The Center for the Study of the Novel is pleased to present a discussion of Professor Joseph Slaughter's new book, Human Rights Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law.  Prof. Slaughter (Columbia) will be in conversation with Prof. Saikat Majumdar (Stanford) and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (UC Berkeley) in the Terrace Room of the English Department (Building 460, Room 426) on Friday, November 20th, at 3:30 pm.  A reading selection from this book is available as a pdf by email request and in hard copy on the second floor of the English Department, under the grad mailboxes.

Human Rights Inc is, in Simon Gikandi's words, "one of the most intense and intelligent reflections on the relation between the novel and human rights....a model of how students and scholars of literature can respond to the great humanitarian crisis of our time and transform the culture of human rights itself."

Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial literature and theory, African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonialism, narrative theory, human rights, and 20th-century ethnic and third world literatures. His many publications include articles on the narrative foundations of human rights in Human Rights Quarterly, "Humanitarian Reading" in Humanitarianism and Suffering, torture and Latin American literature in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ethnopsychiatry, Nigerian literature, and globalization in African Writers and Their Readers, colonial narratives of invoice in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, city space and the national allegory in Research in African Literatures, human rights, multiculturalism, and the contemporary Bildungsroman in Politics and Culture, a short story translation of Argentine Elvira Orphée's "Descomedido" in The Southwest Review, as well as a co-authored article on contemporary epistolary fiction and women's rights in Women, Gender, and Human Rights. His essay, "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law," appeared in a special issue on human rights of PMLA (October 2006) and was honored as one of the two best articles published in the journal in 2006-7; another, "The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality," was named a winner in the Interdisciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at UCLA in 2004. He has co-edited a special issue on "Human Rights and Literary Form" of Comparative Literature Studies.

Ambassador Simons will seek to honor the broad scholarship of his friend Alexander Dallin by situating a discussion of emerging states within a vision of Eurasia as a world region equally shaped and driven by its own internal dynamic(s). Simons will argue that across the region shared experience and shared features are just as weighty as differences: civil societies are weak, markets are distorted or incomplete, politics features struggle among elites over resources and tends toward semi-authoritarian rule even where democratic forms take hold. Yet there is cause for hope. Simons focuses on states, but he sees states consolidating almost everywhere, so that as resurgent Russia presses on its neighbors, they can now press back. Stable development of strong state institutions within which new civil societies can take root and grow is possible and should be the top priority, but it will come only if the nationalism that gives content to these new states is civic and inclusionary rather than ethno-religious on the East Central European model. The U.S. can help or hinder its emergence everywhere in Eurasia, but if it wishes to help it must realize that in this part of the world the path to democracy leads through state development, and that it can best act as a City on the Hill if its policy centers on today's emerging new states, since they must be the incubators of tomorrow's new civil societies.

The Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture was founded in 1998 to honor Professor of History and Political Science Alexander Dallin, a founder of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford and CREEES director, 1985-89 and 1992-94. The Dallin Lecture is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.