The Human Rights Torture Novel: Unmade Subjects, Unmaking Worlds

Abstract

This essay examines a subgenre of the Human Rights novel, the torture novel, devoted to the social ontology of the human. In the HR torture novel embodiment is rendered ‘abject’ and the subject ‘unmade’, through dehumanization and debasement. The abject embodiment is the consequence of institutional precarity and collapsing social apparatuses. Tortured subjects acquire membership of a collective memory of pain, a trauma-memory citizenship, made possible through the articulation of memories of torture, bringing together fellow sufferers, former perpetrators and witnesses.The essay concludes that the torture novel is integral to the project of Human Rights because it demonstrates how broken bodies are produced in eroding social conditions, driven by state policy, state indifference or state oppression.