Most legal and juridical proceedings depend upon fixed positions with regards to human rights claims, especially where violations of rights are concerned, those of victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and sometimes, although to a lesser extent, beneficiaries. However, the social and political realities in which rights are embedded usually prove much murkier. For example, those who carry out atrocities one minute, might find themselves the object of state violence the next; witnesses who receive reparations or are able to sell their stories might seem like less innocent beneficiaries of the events of which they’ve given accounts, and a much broader notion of culpability calls into question the function or efficaciousness of identifying individual perpetrators. This chapter argues that literature is especially well-suited for evincing and elaborating such ambiguities and contradictions that inhere in the history and politics of human rights.

Vulnerability theory, which identifies embodied vulnerability as the primary definition of human being, addresses some of the concerns and exclusions of other universalist definitions of the human. Social theorists and political philosophers have moved away from conceptions of the human grounded in various capacities, for example, to reason or to labor, and instead to vulberability. But vulnerability theory carries its own risks, insofar as precarious social and political structures can render vulnerable embodiment into abject victimhood, in opposition to, and in need of protection by, state power. This chapter conducts a close reading of Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) to show how literature can imagine alternate possibilities for vulnerability and security as well as the types of political community by which they are generated.