UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how a set of postmodern contemporary novels by women, queer, and writers of color in North and South America reframe the parameters of narrative empathy in order to revise what constitutes as an ethical human rights novel.

This project is part of a growing scholarly discourse connecting the evolution of the novel in the Americas with changing conceptions of human rights as connected to racial, ethnic, and gender identity in the Americas. The writers discussed reconfigure the relationship between reader and victim within the human rights narrative genre. This reconfiguration is founded on a critical reconstruction of the problematic use of sentimental empathy in the nineteenth-century rights novel. Since this former brand of sympathy joined the burgeoning discourse of rights in the Americas to the representation of racialized or gendered corporeal suffering, the reader’s understanding of personhood in the nineteenth century was ethically misguided and predicated on the victim’s indignity.

Chapter One details how Octavia Butler’s Kindred critically rewrites nineteenth-century foundational nation-building texts. This chapter exposes the dangers of narrative voyeurism masking itself as empathy and instead points to an empathy devoid of identification through bodily suffering. Chapter Two looks at Sylvia Iparraguirre’s Tierra del Fuego in order to deconstruct and revise both the colonial travel narrative and the South American nation-building genre. This chapter maps an alternative foundation for narrative empathy by fostering legal and temporal visibility for the indigenous subject and land. Chapter Three examines how Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña engages with nineteenth-century melodrama to define empathy as abject corporeality. This chapter defines empathy through psychological proximity and touch, demonstrating how the novel reforms political and gender identity at the cusp of Argentina’s Dirty War. Chapter Four turns to an examination of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. Here empathy is defined through the reader’s understanding of how nineteenth- century legal practices devastatingly defined land, voice, bodies, and citizenship in the United States. Chapter Five discusses Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez through its documentation of hemispheric genocide. This chapter shows how aesthetics can ethically capture empathy through silences and voids, documenting indigenous historical and bodily trauma.

Human rights law and legal policy shapes and is shaped by the formal qualities of the novel and other art forms. The hemispheric human rights novel (1970-2009) uses narrative empathy to develop a closely interconnected relationship between law and literature. This, in turn, revises the relationship between the reader, the victim and national history by teaching readers how to ethically engage with the bodies and minds of the victims presented. First, the revision of the nineteenth-century melodrama and sentimentalism particular to the hemispheric context enables readers to witness the formal construction of an aesthetic model which uses absence and corporeal abjection in order to represent human rights abuses. And secondly, the use of legal documents and national history formally within the novelistic space allows readers to access literature vis-à-vis the national-legal space. Ultimately, as the reader beings participating in this process of decoding, their new responsibilities for the ethical reading practices demanded by the human rights novel are laid out, transforming the reader into an ethical witness.