Dr Bhakti Shringarpure is a 2022 IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, working on her project Stories and Saviors: On Literary Humanitarianism.
My IASH project 'Stories and Saviors: On Literary Humanitarianism' will expand upon my critical engagement with humanitarianism through a focus on saviorist proclivities in literary, cultural and storytelling initiatives. Today, we see a proliferation of stories of single individuals perceived as victims in need of humanitarian support. These broadly tend to include women in the Global South, children, migrants and refugees, and survivors of persecution based on gender, sexuality, race and religion, among others. Such stories disseminate in various ways: on websites, newsletters and funding drives of humanitarian and rights advocacy organizations, as memoirs and novels, and as full-fledged initiatives that promote stories as a force for change. I use the term “literary humanitarianism” since these stories rely specifically on literary elements of craft such as narrative, setting the scene, plot and exposition in order to generate empathy and activate discourses of social change. Literary humanitarianism becomes one node among many others that attempts to imbue human subjects with dignity, alleviate suffering and respond to emergency and non-emergency crises. Such humanitarianism certainly does not exist in a vacuum and can be traced back to educational and cultural projects imbued with civilizing mission ideologies that formed the backbone of European colonialism. In 'Decolonising the Mind,' Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously described colonialism as “the night of the sword and the bullet” that is “followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard;” referring precisely to the violence of educational, linguistic and cultural missions. Over time, and due to a range of factors, such projects also fundamentally altered the form of the “story” and the practice of “storytelling.” In the Cold War decades that followed, Euro-American soft power initiatives published and promoted “conversion narratives” that told the story of fleeing totalitarianism in the former USSR and embracing democracy, liberalism and freedom, at last, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The practice of literary humanitarianism today extends colonial ideologies and simultaneously gives rise to an extractive ecology that relies upon victim stories for funding and sustenance of humanitarian initiatives.
This research is part of a short book on humanitarianism and saviors for a series that I edit called 'Decolonize That! Handbooks for the Revolutionary Overthrow of Embedded Colonial Ideas' for OR Books, New York.