“The Content of the Form”: Genre and Action in the Rhetoric of Human Rights

Genres, John Frow explains, “generate and shape knowledge of the world; and…generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power” (2014: 2). Taking its cue from recent work by David Scott on the romance and tragedy of anticolonial revolution, Elisabeth Anker on the melodrama of American political discourse, Joseph Slaughter on the Bildungsroman and international human rights law, and Jeanne Morefield’s reading of the tragic self-positioning of liberal imperialists, among others, this seminar seeks to advance and complicate the productive exchange between political theory and genre studies by focusing specifically on human rights and humanitarian discourses and practices. If “[t]o speak of genre is to speak of what need not be said because it is already so forcefully presupposed” (Frow 2014: 93), then our task is to interrogate what is presupposed in both theoretical and practitioner projects to challenge and redeem human rights discourses and institutions. Such critical projects, like the hegemonic human rights regime they seek to move beyond, “create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility” to which we become habituated (Frow 2014: 93).



This seminar invites papers that speculate on and reinvent the relationship among subjectivity/agency, discourse/genre, and politics in the context of human rights and humanitarianism. What generic emplotments inform civil society professionals’ articulations of solidarity? Why has ‘tragedy’ come to be both so overused and misused in public discourse and what are the stakes of its dilution and mistaken attribution to event and character? What generic assumptions enable or constrain the stories we tell about empathy, allyship, (dis)identification, decolonization, and other widely circulating figurations of solidarity between the victors and vanquished of history? Does the romanticization of grassroots social movements by elite progressive civil society professionals grant the former the authority to act politically at the expense of the latter? In other words, how are genre, agency, and political action inseparable in reimagined versions of human rights activism or humanitarian intervention? In pursuing such questions, the seminar will experiment with what Hayden White calls “explanation by emplotment” (Metahistory, 1973: 7), asking what kind of stories narratives of rights and solidarity tend to be, and who is permitted to come forth as an authentic political actor in them. The seminar thus seeks to read for “the content of the form” (White, The Content of the Form, 1987) to invest the discourse of rights and humanitarianism with conceptual rigour, generic subtlety, and political substance.