Rosemary J. Jolly is Weiss Chair of the Humanities and professor of comparative literature, English, bioethics, women’s studies, and African studies at Penn State. She is author of Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa.
"""Rosemary J. Jolly’s far-reaching book urges us to rethink our normative, institutionalized assumptions about human rights. What is required, she argues, is a wider recognition that decentering the human is, paradoxically, vital to human sustainability. Standard notions of human rights have failed vast swathes of humanity and the more-than-human lives with whom their beings are intertwined. By turns philosophical and grounded, The Effluent Eye illuminates anew the vexing worlds of sexual assault, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, among other concerns. Jolly has given us a provocative, iconoclastic work that deserves to be read, taught, and debated.""—Rob Nixon, Princeton University ""This superbly original book challenges some of the core concepts that structure anthropocentric understandings of human rights and calls on readers to think differently about waste, death, health, and healing. Looking through an ‘effluent eye’ inspired by South African literature and philosophy, Rosemary J. Jolly offers a vision that breaks with the embedded logic of colonial capitalism to see what lies outside and beyond.""—Stephanie Newell, Yale University "