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  • Chapter 14 - Literature, Human Rights Law, and the Return of Decolonization

  • from Part III - Interdisciplinarity and Literary Studies
  • Edited by Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California, Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum
    Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 283-299
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  • Summary

    In this chapter, I will look at how the twin projects of cultural and political decolonization in the overlapping fields of literature and law played out over the past hundred years in order to consider how the problem of “formal” decolonization – the filling of foreign colonial administrative structures and cultural educational systems with “native” content – can detour and defer a more radical decolonization of form itself, rooting out the intrinsic eurocentrism at the bottom of both international law and comparative literature. Calls to decolonize (whether territory or a curriculum), especially in the current name of “the decolonial,” often appeal to the language of human rights, but human rights are intentionally counterrevolutionary, designed to forestall the possibility of radical disruption by expanding the compass of the universal to include, over time, people and peoples historically excluded from its coverage.