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Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:
Inventing Human Rights: A History, by Lynn Hunt. W. W. Norton. 320 pages. $25.95.
Living in Haiti during the ruthless dictatorships of Francois Duvalier and his son, my parents decided to teach me an important lesson: inhumanity is endemic to the human condition but so, too, is resistance to brutality. I was seven years of age at the time, and we were standing in front of the Marron Inconnu statue, just across the road from the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. Amid surroundings of abject poverty, the Matron is an inspiring, if incongruous, sight: a bronze figure of a rebel slave from the 1791-1804 revolution, defiant and strong. While my mother was telling me Haiti's story of bondage and tyranny, I looked up at this freed slave, who was still holding the machete he had used to cut off his chains and blowing into a lambi, or conch shell, announcing to other slaves that the time to fight for freedom had arrived. That was when I first heard the words "liberte, egalite, fraternite.," for the slaves of Saint-Domingue fought their French masters with the songs and slogans of the French Revolution on their lips. The grand Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which had been cobbled together by deputies of the National Assembly of France in 1789 and had declared the "natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man," including the right to "resistance to oppression," saw its first trial by fire, sword, and rifle on a small island in the Caribbean Sea.
Since that time, oppressed peoples throughout the world have taken inspiration from the notion of the rights of man, as well as from Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence of 1776, which proclaimed that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Today, when powerful voices in the affluent West can be heard defending torture and indefinitely prolonged detention, Jefferson's words can seem as revolutionary as they were then, prompting us to reflect on how historically contingent the concept of "unalienable Rights" actually is.
"Rights" are invented; the category "human," contested. In circles of international law, "spot the omissions" is a popular pastime. The word "human" has tended to refer to well-off heterosexual men. They were swathed in white skins, Western bodies. At various times, slaves, religious minorities such as Jews, and actors (on the grounds that an actor pretends to be someone else) were set outside the human. When playwright, feminist, and antislavery activist Olympe de Gouges issued her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, in which she maintained that "Woman is born free and lives equal to Man in her rights," she was vilified and, eventually, executed. A few days after she had her head chopped off with the guillotine (by an executioner who, incidentally, would not have been considered human either, for he engaged in a dishonorable profession), revolutionary politician Pierre Gaspard Chaumette urged republican women to "remember that virago, that woman-man." The "impudent" de Gouges, he continued, had "abandoned all the cares of her household because she wanted to engage in politics.... This forgetfulness of the virtues of her sex led her to the scaffold." It wasn't until 1944 that the French government conceded voting rights to the female sex.
In her elegant new book,...
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