The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio , and Human Rights

Abstract

If, as Michael Ignatieff proposes, rights is the lingua franca to articulate and address the problems suffering (7), then it follows particular forms suffering might generate specific forms narrative within this language rights. Local social and cultural conditions atrocity are tied in to universal discourses--including legal--of rights via a narrative is simultaneously local and global, even as the legal domain rights permeates other realms politics and culture (Ahmed and Stacey 1). An atrocity narrative is, then, irreducibly double voiced: it is located within a discursive structure specific to a time and place, thus ensuring the atrocity is made recognizable, and the demand for rights is made part a universal schema values. Anthony Langlois argues the discourse rights presupposes definitions the human, thereby proposing a narrative tradition in which the emerges (Langlois). The circulation and/or acceptance narratives about what it means to be determine what is defined as a human right (Slaughter). My essay discusses Dalit life writing, a genre Indian texts emerged first in regional languages, and, in the 1990s, in English; the genre situates personal and collective suffering within a larger discourse rights. Dalit, derived from the Marathi--the predominant language Maharashtra state literally means of the earth and that which has been ground down and now signifies socially oppressed caste groups and tribals. Ironically, these marginalized Dalit peoples constitute a large segment the population, and have been forced to mobilize themselves in order to fight for rights and justice in postcolonial India. Dalit rights emerge in a national context but, as this essay shows, can be usefully integrated with a larger international-global discourse suffering, trauma and rights. 'While Dalit life explicitly references conditions atrocity in India, it also develops a notion the subject can be serviceable within multiple contexts suffering. Indeed, the genre's narrative tradition recognizing the outcast in India offers strong parallels with other such humans the world over. In its representation suffering humans, Dalit life generates abject-types for (possible) ethical appropriation by a global literary field for rights. I invoke abjectification--deliberately echoing objectification to signal social processes economic and political oppression, modes atrocity and injustice, but also the representational process. Abject-types are figures abjection occurring in literatures trauma across the world. They demonstrate the consequences political and social processes and emerge through representations atrocity and suffering. Life writing includes genres as diverse as autobiographies, autofictions, and confessional forms (Henke). Dalit life is a personal atrocity memoir calls attention to oppressive conditions within a community. It folds the atrocity narrative into testimonies and evidentiary statements are explicitly political; as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith have demonstrated, memoirs by victims are intrinsically linked to contemporary global rights movements (Schaffer and Smith). Thus far, studies Dalit people have been largely sociological and rarely attentive to the narrative, aesthetic, and formal properties Dalit writings (Dumont; Omvedt; (Those). Such studies foreground crucial issues such as oppression, atrocity, and protest as major themes in Dalit but do not investigate or provide an account the forms in which these themes are conveyed (exceptions include the works Limbale, Towards an Aesthetics Dalit Literature; Dharwadker; Beth; Nayar, Bamis Karukku; Rege). My earlier work proposed Dalit may be treated as testimonio (Nayar, Bama's Karukku). …

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