World Literature and Human Rights

This special issue of the Journal of World Literature explores the fraught and generative intersections between world literature and human rights at a moment of acute global crisis. The introduction opens with the invocation of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860) as an exemplary instance of literature’s capacity to intervene in debates about human rights, situating it alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a book referenced in Max Havelaar itself. The life of both works – as well as the fact that the Dutch work was referencing its American counterpart that had been released only a few years earlier – underscores literature’s historical role in bringing an end to systems of forced labor. Drawing on Costas Douzinas’s distinction between subjective and institutional perspectives on human rights, the introduction traces the parallel development of literary institutions – from PEN International to UNESCO , which granted PEN special consultative status in 1948 – as custodians of expressive freedom within the world republic of letters. It then turns to the structural inequalities that govern both the world literary marketplace and the international human rights framework, arguing that both fields are shaped by what Steven Aschheim calls the “political economy of empathy,” in which moral concern tends to follow lines of cultural proximity and geopolitical power. Drawing on theorists including Megan Boler, Debjani Ganguly, Tim Gauthier, Ann Kaplan, and H.G. Toth, the introduction distinguishes passive from active empathy, proposing that world literature’s ethical potential lies in the transformative, reflexive encounter with difference, what Boler calls “testimonial reading,” rather than in mere sentimental identification. A sustained reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) anchors a Lacanian analysis of the gap between the utopian phantasy of constitutional human rights and the dystopian material realities that literature (and specifically South African world literature) has long registered with unsettling clarity. Through Lucy Lurie’s agonizing negotiation of property rights, bodily integrity, and what Antjie Krog calls a “small peace” ( klein vrede ), the introduction proposes what it terms a law of literature: a differential mediation between legal fiction and lived reality that gestures towards alternative modes of coexistence beyond the failing promises of liberal human rights discourse. The issue brings together essays on Alexis Wright, Kamila Shamsie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mahasweta Devi, Elena Ferrante, amongst others, and an interview with Antjie Krog, collectively mapping the possibilities and limits of literary expression as a site of ethical contestation in the twenty-first century.