HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVE AND POSTHUMANIST CRITIQUE: DAVE EGGERS'S "WHAT IS THE WHAT"

Dave Eggers's What Is the What is the fictionalized real-life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's "Lost Boys." Critical of a rhetoric of rescue and promise, the novel questions humanitarianism and the prescriptive, colonial, and even racist undertones of its humanism, w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBiography (Honolulu) Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 115 - 136
Main Author PEEK, MICHELLE
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Honolulu University of Hawai'i Press for the Biographical Research Center 01.01.2012
University of Hawai'i Press
University of Hawaii Press
Subjects
Advocacy
Aid
American literature
Analysis
Autobiographies
Biography
Cultural values
Deng, Valentino Achak
Dialects
Dominance
Eggers, Dave
Equal rights
Equality
Governance
Human rights
Humanism
Humanitarian aid
Humanitarianism
Literary criticism
Narratives
Novels
Posthumanism
Reading
Refugees
Research subjects
Storytelling
Transhumanism
U.S.A
Valentino
Violence
Written narratives
United States
United States > US
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0162-4962
1529-1456
1529-1456
DOI10.1353/bio.2012.0002

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Summary:Dave Eggers's What Is the What is the fictionalized real-life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of Sudan's "Lost Boys." Critical of a rhetoric of rescue and promise, the novel questions humanitarianism and the prescriptive, colonial, and even racist undertones of its humanism, while at the same time sustaining the value of a humanist language of rights in humanitarian life writing.
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ISSN:0162-4962
1529-1456
1529-1456
DOI:10.1353/bio.2012.0002