Human Rights Quarterly

Jill Richards takes up the first decades of the twentieth century in her provocative, transatlantic study of the feminist avant-garde. She posits that the confluence of an avant-garde visual aesthetic of montage with feminist agitation shows politically visible, angry female subjects as challenges to the liberal subject on which we have built our human rights narratives to date. Focusing on types of action and creativity rather than individual figures or works, Richards emphasizes collectivity rather than individuality. She juxtaposes historical examples from both sides of the Atlantic and across the English Channel in novel comparative readings that reconfigure the human by foregrounding (and challenging) the assumptions about the inhumanity of nonconforming female subjects.

Traversing the boundary between the intimate and the public, Richards shows us how to look anew at female citizenship. Demands for equality and inclusion are historically recursive but not stalled. They produce new configurations of political subjects and actions. Moreover, Richards eschews identity and affect in the sense of injury or sentimentality. Hence she participates in a movement by literary scholars to shift away from the debates about sympathy and the instrumentality of creative works for human rights. For Richards, creative works rub against received histories to open up the past and thus seed novel theoretical insights about the meaning of human rights.

There is much that is counterintuitive in this book, beginning with its timeline, which extends an entire century, starting with the Paris Commune and ending with the works of British-Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington from the 1970s. Examining the female arsonists of the Paris Commune, Richards locates an emergent technique of collage in the photography of Ernest Charles Appert. Appert shifted from taking individual portraits of the women who were arrested during the insurrection to composing collective tableaux, most striking among them an image where he mounted photographs of the women's faces onto an imaginary composition of crowded bodies in the prison's interior.

A response to the questions about the juridical humanity of these "furies, " Appert's work helps Richards establish the method of her inquiry. It is not the representativeness of the actions that matter as much as the effort to convey them in the moment—in newspapers, pamphlets, committee meeting minutes, or performative creative responses interjected into the political arena. The mediation of events—the taking up of form in representation—is in itself a sphere of action that carries out a contest over the meaning of human rights. Richards's emphasis on a present temporality brings into view the "long middle" of political struggle when action repeats itself without a clear sign [End Page 607] of resolution either in success or failure.¹ Her archive is full of lists (from tables of contents to announcements of events in newspapers to serialized images), and she deliberately casts aside texts that rely on the "backward gaze of the storyteller."²

Richards, moreover, describes her study as a "counterhistory" that "shifts our understanding of rights from a kind of boundary between citizen and noncitizen, to a set of practices that dismantle such boundaries in the attempt to rebuild social relations and social life."³ She is interested in how rights make demands for justice "beyond the remedies provided by positive law."⁴ Postcolonial scholars, who confront the legacies of exclusion and dehumanization cemented in the governance structures of states and intergovernmental organizations shaped by empire, have put a similar emphasis on moving beyond the law. Richards provides various openings to integrate postcolonial methodologies by resituating familiar figures in the history of the avant-gardes. Thus, for example, we re-encounter E. D. Morel, the Congo Reform Association founder, who is an exemplary figure in the history of humanitarianism. Now, however, he appears alarmingly prejudiced. His pamphlet, The Horror on the Rhine, exposed the purported sexual violence by French African troops stationed with the Allied occupation of the Rhineland against German women.⁵ The...