The Historiographical Turn in Human Rights: A Postmodern Inquiry in Six Stories

Abstract

The present Thesis inquires the recent historiographical turn in the fiend of human rights. A growing body of scholarly publications have been debating whether human rights have a history or rather a genealogy, whether there exists any one history or rather histories of human rights, and so on. The Thesis first collocates the historiographical turn along a trajectory: human rights have experienced a phase of success starting from the 1970s and peaking into pure euphoria throughout the 1990s. Their success has brought to rising instrumentalisation and mounting critique, precipitating human rights into a state of crisis. The historiographical turn comes partly as reaction and partly as continuation to the critical wave and the crisis deriving from it. The underpinning belief is that telling the true history of human rights could bring a definitive solution to the many controversies about their validity, universality, and uncertain future. The cultural dilemma is central: history has been used as ground of emancipation and self-determination since the very beginning. Nonetheless, the historiographical turn demands a clear definition: what are human rights? The paradoxical way of responding this question is to turn to history, thus producing circularity between the two. In order to defeat the impasse, the Thesis understands human rights phenomenologically, i.e., as result of processes and dynamics. Human rights are an important indicator of past and present power dynamics: they have been often portrayed as Western-made, as well as reflecting and imperialistically imposing Western models and values. The problems of Eurocentrism and Western biases are falsely solved encouraging non-Western narratives about human rights. However, the Thesis points out that history itself is of Western origins. In order to provincialize Europe and de-mythologize history, the Thesis elaborates an alternative way of perceiving and representing history. The attempt is that of exposing the fiction by radicalizing fictionality itself. The Thesis thus traces upon Luigi Pirandello's theatrical play Six Characters in Search of an Author, constructing six characters (i.e., lawyer, politician, philosopher, priest, activist, and fool) and their respective human rights stories. Each narrative is then analysed through the categories set forth in the work of Hayden White. Scope of the Thesis is to expose the discursive dynamics of which both history and human rights are part. The conclusive argument here presented is that both history and human rights constitute elusive strategies of the Western modern discourse in its peculiar attempt of escaping nihilism.

Date of Award	9 Mar 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Guobin ZHU (Supervisor)