WHEN PAUL CELAN ACCEPTED THE BREMEN LITERATURE PRIZE in 1958, he used the occasion to reflect on the region of his birth: “The landscape from which I—by what detours! But are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you.” On the syntactic level, Celan's speech performs the detours (Umwege), repetitions, and redoublings of his journey to Germany, a country in which he never lived or spent more than a few weeks but whose language he persisted in calling his own:

With adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the United Nations conscripted, almost by default, the historically Euronationalist forms of the Bildungsroman and natural law to legitimate its vision of a new international order. This essay elaborates the conceptual vocabulary, deep narrative grammar, and humanist social vision that normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman share in their cooperative efforts to articulate, normalize, and realize a world founded on the fundamental dignity and equality of what both the UDHR and early theorists of the novel term “the free and full development of the human personality.” Historically, formally, and ideologically, they are mutually enabling and complicit fictions: each projects, in advance of administrative structures comparable to those of the nation-state, an image of human personality and sociality that ratifies (and makes legible) the other's idealistic vision of the proper relations between individual and society. (JRS)

This essay examines the pre- and posthistory of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

“What have we who are slaves and blacks to do with Art?” asked DuBois in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art.” In an era of lynching, art hardly seemed appropriate for political struggle. Nevertheless, DuBois and his colleagues at the Crisis risked making connections between lynching and art by putting aesthetics to democratic use even as the theatricality of ritualized violence gave lynching an aesthetic dimension. Starting with DuBois's manifesto and reading in reverse chronological order every issue of the Crisis to its first issue in 1910, this article re-creates a critical narrative that traces the development of aesthetic theory among African American writers associated with the NAACP's national magazine. Contextualizing DuBois's work in the Crisis with fiction by Jessie Fauset and Walter White, I examine an alternative aesthetics that relies on propaganda to assail the ugliness of race relations. (RC)

Why should comparison be an act laden with ethical obligation? Readers of ethnic literatures have long insisted that doing justice to these literatures must be a tenet central to work calling itself ethnic studies. I argue for a renewal of that sense of obligation: the difference of ethnicity is an occasion for articulating, juxtaposing, and reworking the relations among otherwise separate ethnic literary traditions. To the extent that difference follows a logic of intertextuality–one of crossing, exchange, and perpetual expansiveness–it enables reading ethnic literatures together even as it emphasizes the ethical difficulties of such a reading practice. From the disciplinary discourse of comparative literature to the metatextual commentary in Richard Wright's “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” and ultimately to the pragmatic context of an intertextual reading, this essay seeks to suspend ethnic difference from its position as a point of permanent untouchability. (Y-HW)

This essay reads the novella Die Narrenburg (1844; “The Castle of Fools”), by the Austrian germanophone writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), in terms of colonial and postcolonial theory. I argue that Die Narrenburg captures the moment when race becomes visible in a multinational Austrian Empire figured as inner colonial space. The novella also offers a challenge to the reality of race emerging into visibility and presents a strikingly modern picture of divided colonial consciousness, its desires suspended melancholically between the symptomatic maintenance of imperialist identifications and a sensitivity to the colonized that anticipates Frantz Fanon. The text thus exposes Hapsburg Austria as an unexpected symbolic locus for thinking about European racial and colonial discourse. It serves as a perceptive theorist of race and colonialism in a broad sense and suggests how we might read other seemingly peripheral works of central European literature for insights into intra- and extra-European colonial contexts. (JM)

Readers have long acknowledged John Donne's lament for the decay of the world in the two Anniversarie poems commemorating Elizabeth Drury. What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the second of these poems stages the reluctance of the soul to depart from the carcass of the earth so vividly depicted in the first. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne does something unprecedented in early modern literature: he gives voice to a soul that cannot bear to leave its earthly body behind. This essay argues that Donne represents a mutual longing between soul and body that stands in marked contrast to conventional Protestant depictions of the relationship between the two parts of the self. His explanation for such mutual longing, I contend, derives from his belief in the corporeal origins of the soul. (RT)

UNTIL RECENTLY, LITERARY HISTORIANS BELIEVED THAT OCTAVIO PAZ'S THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE (EL LABERINTO DE LA S0LEDAD)—NOW considered one of the most influential analyses of Mexican culture written in the twentieth century—was ignored by Mexico's intellectuals for several years after its publication in February 1950. The country's most influential thinkers, from Samuel Ramos to Alfonso Reyes, remained silent after the book's release, even though Paz touched on many subjects, from political history to the origins of national identity, that they had explored in their work. The Labyrinth received only a handful of reviews, mostly by minor writers who merely summarized its arguments. The critic Enrico Mario Santf has interpreted this silence as a veiled form of ninguneo, the passive-aggressive tendency to turn one's adversaries into “nobodies” by ignoring their work—one of the vicissitudes of Mexican cultural life analyzed in The Labyrinth (49).

The publishing house cuadernos americanos has just released a good book, El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], written by a Mexican author who is already known as a good poet and who now makes his debut as a critic and essayist. The book gives us more than the title promises: it contains the solitude necessary for thinking, but the thoughts are applied to the life and history of the Mexican nation. Octavio Paz, the author, comes from an intellectual lineage: his father was an opposition journalist who became a Zapatista revolutionary—a man of action and ideas, who, in turn, inherited the most salient traits of his own father, Don Irineo Paz, Octavio's grandfather.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE AND. WHEN JUDITH BUTLER AND I DEcided to cochair a conference called “Human Rights and the Humanities,” we aimed to create a connection between two apparently disparate fields and to leave its nature general enough to allow participants to probe different types of relations. I say “apparently” because connections between the humanities and human rights have existed historically and conceptually in the West through the mediation of humanism. Even though in Renaissance Italy umanista, the teacher of classical languages and literatures, was contrasted with legista, the teacher of law, humanist thought held that the reading, understanding, and critique of the bonae litterae, as Eugenio Garin has argued, could contribute to the renovation of the world, social life, and government and thus to human happiness. Not surprisingly, then, civic humanism was to merge with the ideals of freedom, equality, justice, tolerance, secularism, and cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. And since 1945 Enlightenment humanism has provided the philosophical underpinnings of human rights declarations, covenants, conventions, protocols, and charters.

Human rights doctrine defines its brief inclusively to encompass “all members of the human family” (Universal Declaration, preamble). But the vantage point from which human interactions are viewed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), although it invokes the family metaphor, is partial: all humans “should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (art. 1). This disjunction between inclusive membership and partial perspective encapsulates the position of children in human rights doctrine: they are included in the broad scope of protection but peripheral to the framing conception of agency. The particular conception of “human” motivating the doctrine is restrictive in other ways relevant to childhood: article 1 of the UDHR states, “All humans … are endowed with reason and conscience,” which is manifestly not true unless “endowed” is interpreted to indicate a capability rather than an ontological state. But “endowed” suggests a current reality, not a future possibility. As the Brazilian delegation to the UDHR drafting process wryly noted, “[U]nfortunately it is not exactly true that all men are endowed by nature with reason and conscience” (qtd. in Morsink 297). And it is certainly not true that all children are. How, then, do children fit into the human rights project?

RULA, A PALESTINIAN WOMAN, WAS IN THE last stages of labor. Her husband, Daoud, could not convince the soldiers at an Israeli military roadblock to let them through to meet the ambulance that was held up on the other side. After a long wait, Rula could no longer hold it. She started screaming in pain, to the total apathy of the soldiers.

Contemporary liberal assertions equate illegal oppression and practices of expulsion from the juridical order with exclusion from humanity. It is often argued that violence ensuing from the abandonment of persons beyond the pale of the law not only violates their humanity but also, and perhaps more crucially dehumanizes them or constitutes them as less than human. While the objective of these critical assertions is to expose the radical evil that illegal violence can institute, they also establish an equation between the protection of the law and the constitution of humanity, effectively granting the former a magical power to endow the latter. Moreover, these critical assertions reproduce a particular conviction that humanity is a status to be recognized and conferred, or seized and taken away. Rather than leave this relation between humanity and the law intact, by pointing to its political instrumentality in contemporary human rights campaigns, this paper examines what this relation does to politics and to subjects of violence beyond its instrumental use directed at highlighting the suffering of subjects (by employing a dehumanization rhetoric) and at insisting on human-rights-based remedies to combat it. The paper asks the following questions. First, what conceptual and theoretical assumptions about humanity and the law, as well as about the relation between them, make possible the dehumanization argument? Second, to what degree has the law's conception of humanity as a status moved beyond the juridical field, leading many humanist practitioners to assert, albeit critically, that certain groups and individuals are dehumanized? And, finally, what other ways of being human are foreclosed by the conceptual assumptions grounding the law-based humanity argument?

Globalization touches the core of what it means to be human. The proliferation of discourses on human rights after the end of the cold war indicates that globalization raises the deepest anxieties about the continuing preservation of our humanity. Because the humanities does not take the humanity of the human being as a given but sets as its basic task the inquiry of how humanity is constituted, it can help us assess whether the vicissitudes of globalization compel a radical rethinking of what it means to be human. If social-scientific solutions to the problems of globalization have always precomprehended an idea of humanity as the bearer of dignity, freedom, sociability, and culture as the power of transcending contingent limitations, and therefore the idea of humanity as an ideal project that needs to be actualized, the task and challenge of the humanities today may be to question this precomprehension of the human and even, somewhat perversely, to give it up.

In his now famous address on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the slave, Frederick Douglass seeks to delineate the various ways in which the persistence of slavery in a nation that was founded on the virtues of freedom, liberty, and equality produces a national ideology traversed by ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions. Suggesting that the experience of freedom cannot be thought apart from that of slavery, that abstract equality can only be imagined alongside the story of black subjection, he argues that these inconsistencies have two consequences. They derail the course of American democracy, and they leave their most painful and material consequences on the lives and bodies of the slaves without whom the narratives of freedom and equality could never be written. This is why he often refers to the violence, inequality, economic oppression, and racist exclusions that have harmed and devastated so many human beings in the history of America and the history of the world. For Douglass, America finds itself in mourning the moment slavery exists, populations are removed, dispossessed, or exterminated, wealth is distributed unequally, acts of discrimination are committed in the name of democracy and freedom, and rights are withheld—and what it mourns is America itself. As he tells us in his Fourth of July oration, this mourning belongs to the long history of efforts to actualize equality, to realize, that is, the promise of the right to representation for everyone, of an America that to this day still does not exist, which is why it must always be mourned. “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary!” he writes. “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us…. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me… . This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (“What to the Slave” 368).