Thi s article examines two instances of human rights advocacy-Dave Eggers's What Is the What (2006) and Invisible Children's Kony 2012that have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. It aims to show how the former exposes and challenges the neocolonial assumptions underlying humanitarian campaigns such as Kony 2012 as well as how they are emblematic of different forms of engagement with subaltern testimonies established by humanitarian activists in the postcolonial era. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng-A Novel constitutes a fascinating and at times confusing instance of literary ventriloquism. It has garnered signiWcant popular and critical interest for its unusual collaborative testimonial account, which, as the subtitle suggests, fuses the genres of the novel and autobiography. The book tells the story of one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan: children who were made homeless by the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), which forced them to Xee across vast unforgiving territories before being considered for resettlement in the United States by aid organizations. What Is the What testiWes to Deng's traumatic experiences in war-torn Sudan within a frame narrative centering on a violent robbery he suffers in his Atlanta apartment. While the book has been widely praised, some critics have addressed the perceived shortcomings and Xaws of the product of Eggers and Deng's collaboration. Criticisms of What Is the What concentrate on the issues of voice appropriation, identity erasure, and neocolonial imperialism in relation to the role of testimony in human rights advocacy. As our analysis will reveal, however, the accusations leveled at What Is the What apply much more plausibly to the online video campaign Kony 2012, which went viral in March 2012. The latter is part of an ongoing humanitarian
Whereas many female authors of the long nineteenth century have been recovered and revalued in recent years, their relationship to the rise of professional authorship as well as their male peers has remained under analysed. Nevertheless, an understanding of the dynamic between budding American literary aspirations, the harsh commercialism of the developing national publishing scene and the profitable domestic tradition of female authors can shed new light on the development of female authorship in this period. In this article, I embed Wharton in the increasingly commercialised and transatlantic literary marketplace of her age to show how she adopted the masculine language of professionalism to distance herself from the domestic female writers which preceded her and carve out a place for her own high literary aspirations. I begin with a brief examination of her rather privileged socioeconomic background and ambitious literary aspirations before analysing more in depth her developing authorial persona throughout her career, primarily in comparison to two well-known male authors of the day, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. Wharton, I argue purposely adopted the business like attitude and commercial guise specifically avoided by her male counterparts because it guaranteed her the serious critical reception otherwise denied to female authors.
In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published with the help of Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. In doing so, Eggers relies on the affective charge attributed to testimonial narratives within human rights culture as a critical means of informing and engaging a broad audience. Specifically, the article deals with two separate versions of the same man's testimony, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, respectively written or published by Eggers in conjunction with Zeitoun. The first appears in Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath, an oral history collection published as part of the Voice of Witness book series that Eggers helped to found. The second, Zeitoun, is a narrative non-fiction account that expands on the protagonist's experiences before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. As is the case with many human rights narratives, the explicit goal of these texts is to educate readers about human rights crises, narrate the humanity and suffering of their protagonists, and, by extension, convince readers to include them in the circle of people whose rights deserve recognition and protection. In both versions of this testimony, the protagonist's humanity and suffering are focalized through the victim, and it is this act of collaborative witnessing that offers victims the opportunity to claim rights. In order for a testimonial narrative to fulfil this function within human rights culture, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith explain in Human Rights and Narrated Lives, affectively charged and sensationalized stories are typically chosen for circulation that "target privileged readers in anticipation that they will identify with, contribute to, and become
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