E3W Literature | University of Texas

Language and the State: The Rhetorical Parameters of Rights

Edited by Charlotte Nunes

What are the rhetorical parameters of human rights? This special section engages broadly with the ethical implications of formations of language, including both the spoken and the written word. The reviews that follow address the inti­mate relationship between language and both the facilitation and the debilitation of civil, political, social, and economic rights. How are rights defined and who is entitled to them? Operating on the premise that the history of language is a history of social and political change (and vice versa), the pieces comprising this section interrogate the intersection be­tween discourse and rights in a variety of cultural and histori­cal contexts. Several of the reviews touch on the breaches of international law attending the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” In her review of the anthology Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism, edited by Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller, Priya Nel­son discusses the parallels between discourses of imperialism and present-day US foreign policy. Daniel Friedman’s review of Philippe Sands’s Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values and Johanna Sellman’s review of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals explore the processes by which violations of international law—includ­ing the redefinition of torture in terms that are incompatible with the definition set forth in the Geneva Convention—be­came acting policy in the War on Terror. In an interview con­ducted by Charlotte Nunes, Karen Engle identifies another important dimension of the Right’s strategic deployment of language by pointing out that conservative US authorities have explicitly invoked human rights discourse in promot­ing anti-terror agendas. Discussing the theme of language and rights in a more general context, Nate Kreuter echoes Engle’s assertion of archives as vital to the advancement of critical studies in human rights in his piece on the politics of the availability of archival materials. Connie Steel’s review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror examines the problem­atic rhetorical conflation of politics and culture. Melanie Clouser’s review of Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, by Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, explores the language of political opposition to the hegemonic state. In her review of Paul W. Kahn’s Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty, Megan Eatman dis­cusses the rhetorical links between terror and torture, both of which, Kahn argues, are rooted in convictions regarding the inviolability of the sovereign. Michelle Mott’s review of Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering explores how patterns in the language of denial, attributable both to implicated individuals and to nations as a whole, perpetuate atrocity. Emily Spangenberg’s review of Constantin Costa-Gavras’s film Missing, based on the true story of a “disappeared” American journalist in Chile and his family’s unsuccessful search for information surrounding his death, demonstrates that at times it is not the manipula­tion of language, but the silencing of language altogether, that has the most injurious consequences for human rights.