Liberal Humanitarianism: Obscuring US Culpability in James Disco and Susan Clark’s Echoes of the Lost Boys of Sudan and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What

Abstract

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System n 2001, nearly 4,000 Sudanese refugees, displaced during the second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), resettled across the United States. The newcomers were mostly young men who had grown up in refugee camps in North Africa after fleeing attacks on their villages in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As re­ ports of the refugees’ lives began to circulate, much of the US public turned its attention to a war that by its end had killed nearly two million and had displaced four million. In particular, the US public encountered harrowing tales of unaccompanied children walking across a thousand miles of desert to seek refuge first in Ethiopia and then in Kenya. Numbering more than 20,000, less than half the boys survived the combined threats of dehydration, starvation, wild animals, and roaming bandits. Referred to as the “lost boys” by journalists and aid workers in reference to the unaccompanied youth in the tale of Peter Pan, the children became part of a narra­ tive of US benevolence toward refugees fleeing a war in which the United States seemed to have so little at stake. Unlike earlier US pol­ icies welcoming refugees because of their flight from communism, the Sudanese refugee resettlement appeared to be emblematic of a post–Cold War US commitment to human rights untainted by geo­ political ambition. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, much of the West saw hope in the triumphant human rights ethic that promised to better the world. In Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith highlight their investment in the discourse, referring to the 1990s specifically as the “ decade A L A I N A K A U S