joseph slaughter
Joseph Slaughter specializes in literature, law, and socio-cultural history of the Global South (particularly Latin America and Africa). He’s especially interested in the social work of literature—the myriad ways in which literature intersects (formally, historically, ideologically, materially) with problems of social justice, human rights, intellectual property, and international law.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.
His essays and articles include : “World Literature as Property” in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; “However Incompletely, Human” in The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law; “‘It’s good to be primitive’: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticity” in Modernism and Copyright; “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” in Critical Quarterly; “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There” in The Journal of Human Rights; “‘A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story’: Silence, Violence, and Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apart” in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya” in Research in African Literatures; “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” co-authored with Sophia A. McClennen, in Comparative Literature Studies; “A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” in Human Rights Quarterly; “Humanitarian Reading” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.
He is co-editing a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region. He is currently working on two monographs, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and "New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature," which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Public Voices Fellowship, Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), which explores the cooperative narrative logics of international human rights law and the Bildungsroman, was awarded the 2008 René Wellek prize for comparative literature and cultural theory. His essay, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law,” was honored as one of the two best articles published in PMLA in 2006-7. He was elected to serve as President of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2016.
His essays and articles include : “World Literature as Property” in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics; “However Incompletely, Human” in The Meanings of Human Rights: Philosophy, Critical Theory, Law; “‘It’s good to be primitive’: African Allusion and the Modernist Fetish of Authenticity” in Modernism and Copyright; “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” in Critical Quarterly; “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There” in The Journal of Human Rights; “‘A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story’: Silence, Violence, and Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apart” in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya” in Research in African Literatures; “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Form; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” co-authored with Sophia A. McClennen, in Comparative Literature Studies; “A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law” in Human Rights Quarterly; “Humanitarian Reading” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative. Slaughter is a founding co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.
He is co-editing a volume of essays, The Global South Atlantic, that explores some of the many social, cultural, political, and material interactions across the oceanic space between Africa and Latin America that have made it historically (im)possible to imagine the South Atlantic as a coherent region. He is currently working on two monographs, “Pathetic Fallacies: Essays on Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Humanities” and "New Word Orders: Intellectual Property and World Literature," which considers the role of plagiarism, piracy, and intellectual property regimes in the globalization of the novel, as well the work the novel might do to interrupt globalization and to resist monopoly privatization of cultural and intellectual creations.
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This is the last draft of the Joseph Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom's Introduction to The Global South Atlantic, an edited volume of essays by leading and emerging scholars whose transatlantic research spans the southern ocean, focusing on cultural, social, and economic transactions among Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Postcolonial studies, and the relatively recent approaches of oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies have proposed alternative formations and frameworks for studying South-South connections that challenge the North Atlantic hegemony in geopolitics, intellectual, and cultural production. Similarly, Transatlantic, Black Atlantic, and Diaspora studies have attempted to refocus and complicate the traditional story of North Atlantic networks. Transformative work such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1992) opened the field to the South by demonstrating the centrality of the slave trade and the African diaspora to any understanding of the “Atlantic World.” Yet, even that South was largely situated in the North, around the triangular systems of trade among Africa, North America/Caribbean, and Europe.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters by joseph slaughter
International law is a creole without native speakers, produced at interfaces among distinct languages (often in colonial contact zones), not reducible to its participating tongues. Its figurations of sovereignty and personhood may not obey ordinary grammatical rules. Unruly personifications in Amos Tutuola’s Palm-wine Drinkard, colonial charter company treaties, and legal theory, high- light some pitfalls of confusing legal fictions for social facts.
The Golden Stool of the Ashanti has been a powerful symbol of political and cultural sovereignty for centuries. Stories about its origins, history, and fate were recorded by precolonial explorers and missionaries; they were recirculated and embellished by colonial anthropologists and administrators; and they have been reappropriated by postcolonial cultural nationalists reinventing tradition after Ghanaian independence. Across two centuries, a distinct storytelling tradition developed around the stool in which plagiarism plays a crucial, if hidden and disavowed, role. The tradition is heavily marked by plagiaristic intertextuality, whereby prior published versions of the story are surreptitiously appropriated and reprinted as new historical information or interpretation—often re-coded as native oral tradition. Indeed, within this storytelling tradition, postcolonial authors, like the colonial writers before them, plagiarize from the colonial archive while attributing their insights to native informants, borrowing the power of the oral tradition to bolster the authenticity and authority of their written words.
http://www.boundary2.org/2020/06/joseph-slaughter-who-owns-the-means-of-expression-review-of-unesco-and-the-fate-of-the-literary/
The misfortune is that the forces of change are not always able to express themselves because they do not possess the means of expression.-Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow
In April 1974, Houari Boumédiène, the Algerian Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement, opened a special session of the UN General Assembly with a blistering speech describing and denouncing the world system of neocolonial exploitation that continued to disadvantage and despoil the newly independent postcolonial states. "[T]he colonialist and imperialist Powers accepted the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination," he asserted, "only when they had already succeeded in setting up the institutions and machinery that would perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era" (Boumédiène 6). Sarah Brouillette's important new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, offers a similarly searing account of Third World efforts to capture the institutional machinery of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to redirect its work for the mass benefit of disenfranchised peoples everywhere, and of how those efforts were ultimately frustrated. Brouillette is concerned with "how cultural production emerges in relation to the real economy" (2). By "grounding the critical discourse of world literature in the political economy of global literary institutions and markets," she places UNESCO at the center of a revealing story about the production, consolidation, and distribution of world literature in the postwar international order (2). Because, as Brouillette insists, the economic world system overlaps with, and to a great degree determines, the cultural world system, it seems helpful to sketch here the broader Third World legal efforts to decolonize international law and the See the published version and support the journal:
Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press. Human Rights Quarterly 40 (Nov 2018) 735-75.
Recent histories identify the 1970s as the " breakthrough " period when human rights discourse gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt an Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the rest of the world. For many in the Global South, the Western rediscovery of human rights looks more like retrenchment and repossession, part of a larger " roll back " of Third World agendas to decolonize the international order. The 1970s also witnessed increased airline hijackings and a reversal in the meaning of " terrorism. " Together, these forces effected a neoliberal hijacking of human rights.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/684770
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-social-work-of-narrative/9783838209586
This is the last draft of the essay submitted for publication.
In the context of our contemporary memoir culture of injury and survival, it has become something of an inspirational mantra to maintain that every life has a story. In fact, we have become so used to thinking in terms of “life stories” that the humanistic equation between life and narrative (that sees life as the source of narrative and narrative as the sustenance of life) can seem like a simple truism, rather than, say, a political commitment or a moral imperative. It becomes easy to overlook how contingent and recent a generic phenomenon the “life-story” itself is. Because the equation between narrative and life may not be at all inevitable, it is striking how close narrative is to life—not in a mimetic sense, or even in a humanistic metaphysical or moral sense, but in an even more mundane spatial and temporal sense: the mere proximity of the words “life” and “narrative” in so much writing and speaking on law and violence. The juxtaposition of life and narrative appears commonly in law review articles, human rights reports, humanitarian appeals, journalistic news stories, medical and psychological treatment guidelines, and military field operations manuals.
What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the Presidential Address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its (in)hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.
This brief essay reflects on responses to my ACLA Presidential Address, " Locations of Comparison, " from Ali Behdad, David Damrosch, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson. I consider the open-ended question of " doing justice " to and through literature: if the location of any particular comparison matters, the forums in which one seeks justice, or seeks to do justice, also matter. While the discipline of comparative literature seems to have become more hospitable to non-European languages and literature in recent years, I argue that it treats the Global South (and other historically marginalized locations and populations) largely as a site of literary resources useful for resupplying and fortifying older, more traditional fields. Forum shopping names this opportunistic practice of expropriating literary resources from other fields or parts of the world and importing them back to a scholar's " home " field, thereby escaping judgment by specialists while claiming the mantle and cachet of the global.
This is the last draft of the Joseph Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom's Introduction to The Global South Atlantic, an edited volume of essays by leading and emerging scholars whose transatlantic research spans the southern ocean, focusing on cultural, social, and economic transactions among Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Postcolonial studies, and the relatively recent approaches of oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies have proposed alternative formations and frameworks for studying South-South connections that challenge the North Atlantic hegemony in geopolitics, intellectual, and cultural production. Similarly, Transatlantic, Black Atlantic, and Diaspora studies have attempted to refocus and complicate the traditional story of North Atlantic networks. Transformative work such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1992) opened the field to the South by demonstrating the centrality of the slave trade and the African diaspora to any understanding of the “Atlantic World.” Yet, even that South was largely situated in the North, around the triangular systems of trade among Africa, North America/Caribbean, and Europe.
International law is a creole without native speakers, produced at interfaces among distinct languages (often in colonial contact zones), not reducible to its participating tongues. Its figurations of sovereignty and personhood may not obey ordinary grammatical rules. Unruly personifications in Amos Tutuola’s Palm-wine Drinkard, colonial charter company treaties, and legal theory, high- light some pitfalls of confusing legal fictions for social facts.
The Golden Stool of the Ashanti has been a powerful symbol of political and cultural sovereignty for centuries. Stories about its origins, history, and fate were recorded by precolonial explorers and missionaries; they were recirculated and embellished by colonial anthropologists and administrators; and they have been reappropriated by postcolonial cultural nationalists reinventing tradition after Ghanaian independence. Across two centuries, a distinct storytelling tradition developed around the stool in which plagiarism plays a crucial, if hidden and disavowed, role. The tradition is heavily marked by plagiaristic intertextuality, whereby prior published versions of the story are surreptitiously appropriated and reprinted as new historical information or interpretation—often re-coded as native oral tradition. Indeed, within this storytelling tradition, postcolonial authors, like the colonial writers before them, plagiarize from the colonial archive while attributing their insights to native informants, borrowing the power of the oral tradition to bolster the authenticity and authority of their written words.
http://www.boundary2.org/2020/06/joseph-slaughter-who-owns-the-means-of-expression-review-of-unesco-and-the-fate-of-the-literary/
The misfortune is that the forces of change are not always able to express themselves because they do not possess the means of expression.-Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow
In April 1974, Houari Boumédiène, the Algerian Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement, opened a special session of the UN General Assembly with a blistering speech describing and denouncing the world system of neocolonial exploitation that continued to disadvantage and despoil the newly independent postcolonial states. "[T]he colonialist and imperialist Powers accepted the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination," he asserted, "only when they had already succeeded in setting up the institutions and machinery that would perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era" (Boumédiène 6). Sarah Brouillette's important new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, offers a similarly searing account of Third World efforts to capture the institutional machinery of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and to redirect its work for the mass benefit of disenfranchised peoples everywhere, and of how those efforts were ultimately frustrated. Brouillette is concerned with "how cultural production emerges in relation to the real economy" (2). By "grounding the critical discourse of world literature in the political economy of global literary institutions and markets," she places UNESCO at the center of a revealing story about the production, consolidation, and distribution of world literature in the postwar international order (2). Because, as Brouillette insists, the economic world system overlaps with, and to a great degree determines, the cultural world system, it seems helpful to sketch here the broader Third World legal efforts to decolonize international law and the See the published version and support the journal:
Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press. Human Rights Quarterly 40 (Nov 2018) 735-75.
Recent histories identify the 1970s as the " breakthrough " period when human rights discourse gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt an Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the rest of the world. For many in the Global South, the Western rediscovery of human rights looks more like retrenchment and repossession, part of a larger " roll back " of Third World agendas to decolonize the international order. The 1970s also witnessed increased airline hijackings and a reversal in the meaning of " terrorism. " Together, these forces effected a neoliberal hijacking of human rights.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/684770
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-social-work-of-narrative/9783838209586
This is the last draft of the essay submitted for publication.
In the context of our contemporary memoir culture of injury and survival, it has become something of an inspirational mantra to maintain that every life has a story. In fact, we have become so used to thinking in terms of “life stories” that the humanistic equation between life and narrative (that sees life as the source of narrative and narrative as the sustenance of life) can seem like a simple truism, rather than, say, a political commitment or a moral imperative. It becomes easy to overlook how contingent and recent a generic phenomenon the “life-story” itself is. Because the equation between narrative and life may not be at all inevitable, it is striking how close narrative is to life—not in a mimetic sense, or even in a humanistic metaphysical or moral sense, but in an even more mundane spatial and temporal sense: the mere proximity of the words “life” and “narrative” in so much writing and speaking on law and violence. The juxtaposition of life and narrative appears commonly in law review articles, human rights reports, humanitarian appeals, journalistic news stories, medical and psychological treatment guidelines, and military field operations manuals.
What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the Presidential Address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its (in)hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.
This brief essay reflects on responses to my ACLA Presidential Address, " Locations of Comparison, " from Ali Behdad, David Damrosch, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson. I consider the open-ended question of " doing justice " to and through literature: if the location of any particular comparison matters, the forums in which one seeks justice, or seeks to do justice, also matter. While the discipline of comparative literature seems to have become more hospitable to non-European languages and literature in recent years, I argue that it treats the Global South (and other historically marginalized locations and populations) largely as a site of literary resources useful for resupplying and fortifying older, more traditional fields. Forum shopping names this opportunistic practice of expropriating literary resources from other fields or parts of the world and importing them back to a scholar's " home " field, thereby escaping judgment by specialists while claiming the mantle and cachet of the global.
Human rights legal discourse and the novel genre are more than coincidentally, or casually, interconnected. Although literary criticism may intuit an intimate relation between the novel’s rise and human rights, as Erich Auerbach did in 1946 when he attributed the emergence of “modern tragic realism” to the “convulsions” of the French Revolution (404), rarely are those linkages named explicitly, except in passing, as Roberto Schwarz did when he suggestively identified a “combination of individualism and the Declaration of Human Rights” as the sociopolitical stipend of nineteenth-century novelistic realism (58–59).2 Edward Said proposed, “Without empire . . . there is no European novel as we know it,” and a similar codependency becomes evident when we examine the sociohistorical and formal correspondences between international human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman, whose hegemonic norms and forms are themselves “unthinkable without each other” (69, 71). Tracking the figure and formula of human personality development, this essay aims to excavate a neglected discursive genealogy of international human rights law that intersects with German idealism and its particular nomination of the bourgeois, white male citizen to universal subject. The assumptions about that subject shared by normative human rights law and the idealist Bildungsroman manifest themselves in a common conceptual vocabulary, humanist social vision, and narrative grammar of free and full human personality development. Human rights and the Bildungsroman are mutually enabling fictions: each projects an image of the human personality that ratifies the other’s vision of the ideal relations between individual and society.
Speakers: Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University), Visiting Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Jessica Whyte (Western Sydney University), Visiting Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Followed by a panel discussion with Lori Allen (SOAS, University of London); Başak Ertür (Birkbeck, University of London); Luis Eslava (University of Kent); Robert Knox (University of Liverpool).
When 22 November 2018, 18:00 — 19:00
Venue Birkbeck Main Building, B34
Free: Tickets available here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/are-human-rights-neoliberal-tickets-52350554919?aff=ebapi
In recent years, scholars have sought to understand the simultaneous rise, from the 1970s, of neoliberalism and an individualistic, NGO-driven, politics of human rights. However, most of that scholarship maintains a narrow Eurocentric perspective. This event explores the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism by looking at the broader international context in which both movements came to prominence. We will consider 1) how anti-colonialists mobilised the language of human rights to support national liberation struggles, demands for economic restructuring, and social and cultural security; and 2) how neoliberal thinkers and politicians themselves marshalled the language of human rights to counter-attack those struggles for political and economic self-determination.
Lecture #1: "Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World." By Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University), Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
The North Atlantic perspective of the “new historiography” of human rights, which identifies the 1970s as the period when human rights discourse gained traction globally, generally relegates struggles outside the U.S. and Europe to minor, inconsequential, or irrelevant uses of the languages of human rights. However, the West’s late rediscovery and reduction of human rights to a limited set of individual civil and political protections should be understood as part of the larger roll back of a Third Wordlist agenda that included more expansive visions of human rights: postcolonial self-determination, economic redistribution, and social and cultural security. If the 70s became the decade of human rights, it was also the decade of hijackings and a dramatic reversal in the meaning of “terrorism.” Many airliner hijackings were undertaken precisely in the name of human rights struggles to decolonize the international order, but none of those were as effective as the neo-liberal hijacking of human rights.
Lecture #2: "Powerless Companions or Fellow Travellers? Human Rights, Neoliberalism and Postcolonial Economic Justice." By Jessica Whyte (Western Sydney University), Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
To date, much discussion of the relation of human rights and neoliberalism has focused on Latin America, where human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International came to prominence for contesting the torture, murder and disappearance that accompanied neoliberal ‘shock therapy’— while generally turning their attention away from its economic effects. This paper shifts this focus by examining the foundation Liberté sans Frontières (LSF), established in 1985 by the French leadership of Médecins sans Frontières. Far from simply vacating the economic field, LSF mobilised human rights explicitly against Third Worldist demands for post-colonial economic redistribution. Its leading figures criticised Third Worldism for promoting “simplistic” theses that blamed under-development on the looting of the third world by the West, the deterioration of the terms of trade, and the power of multinationals. LSF's human rights warriors were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberalism, but enthusiastic fellow travellers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGOSxv3_vu8
Modern law operates by creating legal persons as entities that are endowed with rights and responsibilities. This figurative process of personification is the modern legal mechanism of emancipation; indeed, the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution laid the legal groundwork not only for the recognition of ex-slaves as full legal persons before the law but also for the “emancipation” of the business corporation, which possesses legal rights and responsibilities by way of analogy to the human, figured as a metaphorical assemblage of organic body parts. That analogical operation sits at the bottom of human rights law, which protects the rights of the human by way of analogy to that same human. “Pathetic Fallacies” examines the rhetorical magic of modern law that populates the social world with fictional creatures personified as moral agents in the image of the human, and it explores the conditions and consequences of this tropological enchantment by reading international human rights law alongside and through early Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard.
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/religious-freedom-restoration-acts-what-if-inclusion-really-is-what-theyre-all-about
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/corporate-civil-rights-movement
link: http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/psychology-apa-collusion-with-cia-on-torture