Why human rights don’t work

In The Effluent Eye, Rosemary J. Jolly argues for the decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to state and institutional malfeasance but to the very concept of human rights as anthropocentric—and, therefore, fatally shortsighted. In an engaging mix of literary and cultural criticism, Indigenous and Black critique, and substantive forays into the medical humanities, Jolly proposes right-making in the demise of human rights.

Using what she calls an “effluent eye,” Jolly draws on “Fifth Wave” structural public health to confront the concept of human rights—one of the most powerful and widely entrenched liberal ideas. She builds on Indigenous sovereignty work from authors such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Mark Rifkin as well as the littoral development in Black studies from Christine Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Tiffany Lethabo King to engage decolonial thinking on a range of urgent topics such as pandemic history and grief; gender-based violence and sexual assault; and the connections between colonial capitalism and substance abuse, the Anthropocene, and climate change. 

Combining witnessed experience with an array of decolonial texts, Jolly argues for an effluent form of reading that begins with the understanding that the granting of “rights” to individuals is meaningless in a world compromised by pollution, poverty, and successive pandemics.

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Rosemary J. Jolly is Weiss Chair of the Humanities and professor of comparative literature, English, bioethics, women’s studies, and African studies at Penn State. She is author of Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa.

"Rosemary J. Jolly’s far-reaching book urges us to rethink our normative, institutionalized assumptions about human rights. What is required, she argues, is a wider recognition that decentering the human is, paradoxically, vital to human sustainability. Standard notions of human rights have failed vast swathes of humanity and the more-than-human lives with whom their beings are intertwined. By turns philosophical and grounded, The Effluent Eye illuminates anew the vexing worlds of sexual assault, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, among other concerns. Jolly has given us a provocative, iconoclastic work that deserves to be read, taught, and debated."—Rob Nixon, Princeton University

"This superbly original book challenges some of the core concepts that structure anthropocentric understandings of human rights and calls on readers to think differently about waste, death, health, and healing. Looking through an ‘effluent eye’ inspired by South African literature and philosophy, Rosemary J. Jolly offers a vision that breaks with the embedded logic of colonial capitalism to see what lies outside and beyond."—Stephanie Newell, Yale University