The Rights War in Literature and Culture: From Literary Humanitarianism to Savior Victimism

by Jennifer Rickel

Overview

Rights War tracks how the human rights framework is weaponized against the oppressed, and it makes the case for the central place of literature in understanding this seizure of narrative control. While literary humanitarianism depoliticizes suffering and positions the reader as a savior to traumatized Others, Rights War shows how contemporary fiction by women of color and queer writers across the African diaspora engage innovative narrative paradigms to address structural inequities. It analyzes strategies set out in this literature for disarming savior victimism, which it identifies as a pernicious cultural phenomenon in which the powerful proclaim themselves saviors to and victims of those they marginalize. As the disassociation of national rights from international human rights and the disconnection of civil and political rights from social and economic rights provoke a contest of victimhood, this book offers a renewed argument for the indivisibility of rights and the social justice function of literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040355794
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/31/2025
Series:	Routledge Literary Studies in Social Justice
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	841 KB

About the Author

Jennifer Rickel is a Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. She holds a BA in English with honors from the University of California Santa Barbara and a PhD in English from Rice University. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature in English, postcolonial studies, human rights, and gender and sexuality. She co-founded and co-coordinates the Peace and Justice Studies program at the University of Montevallo. She has published articles in the Journal of Narrative Theory, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, South Atlantic Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and Studies in the Novel.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

Credits

Introduction: Barriers to Indivisibility and Intersectionality in Rights Formations

Chapter 1: The Historical Arc of Institutionalized Racism and Rights in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

Chapter 2: Examining Cultural Narratives of Misogynist Ethnonationalism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah

Chapter 3: Reimagining Literary Engagement with State Discourse on Rights in Racially Divided Societies with Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s “Wolfpack”

Chapter 4: Second- and Third-Generation Resistance to Neoliberal Imperialism in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Chris Abani’s GraceLand

Chapter 5: Raced Configurations of Womanhood and Structures of Labor in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun

Conclusion: Reading in Place: Insights from Alabama’s Civil Rights Triangle

Index

Editorial Reviews

Jennifer Rickel’s Rights War builds on important recent scholarship like Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity and Crystal Parihk’s Writing Human Rights to showcase the unique affordances, and unique challenges, that committed literary fiction can pose to the most cynical discursive manipulations of power, especially when it claims a ‘victim’ status from which it in turn also claims a ‘right’ to redress. Strategically curating, and brilliantly reading, an archive of expressive work by writers as diversely creative as Claudia Rankine, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jamaica Kincaid (among others), Rickel’s project deepens as it complicates our understanding of the critical force of literary praxis in a world only increasingly corrupted by the lies, not to say the fictions, of power.

Ricardo L. Ortiz, Professor, Georgetown University, USA

From the Publisher