ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid's simultaneously activates and subverts many of the assumptions about the "human" that guide liberal human rights discourses and norms. Human rights standards presume an agentive subject whose reasoned self-determination secures the privileges and protections of rights – just as deliberative, rational choice is understood to vest political process with legitimacy. As such, human rights norms naturalize a vision of historical and individual progress that casts the condition of embodiment and especially corporeal suffering as inherently wasteful, or an automatic detraction from those qualities most fully constitutive of human liberty. In turn, if Autobiography offers up a portrait of the "commonly human," it is one founded on destruction and other decidedly illiberal appetites. Whereas liberal human rights norms purvey expectations about dignity and self-improvement, those lofty ideals are suggested to be as divorced from Xuela's reality as is the drinking of "English tea."
