The reaction to Mr. Jackson's particular phrasing of a particular state of affairs reminded me of a couple other presentations at the Conference of the Humanities Institute and the Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut that caught my eye. They are on the way the experiences of oppressed people are translated for consumption by the wealthier world.
Ron Dudai is a research fellow at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. His presentation, "Can You Describe this?: The Language of Human Rights Reports and What it Tells us about the Human Rights Movement," speaks to how situation reports came to be shoehorned into a familiar format.
My analysis is centred on identifying a tension between two ambitions. The language of human rights reporting seeks to achieve two main goals: to establish the credentials of the organization itself as an authoritative and credible voice, in order for governments and public opinion to listen to it; and to convey and generate empathy, in order that its readers will take action to change the reported reality. To advance the first goal, organizations adopt a "professional” mode: the reports are distinguished from other types of commentary on the conflict in their detached, restrained, almost minimalist, language. They exclude moral assertions, or any reference to historical or religious arguments. In order not to be perceived as partial to either side in the conflict, the reports adopt a single point of reference: the international human rights conventions. The constant use of footnotes is almost the emblematic feature of this genre: factual pronouncements are carefully sourced to eye-witness accounts or official statements; condemnations of an action or a policy are unfailingly referenced to international conventions. As such the reports successfully distinguish themselves from partisan polemic, and are read as reliable.
Nevertheless, this comes with a price. The cold style of writing minimizes the potential readership, and even more importantly, the conviction that knowledge will lead to action is too simplistic, as Stanley Cohen has shown in his work on States of Denial. The reports’ potential to generate empathy is compromised by their objective-rational-legal tone, and the axiomatic belief in the status of universal human rights norms may not easily translate itself to each local context.
James Dawes is the author of The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II. His presentation struck me as a bit weird at first.
My talk, “Human Rights and the Ethics of Representation,” examines the representational crises that have become recurring, urgent concerns for both the fiction and fieldwork of human rights and humanitarianism.
I didn't know there was such a thing as human rights fiction. I think I would find it distasteful. But Prof. Dawes takes an interesting approach, essentially the one he used in The Language of War. Call it The Language of Humanitarian Crisises. The questions he raises are equally applicable to reporters, politicians and activists.
For those whose job it is to look, to document and to bring pain into language, the process of creating a surrogate voice for victims of deep shock can feel morally suspect. How must the words of the survivor be translated, edited, and rewritten to fit the officially sanctioned vocabulary of the institution? What for the organization counts as legitimate memory?
There is an attempt to ban race from the officially sanctioned vocabulary in the USofA.
I don't think we have to let that happen. Let me pull up a comment:
Submitted by kspence on August 16, 2006 - 2:00pm.
there isn't an "armless" tactic that cannot be used by both sides.
I'd like to see a lot more Black folks speak up on our issues...those specific to us, those that affect us differentially and those that drag us along with the mainstream. I'd like our understanding of things...not the cartoon that passes for that understanding in the general public...to become common knowledge.
Because there's been two, maybe three time in American history where economic issues crashed and damn near took the whole country with it. And each time a new organization arose when people were forced to deal with the real, the current state of affairs through the Constitutional lens. To me, it implies the need to have our understandings understood before the next crash.
And I'm not sure we got all that much time.
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Yahoo | The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II author: James Dawes asin: 0674006488 |
