Melville's Benito Cereno and the politics of humanitarian intervention

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 103, Issue 2-3, 2004, Pages 465-488

  Downes, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950489338     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-465     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 251
2. ICISS was funded by "the Canadian Government, together with major international foundations including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Simons Foundation" [The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and Stale Sovereignty [Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001], 85). The governments of Switzerland and the United Kingdom are also thanked for their "generous financial and in-kind support to the work of the commission." ICISS also has a Web site: www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/iciss- ciise/ menu-en.asp
3. Quoted in ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, 2. Subsequent citations are given in the text
4. Kofi Annan, "Secretary-General Addresses International Peace Academy Seminar on The Responsibility to Protect, New York City, February 15, 2002," available online at www.un. org/News/Press/docs/2002/sgsm8125.doc. htm
5. The text of UN Article 2(4) is available online at www.un.org/aboutun/ charter
6. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 242-44
7. Annan, "Secretary-General."
8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 110-11. A strategic renunciation of sovereignty at the Guantänamo Bay Naval Base has proved very useful to the current U.S. administration. The government's insistence that this piece of land is under Cuban sovereignty allows federal district courts to claim that they have no jurisdiction over the base and hence cannot entertain petitions of habeas corpus filed on behalf of detainees held there. At the same time, of course, the 1903 agreement with Cuba that established the base (which the Castro regime has always denounced) states that "during the period of occupation by the United States of said areas. . . the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas"
9. (see Joseph L. Hoffmann, "Justices Weave Intricate Web of Habeas Corpus Decisions," Trial 37.13 [December 2001]: 62-65). Effectively realizing a sovereignty that democracy was thought to have rendered obsolete (a sovereignty beyond the law of the very land to which that sovereignty is said to belong), Guantánamo Bay simultaneously opens up a conceptual and geographical zone of complete rightlessness, that includes, as we know, child detainees. The detention camp itself appears to visitors behind a sign that reads "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." "Isn't that a little strange," asks ex-corrections officer and New York Times reporter Ted Conover of his military guide, "a slogan about freedom on the gate of a prison camp?" He looked at me flatly. 'Doesn't seem strange to me,' he said
10. 'Does it seem strange to you?'" (Ted Conover, "In the Land of Guantánamo" New York Times, June 29, 2003, available online at.www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29GUANTANAMO.html)
11. Rony Brauman, "Contradictions of Humanitarianism," in the dossier "Humanism without Borders," Alphabet City, no. 7 (2000): 47
12. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 115
13. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 140
14. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 337
15. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, quoted in Lance Banning, ed., Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1995), 170
16. Paine, "Common Sense," in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 83
17. Wood, Creation, 365
18. Ignatieff himself does not seem entirely comfortable with this line of thought, since he later declares in the same lecture that "the fundamental moral commitment entailed by rights is not to respect, and certainly not to worship. It is to deliberation" Ignatieff, "Human Rights as Politics" [originally delivered as part of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton University, 2000]
19. in Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 84. Then again, as coauthor of the ICISS report, Ignatieff presumably shares in the sentiment of its final lines: "We cannot be content with reports and deliberations," the report concludes. "We must be prepared to act. We won't be able to live with ourselves if we do not" (The Responsibility to Protect, 75)
20. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987). Subsequent citations are given in the text
21. Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres [Boston, 1817] (New York: Praeger, 1970), 352. Subsequent citations are given in the text. Melville's story borrows heavily from chapter 18 of Delano's Narrative
22. For a wonderful discussion of this name change and the corresponding change in the date of the events, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 135-82
23. See Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
24. Briton Cooper Busch, The War against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery (Kingston and Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, 1985), 10-36
25. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), 114
26. "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," in The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Edward Dumbauld (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 22
27. One of the ways the U.S. Constitution enshrined and displaced the violence done by democracy to the fantasy of the singular and autonomous individual was by inventing the category of "three-fifths of a person" to fold the bodies, if not the wills, of Africans into the franchise laws. See Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, and A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski (Madison: Madison House, 1995)
28. This structure is intriguingly reproduced in John Quincy Adams's famous speech to the court during his defense of the slaves who revolted on board the Amistad in 1839. In the course of a defense that prioritized the concept of human rights, Adams scored one of his most forceful points by reminding the court that "if the President has the power to. . . send [the Africans] beyond seas for trial, he could do it by the same authority in the case of American citizens." Such an act of tyranny, Adams noted, was "one of the grievous charges brought against George III. . . one of the most odious of those acts of tyranny which occasioned the American revolution" (quoted in Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone [Athens: University of Georgia Press], 16)
29. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 262-63. A certain "shock" also appears in the final lines of the ICISS report, where we read that "all human beings are equally entitled to be protected from acts that shock the conscience of us all" (75). That "we" might be shocked by acts that "we," presumably, are also capable of performing suggests that Benjamin's exemplary materialist historiographer has become the figure for that from which human rights discourse will protect us
30. Melville, Benito Cereno, 89-90
31. Laurie Robertson-Lorant writes of the legal documents that Melville, following Delano, appended to his story for Putnams: "The deposition, however, actually frames the story to form a mutilated triptych, with the implied third panel being the 'voiceless' Babo's version of the story" [Melville: A Biography [New York: Random House, 1996], 350)
32. Hortense Spillers also addresses the question of perspective to force an acute political intervention in the discourse on and around human rights: "For me, modern history begins in slavery and colonization, periods during which the African personality is not just the other, but the place where the human stops. The question of the human, in this case, becomes the category I can't see, because I'm standing in the spot where the human stops, and I can't stand on any other ground" ("Where the Human Stops," in Social Insecurity, ed. Len Guenther and Cornelius Heesters, a special issue of Alphabet City, no. 7 [2000]: 52)
33. Somini Sengupta, "Rebels in Liberia Attack Capital; Shell Refugees in U.S. Annex," New York Times, June 26, 2003, online at www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/international/ africa/26LIBE.html
34. Thomas Paine anticipated this phenomenon when he celebrated the idea that having escaped from Eastern tyranny, America would now witness a turning of the tide: "Government founded on a moral theory, on a system of universal peace, on the indefeasible hereditary Rights of Man, is now revolving from west to east. It interests not particular individuals, but nations, in its progress, and promises a new era to the human race" ("The Rights of Man," in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin, 1987], 265)
35. Jonathan Culler, "Problems in the Theory of Fiction," in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1988), 206, 216
36. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 148
37. Jack Donnelly, The Concept of Human Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 34
38. Ignatieff, "Human Rights as Politics," 3-4
39. Donnelly, Concept of Human Rights, 59
40. In his original response to the idea of an American Bill of Rights, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "in a popular government, the political and physical power may be considered as vested in the same hands, that is in a majority of the people, and consequently the tyrannical will of the sovereign is not to [be] controuled by the dread of an appeal to any other force within the community." Democratic sovereignty, Madison noted with chilling prescience, has an ominous potential to produce rightless classes: "One of the objections [to the proposed Federal Constitution] in New England," he reminded Jefferson, "was that the Constitution, by prohibiting religious tests, opened a door for Jews, Turks and Infidels" (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788, in Banning, Jefferson and Madison, 151-52). Rights, Madison seems to be saying, risk putting the democratic people at odds with their sovereign selves. Two hundred years later, Mah-mood Mamdani, in his compelling account of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, confronts the same structure: "How to foreclose the possibility of a democratic despotism," he writes, "remains our toughest challenge yet" (Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 281)