Universal Rights and Global Literature: Human Rights, Literary Form and the Subject on the Move" (RightsLitMove)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Schneck; Dr. Laura Zander
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550171903

Based on Jacques Rancière's crucial question "who is the subject of the rights of man?" this project will address the current legal and literary constitution of the subject of human rights (together with the legal research project NAVIG). The project's focus will be on the productive ambivalence of subjects on the move between self-determination and heteronomy, between individual agency, abstract legal formalization and cultural representation. The project thus situates itself at the interface of current Anglo-postcolonial and transnational American Studies on the relationship between law and literature and literary fiction and human rights. The critical question of the constitution of the subject of human rights is of particular importance in global contexts of flight, displacement, and migration. In this sense, refugees and migrants are understood as central imaginary convergence figures of alternative subjectivity that are simultaneously culturally overdetermined and legally and politically underdetermined. From the perspective of postcolonial, transnational literary studies, an emergent canon of transnational narrative forms can be recognized in global Anglo-American literature of the last three decades, which critically and reflexively deals with narrative forms of 'mobile subjectivity' the experience of 'migrancy' in global human rights fictions. These fictions thus clearly differ from conventional forms of 'migration literatures' and their narratives. This emergent canon of Anglophone human rights fictions will be identified more precisely and analyzed in their critical and theoretical contexts in literature and law with regard to their functions and effects. At the same time, the project aims to gain a more concrete understanding of the complex interrelationship between legal and literary discourses and their convergence, as well as the critical dynamics of human rights imaginaries at work in both discourses. The close interrelation of human rights in law and literature is reflected in the common claim to the universality of the indisputably human and the corresponding legal subjectivity – but also in the reflection, criticism, and revision of precisely these claims to universality. The project addresses and analyzes the critical function of literary texts precisely with regard to the divergence between the legal-political ideal of universality and the inconsistent, fragmented and partly arbitrary implementation of its political and ethical claim. The literary subject of human rights is legitimized above all through specific forms of its linguistic articulation and its affective reception. The project therefore focuses primarily on self-determined forms of narrative subjectivation and empowerment that simultaneously explore, negotiate, and demand alternative forms of legal agency and empowerment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants