Rights War in Literature and Culture

Jennifer Rickel is a Professor of English at the University of Montevallo. She holds a BA in English with honors from the University of California Santa Barbara and a PhD in English from Rice University. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature in English, postcolonial studies, human rights, and gender and sexuality. She co-founded and co-coordinates the Peace and Justice Studies program at the University of Montevallo. She has published articles in the Journal of Narrative Theory, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, South Atlantic Review, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and Studies in the Novel.

Jennifer Rickel’s Rights War builds on important recent scholarship like Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity and Crystal Parihk’s Writing Human Rights to showcase the unique affordances, and unique challenges, that committed literary fiction can pose to the most cynical discursive manipulations of power, especially when it claims a ‘victim’ status from which it in turn also claims a ‘right’ to redress. Strategically curating, and brilliantly reading, an archive of expressive work by writers as diversely creative as Claudia Rankine, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jamaica Kincaid (among others), Rickel’s project deepens as it complicates our understanding of the critical force of literary praxis in a world only increasingly corrupted by the lies, not to say the fictions, of power.Ricardo L. Ortiz, Professor, Georgetown University, USA

• AcknowledgementCreditsIntroduction: Barriers to Indivisibility and Intersectionality in Rights FormationsChapter 1: The Historical Arc of Institutionalized Racism and Rights in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Claudia Rankine’s CitizenChapter 2: Examining Cultural Narratives of Misogynist Ethnonationalism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and AmericanahChapter 3: Reimagining Literary Engagement with State Discourse on Rights in Racially Divided Societies with Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s “Wolfpack”Chapter 4: Second- and Third-Generation Resistance to Neoliberal Imperialism in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Chris Abani’s GraceLandChapter 5: Raced Configurations of Womanhood and Structures of Labor in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the SunConclusion: Reading in Place: Insights from Alabama’s Civil Rights TriangleIndex