Jennifer Rickels Rights War builds on important recent scholarship like Elizabeth Ankers Fictions of Dignity and Crystal Parihks Writing Human Rights to showcase the unique affordances, and unique challenges, that committed literary fiction can pose to the most cynical discursive manipulations of power, especially when it claims a victim status from which it in turn also claims a right to redress. Strategically curating, and brilliantly reading, an archive of expressive work by writers as diversely creative as Claudia Rankine, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jamaica Kincaid (among others), Rickels project deepens as it complicates our understanding of the critical force of literary praxis in a world only increasingly corrupted by the lies, not to say the fictions, of power.
Ricardo L. Ortiz, Professor, Georgetown University, USA
