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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Published in | Biography (Honolulu) Vol. 35; no. 1; pp. 115 - 136 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
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 | |
Online Access | Get full text |
ISSN | 0162-4962 1529-1456 1529-1456 |
DOI | 10.1353/bio.2012.0002 |
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Abstract | 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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AbstractList | 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. To draw uncritically on the concept of a common, universal humanity is to risk glossing over the historical processes and institutional arrangements, "from nation-states to flourishing forms of transnational governance and advocacy in a global world," that have helped to install "these dialects of universality" as a "'universal' coding of the human," and to miss the fact that the human of human rights and humanitarian storytelling is, again, "particular" (Abu-Lughod 87, 85). Valentino's life is continually cast, in Eggers's words, as a "promise that could not be fulfilled" in Africa and the United States.25 The humanitarian promise, like the legal subject it constitutes, remains in the space of the "not yet": it embodies a potentiality in the way that the refugee is on the threshold of citizenry, not yet formalized by the laws of state.26 But to understand only the refugee as beholden to humanism's promises is to play into the humanist script that places the refugee in the space of some perpetual and stagnant "not yet," while the reader/citizen, conversely, as a whole and sovereign subject, has "arrived," or is immune to global violence and its structures of dominance. 27 As a posthumanist critique of humanitarian life narrative, What Is the What places both Valentino and his addressee as precarious and not fully knowable human subjects, both subjects of the "not yet." What Is the What, pronounced a novel and an autobiography by its author Dave Eggers, is the life story of Valentino Achak Deng. Fusing fictional representation with autobiographical and historical detail, Eggers's first-person narrator recreates the voice of Valentino, one of Sudan's so-called 'Lost Boys.' Here, as in his celebrated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers creates a complex autobiographical subject who simultaneously reflects critically on readers' expectations of genre, and presents a profound and moving account of a traumatic life story. Eggers's own memoir is openly suspicious about the ethics of autobiographical writing (Smith and Watson, 'Rumpled'), and in What Is the What Eggers has crafted a novel that is likewise aware of 'the deep moral problems of its own storytelling' (Dawes 182). The complex play with genre in What Is the What-from recreating Valentino's voice to embedding an anti-humanitarian narrative of failure and disappointment within a larger humanitarian frame-not only allows Eggers to rewrite the terms of testimonial writing (who speaks, with whom, how, about what, and to what effect), but also enables him to retain what is local and unique about Valentino's story in the universalizing genre of 'Lost Boys' testimonial. Reprinted by permission of University of Hawaii Press |
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Snippet | 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... To draw uncritically on the concept of a common, universal humanity is to risk glossing over the historical processes and institutional arrangements, "from... What Is the What, pronounced a novel and an autobiography by its author Dave Eggers, is the life story of Valentino Achak Deng. Fusing fictional representation... |
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SubjectTerms | 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 |
Title | HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVE AND POSTHUMANIST CRITIQUE: DAVE EGGERS'S "WHAT IS THE WHAT" |
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