For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017)

This thesis explores how Anglophone literature debated the rise of modern international law since the late nineteenth century, including the founding of the United Nations and the 1948 declaration of human rights. While international law has its origins in the early modern period, it was largely at the turn of the century, with the Berlin Conference, that it began taking shape as a colonial and then a postcolonial, global ethics. In this thesis, I lay claim to literature’s capacity to legislate by examining instances where Anglophone novelists—including Joseph Conrad, Bryher, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—work through the promises and problems of international jurisprudence. More than a mere reflection of international law’s evolving theory and practice, the literature I treat registers the law’s presumptions and first principles while interrogating its capacity to follow through with its declarations. In spreading the law’s claims while also submitting them to the scrutiny of close reading, these novels are both advocates of and at times stubborn liabilities for international law’s normative worlds. Collectively, these Anglophone novelists scrutinize international law’s ability to shape the ways we come to know ourselves and one another as rights-bearing individuals, international actors, advocates, and activists. Recent work in the humanities has begun to address the ways in which international law is a set of interlocked narratives that claim to enshrine common sense when, in fact, they curate and confine modern ways of knowing, feeling, and belonging. By attending to issues that often go unacknowledged in the ordinary practices of international law—questions about subjectivity and self-fashioning, concerns about security and citizenship—I continue the work of examining international law’s epistemologies. In approaching literature as responsive to legal developments, and law as dependent on the narrative logic conventionally reserved for literature, I narrate the kinds of life and liberty that international law makes both conceivable and inconceivable, while at same time examining the literary contexts that continue to shape its apparent common sense.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0