Chapter 1 - Genres of Slavery and Human Rights

Summary

Building on the work of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) scholars, this essay considers the limitations of international law (and the human rights legal framework more specifically) in addressing slavery, and the ways in which contemporary global fiction puts pressure on normative legal and literary conceptions of slavery and freedom. The essay begins with an examination of how slavery and the slave narrative take shape in the context of international law that is rooted in colonial encounters and predicated on the differential recognition of humanity. That analysis leads to investigation of how normative twentieth century human rights law delimits the concepts of slavery and freedom. In its final section, the essay how several contemporary global fictions challenge the familiar, generic logic of the slave narrative and, with it, human rights imaginaries of freedom.