This article explores the increasingly significant question of the relationship between fiction and human rights. From one perspective, the question has settled around issues of genre and form. In particular, Joseph Slaughter has argued that the Bildungsroman is the fictional correlative of human rights discourse, insofar as both figure the incorporation of formerly marginalized figures into the full recognition of personhood by existing society or the state. While Slaughter allows some variation in the form the Bildungsroman takes, this article questions the circularity of such a discussion. Specifically, there is the question of what other forms of narrative might tell us about the nature of human rights, not least when the relevant arena is not the state, or else is the state in a highly ambiguous form. The key figure here is the refugee, whose tale of demarginalization is not always one of incorporation. Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben both focus on the refugee, and Agamben develops the notion of the "camp" as the modern nomos of the planet, but this article proposes a different concept as foundational, the route as the via rupta, the broken road of the refugee. Such a broken road, figuring a broken narrative, marks the inner form of the fiction of Caryl Phillips, whose constellated and dispersed writings in the uncanny spaces of the contemporary world both de- and reconstruct notions of home, personhood, asylum, location, relation, and self. In so doing they problematize the concept of human rights as a project whose meaning has not yet come into view. © 2015 by The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. All rights reserved.

The nature of blood Roots and routes Giorgio Agamben human rights Nomos Caryl Phillips Joseph Slaughter A distant shore Hannah Arendt Uncanny Via rupta Refugee fiction

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