Palimpsests of Empire: Humanitarian Recognition and the Ethics of Bearing Witness in World Literature

Palimpsests of Empire: Humanitarian Recognition and the Ethics of Bearing Witness in World Literature examines the formative role humanitarianism discourses and ideals have played in the reading, writing, and theorizing of world literature from the 1990s to the present. While much popular fiction provides palatable yet problematic ways of thinking about cultural distance, morality, guilt, and global responsibility, my dissertation traces an emergent counter-archive in global literary and cultural production that contests some of the framing mechanisms by which humanitarianism is imagined. The body of fictional texts I examine calls into question specifically the ways in which humanitarianism discourse and its cultural artifacts contribute to and accentuate cultural and religious differences that foster justifications for intervention, occupation, and neoliberal transformation. The works discussed in this dissertation contribute to a better understanding of how humanitarianism functions as a problematic moral foundation for global capitalism, and offer ways of reframing and reimagining structural relationships, colonial legacies, collective rights, conceptions of self and other, and global responsibility. While the conventions of bestselling “humanitarian fiction” are often premised on a politics of pity that reinforces the “bare life” of humanitarian subjects, the works discussed here outline an emergent set of political and aesthetic investments within contemporary cultural production that challenge and reorient the ethical parameters of global humanitarianism.