Cosmopolitanism,law,and narrative: An interpretation of the right to narrate

Introduction

Homi K. Bhabha is one of the leading figures in postcolonial studies. His major works, all produced in the 1990s, are grounded in literary criticism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies. With a primary focus on literature, Bhabha has sought to examine the contemporary cultural condition, shaped by the formal end of European imperialism and the onset of post-Cold War globalisation. Like other scholars in postcolonial studies (Breckenridge et al., 2002; Gilroy, 2003, 2004; Said, 1998), Bhabha has paid close attention to the human trajectories tied to experiences of diaspora, migration, exile, deportation, and ethnic displacement – forces that complicate and challenge the global order based on nation-states.

In this regard, he also participates in the renewed interest in cosmopolitanism that emerged during that period. However, although Bhabha’s work has been widely discussed, it has rarely been brought into dialogue with cosmopolitan political theory. His contributions to cultural studies, literary criticism, nationalism studies, and key concepts like ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry’ have been analysed, reinterpreted, and critiqued, while the more political aspects of his thought have not received the same attention. This is partly because creating this dialogue is indeed challenging, as Bhabha himself does little to fully develop his political concepts.

With this article, I intend to discuss the ‘right to narrate’. Situated within the framework of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, this concept serves as a focal point for grappling with the intricate dynamics of transnational displacement and the preservation of cultural identities amid the hegemony of nation-states (Bhabha, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b) I will argue that the right to narrate emerges from a cosmopolitan perspective capable of overcoming the main limitation of liberal cosmopolitanism: its simplistic, hierarchical view of the relationship between the national and supranational. Grounded in a nuanced geographical and cultural understanding of the modern world, this right can interrogate entrenched notions of national identity while also safeguarding the emancipatory aspirations of marginalised and subaltern groups. Bhabha’s ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism conceptualises global space as an irregular and fragmented field of power, where a diverse composition of identities, cultures, and worldviews coexist unevenly.

The right to narrate intervenes in this framework with the goal of safeguarding the ability of individuals and groups to appropriate legal and normative principles at various levels of governance (national law, international law, human rights) according to their needs and claims. In so doing, it shows a propaedeutic role for the enjoyment of rights. We can think of it as a political principle conceived from the perspective of minorities that occupy unstable ground in the social and political landscape of the globalised world. These correspond to social, ethnic, cultural, or other groups whose presence within states conflicts both with the dominant national narratives and with the democratic principle that those subject to power must also participate.

In the contemporary Western context, we find several concrete examples, such as undocumented migrants, descendants of diasporic communities, and national minorities. These minority groups are characterised by being marginalised both in terms of the representation of national identity and in terms of democratic participation. This creates an intertwinement in which, on the one hand, there is a discrepancy between cultural belonging and national narratives, and on the other, between political marginalisation and forms of political claim-making. The two dimensions converge in the right to narrate, which emerges as a political response to marginalisation – not by advocating for the coexistence of different cultural groups or the inclusion of a minority within a larger whole, but by defending the innovative character of culture. In this sense, the right to narrate challenges the Western notion that rights are rooted solely in the idea of an independent, self-sufficient individual (see Taylor, 2000).

To clarify this point, as I will attempt to demonstrate, it is useful to make explicit some of the premises of Bhabha’s thought, which are rooted in Walter Benjamin’s conception of history and Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. Though in different ways, both emphasise the importance of narrative in shaping collective life, given its unique relationship with the temporality of experience and the notion of identity. To reconstruct events narratively is to create a ‘lag’ between mere occurrences and the representation of experience. The right to narrate is founded on this idea: it safeguards the capacity of marginalised groups to interrupt their essentialisation as separate entities within society and to reformulate their political claims in meaningful, self-determined terms.

The approach of this article is structured in several interrelated sections. First, I will endeavour to contextualise vernacular cosmopolitanism, elucidating its transnational perspective and its implications for understanding the plight of minorities within the confines of national contexts. Second, I will undertake an examination of the concept of narrative, drawing upon the rich insights of Benjamin (2012a, 2012b) and Arendt (1961, 1981, 1998, 2006) to illuminate the conceptual terrain of the right to narrate. This exploration will delve into the role of narrative in shaping collective identities and political imaginaries. Third, I will engage in a critical review of Bhabha’s discourse on the right to narrate, situating it within a broader inquiry into the interplay between law and narrative. Drawing upon the seminal works of Robert Cover (1983) and Seyla Benhabib (1990, 2008) I will explore the ways in which narratives intersect with legal frameworks to produce and contest systems of power and domination. Finally, I will synthesise these diverse strands of inquiry to outline a profile of the right to narrate, and in the conclusion I will briefly situate this point referring to case studies about multiculturalism, human rights translation and migration. Through this integrative approach, I aim to offer novel insights into the potential of the right to narrate as a political concept.

Vernacular cosmopolitanism and minorities

The term ‘vernacular’ is usually associated with ‘language’, ‘literature’ or even ‘art’ or ‘architecture’. It originates from the Latin vernaculus, meaning ‘domestic’ or ‘native’, and derived from the word verna, of Etruscan origin, which referred to a slave born in the master’s house. In this sense, a language or type of literature can be considered vernacular when tied to a popular or regional context. Similarly, Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism rooted in a circumscribed time-space that resists being characterised by mere abstraction or detachment. It can be understood as a form of subaltern cosmopolitanism aimed at studying global politics from below, focusing on intercultural relations, justice, and social emancipation. This stands in contrast to liberal cosmopolitanism, which, since the 1990s, has theorised top-down models of institutional configurations for global governance (Archibugi, 2008; Held, 2010). Bhabha refers to this latter approach as ‘global cosmopolitanism’, using the term to designate a perspective based on a concentric geography of care, which Doreen Massey labels ‘Russian Doll geography’:

In Western societies, there is a hegemonic geography of care and responsibility which takes the form of a nested set of Russian dolls. First there is ‘home’, then perhaps place or locality, then nation, and so on. There is a kind of accepted understanding that we care first for, and have our first responsibilities towards, those nearest in. (Massey, 2004: 8–9)

Bhabha’s cosmopolitanism does not refer to this geographical imaginary. According to him, contemporary transnational space arises in continuity with the experiences related to colonialism and imperialism – that is, from migrations, diasporas, and violent ethnic or cultural substitutions. Flows of movement, networks of relations, zones of both cultural hybridisation and cultural segregation are irregular and changeable. There is no concentric geography that can emerge from these processes (Bhabha, 1995: 5). Therefore, his suggestion is to capture the histories of movement and cultural encounter by looking at vernacular space, where national identities take shape through discursive and aesthetical elaborations and where the disruptive currents underneath these elaborations may stand out.

According to Bhabha, nation-states constitute themselves through narratives. In their discursive, literary, and aesthetic nature, dominant narratives crystallise in the ideas of ‘people’ and ‘national identity’ in order to give form and unity to the nation (Bhabha, 2004b). ¹ This emphasis on the vernacular does not represent a return to the epistemological preeminence of the nation-state, but emerges from the awareness that reducing the problem of cosmopolitanism to a global perspective is impossible because of its complexity. The vernacular space pregnant with national narratives is called into question to be investigated, according to Walter Benjamin’s metaphor, ‘against the grain’. It means that, in order to study and evaluate contemporary cosmopolitan phenomena and aspirations, we should take vernacular context as a methodological delimitation of units of analysis.

For this purpose, Bhabha claims that it is necessary to take into account minorities’ perspective. In general, minorities have a special meaning for vernacular cosmopolitanism and that is for three main reasons. First, taking the perspective of minorities urges theory to assume the transnational dimension as a background. Inside nation-states, indeed, minorities occupy a liminal space – a grey zone where there is neither full inclusion nor full exclusion. They stand as groups that do not entirely coincide with the demos of the state in that their political agency does not correspond to the democratic agency that ordinary citizens can exercise. As a result, for not being fully included in the political, legal and institutional sphere of the democratic state, the way in which minorities experience the problems of rights, cultural difference and redistribution recalls a discourse of international law, human rights and supranational institutions.

Second, minorities make transparent the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that hide behind nation-states narratives. If nation-states enact narrative strategies to give stability and legitimacy to their power, the contradictions of such strategies are evident when looked from the perspective of those that fall under the legal jurisdiction of the state but are outsider in its narrative.

Third, minorities can catalyse political innovation. To understand this point we can refer to Bhabha’s distinction between two ways to look at cultures: cultural diversity and cultural difference. The former means an ‘epistemological object’, while the latter points to a ‘process of signification’. Cultural diversity is incapable of paying attention to the performative quality of culture. It underlies, for example, how policies of liberal multiculturalism appropriate minorities in a rhetoric of essentialism, separation, and wholeness. The focus on cultural diversity produces a catalogue of closed, complete, and independent cultures. In contrast, the perspective of cultural difference reads cultures in terms of a creation process, where cultures are not fixed objects, but practices and knowledge enacted, handed down, produced, and reproduced. This performative dimension manifests itself in the encounter between difference, when different groups need to translate, negotiate, mediate between their cultural universes, and eventually produce synthesis, in a continuous generation of the unprecedented (Bhabha, 2004b: 49–51). As Bhabha writes, these encounters always presuppose a third space, or an ‘in-between’ space, which provides ‘the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’ (Bhabha, 2004b: 2).

In sum, vernacular cosmopolitanism is a type of subaltern cosmopolitanism. As such, it seeks to understand how politics is articulated from below in the global context and what opportunities or potential exist in it. Its specific characteristic is that it focuses on the textual and discursive dimensions of politics, paying attention to the vernacular space of the nation-state: that is, the narrative space where the ideas of ‘people’, ‘nation’, and ‘national identity’ arise. Vernacular cosmopolitanism privileges minority perspectives, which it considers important for three reasons: they project us into a transnational sphere, they make visible the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of democracies, and they can be politically innovative.

It is from this theoretical framework that Bhabha develops the right to narrate, however, it might be better interpreted if we start with a reconstruction of the concept of narrative. There is a common thread that connects Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and reflections on narrative to Hannah Arendt’s political theory and unravels all the way to Bhabha’s postcolonial approach.

Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and narrative

First of all, it is worth mentioning the significance of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History for postcolonial thought. The critique of the ideas of modernity, civilisation and progress is a main topic for postcolonial thought. Postcolonial scholars have spent much energy countering the claim that such ideas coincide with what has occurred in the spatial and cultural context of Europe. In their perspective, Western culture has created a self-representation that claims to count as a universal reference for historical and civilisational development. Therefore, according to them, Europe should be ‘provincialized’ by resizing its historical legacy. They claim that Europe’s history is undoubtedly a fundamental and indispensable piece of global history, but it remains a part of the whole, and nothing authorises us to take one part for the whole (Chakrabarty, 2007; Mignolo, 2012; De Sousa Santos, 2021; Spivak, 2002).

Benjamin’s conception of history is first and foremost articulated as a critique of historicist historiography and its idea of progress. For him, history based on a linear, rational and evolutive time always corresponds with the point of view of the winners; ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 2012b: 256). This is the essence of the historicism that he sees in the German historiography of his time, to overcome which he believes that we must embrace a different conceptualisation of historical time. For Benjamin, time does not unfold causally and cumulatively; there are no discrete moments that succeed one another according to a universal logic; and there is no ‘homogeneous, empty time’ within which things happen. Instead, the homogeneous and empty time is replaced by the idea of ‘time filled by the presence of the now’ (Benjamin, 2012b: 261). This means that the past is not a dead thing that lies on our back; rather it can be reactivated in the present understood as the ‘actual moment’ that breaks the continuum of history and reconnects with a past temporality. (Benjamin, 2012b: 260–261).

In the causal concatenation that historicism sets as inevitable, facts become sterile. The history conceived as ‘grand tradition’ is the realm where resignation to the fait accompli reigns. In the grand tradition the past is past, and no one can do anything about it. Rather, Benjamin argues for the possibility of ‘redemption’: instead of a history in which facts follow one another, he proposes to think of history as a network of all events that includes both what has been narrated and what has been omitted. For the great historical tradition is always the account of the winner, if the reality of all events is not considered, there is no possibility of redemption. However, the alternative to historicism is not simply to substitute a convoluted temporality for linear and causal temporality. Instead, the historical materialist creates monads: intersection between the then and the now that reconnect threads with what has already happened and seek to redeem the past. Redemption occurs when History is not left to the victors, but is reconfigured as the history of the oppressed. For this to happen, it is essential to identify dormant traditions from the past that can be reawakened in the present and brought back into the historical spotlight (Gentili, 2020: 34).

Postcolonial thought shows similar concerns. The main claim is that we should explore different historical narratives in order to recover what has been forgotten, neglected, or wilfully omitted by the dominant narrative. Recovery is not the unveiling of a portion of the ‘true’ concealed in mere ignorance, but it is the search for a silenced past that contributes to tell alternative stories (Clifford, 1997). The search for historical connections strives to emphasise other temporal itineraries so that the unidirectional plane in which the Eurocentric historical narrative flows open up to other dimensions (Bhambra, 2023).

From this, we can deal with the issue of narrative. Benjamin analyses both the figure of the narrator and the narration as a type of communication in an essay entitled ‘The Storyteller: reflections on the work of Nikolai Leskov’. His first thesis is that narrative as such finds no place in modernity, as modern narratives depend on two other kinds of writing: the novel and the informative text. First, narrative expresses the human desire to share experiences. This is achieved when there are unique, cohesive, and memorable stories that can be easily conveyed. This is not the case with the novel:

The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or, that reponed by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. (Benjamin, 2012a: 87)

The novelist is ‘solitary’ because he wishes to represent the fullness of human experience. But every life is different as it evolves through contradictions and complexities. Even if a life story resonates with others still it is incommensurable and cannot be completely incapsulated in the writing. Then, relying on novels, modern narratives are never cohesive or uniform

Secondarily, the coherence and the strength of premodern narratives are associated with memory, which in turn is strengthened when the information to be remembered is few and essential. ‘Memory is the epic faculty par excellence’ (Benjamin, 2012a: 97), and this contrasts with the richness of information found in another important modern collector of collective experience: the newspaper. While the newspaper article reports events bit by bit and in detail, the traditional narrative neglects superfluous details and succinctly reports the facts, placing them in a unified time frame endowed with a logical and intelligible succession. As Benjamin recalls, there is an episode in Herodotus’ account of the defeat of the Egyptian king Psammenitus by Cambyses that is a matter of Montaigne’s reflection still many centuries later. In the triumphal procession ordered by Cambyses, Psammenitus remains impassive at seeing his children enslaved, and only despairs when he sees his old servant. Herodotus says nothing more, and this is the reason for this episode being remembered and discussed by Montaigne so much time later.

Bhabha applies Benjamin’s idea of modern storytelling as disjunctive, fragmentary, and incommensurable to describe national narratives (Bhabha, 2004b: 231). The nation’s story is not a singular, cohesive tale but one marked by tensions and differences that make it fundamentally incomplete. It is not the product of a centralised and unified ‘we’ that represents a ‘people’ as a whole. Instead, the nation speaks from its margins; from cultural and identitarian spaces that only afterwards are incorporated in a unified ‘imagined community’. However, since cultural difference complicates and challenges this imagined unity, such incorporation in a common story is never an even process; as narratives can be reinterpreted, modified, appropriate, memories are not bound to perfect repetition, but they are the basis for the creation of something new.

Narrative, public space and collective responsibility

Influenced by Benjamin and recalled by Bhabha, Hannah Arendt is another key thinker for the development of the concept of right to narrate. Two aspects of Arendt’s thought are particularly relevant here. First, while Arendt’s concept of history is deeply influenced by Benjamin, she extends it by exploring the ethical relationship between a community and its historical consciousness. Second, she views narrative as not only central to the construction of individual and collective identity, but also to the creation of the shared world that forms the basis of political action. This perspective aligns closely with Bhabha’s idea that social reality itself is narratively constructed.

In the first instance, she claims that historical narratives must not only meet criteria of historiographical validity but must take into account, as Graham MacPhee points out, the ‘variable capacity of human collectivities and individuals to take responsibility’ for events (MacPhee, 2011: 178). The question of responsibility proves important when Arendt addresses the problem of the historiography of totalitarianism. Seyla Benhabib (1990) notes how Arendt believes that confronting totalitarianism requires a reflection on the production of historiographical knowledge. As noted by Isak Dinesen (2014), what is at stake for Arendt is the notion of progress discussed by Benjamin. Both Benjamin and Arendt critique historicism for its abstract notion of ‘humanity’, selective memory, and the violent implications of progress-driven narratives. They argue that historicism’s linear temporality creates a gap between present demands and historical memory (Demiryol, 2018).

In general, however, Arendt approaches Benjamin’s texts through selective appropriation. She aims to advance the critique of the historicist concept of progress by relying on the meanings of narrative and memory found in Benjamin, but at the same time does not prefigure any ‘history of the oppressed’. Rather, she aspires to recover failed revolutions: those episodes, albeit briefly, in which human freedom shaped a new beginning. The Paris Commune, the early Soviet experience, the Hungarian Revolution are all examples of positive freedom that historicist historiography stifles in its causal account of events. There is no history of oppressed because for Arendt ‘impartiality’ is a value (Goyenechea, 2011). To be impartial means to provide justice both to the victorious and the defeated. This non-involvement permits an objective perspective that is a prerequisite for historical comprehension. ² The observer’s refusal to take sides allows him or her to creatively approach the perspective that others have of the world. This slippage also allows a narrative appropriation of the past to reach reconciliation with our own individual and collective identity.

Building on Bethania Assy’s (2008) interpretation, Arendt’s concept of narrative can be seen to bridge the empirical-material world and the realm of thought. In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies three foundational human activities: labour, work, and action. Labour pertains to the cyclical, biological processes required to sustain life, bound to nature’s repetitive rhythms. Work transcends this by creating durable objects, institutions, and cultural artefacts that constitute the human-made ‘world’. Action, distinct from both, unfolds in the public sphere, rooted in plurality and freedom. It disrupts routine through spontaneous, purposeless beginnings, enabling individuals to manifest their agency and originality

According to Arendt, the whole sphere of politics relates to the space where free men gather in public. In the setting of the Greek polis, only the head of the household, as an adult male citizen who enjoyed total emancipation from manual labour, had access to the public sphere. His existence assumed public relevance precisely because he acted in contact not only with nature or objects, but also with other free men. This is opposed to the dimension of existence that among the Greeks constituted the private sphere, that is the domestic space where people worked in order to satisfy the material needs of the whole family.

Arendt describes action as authentic political activity because of its independence from the constraints of nature, and because it allows both to project the individual human life into the horizon of freedom and to self-determine the future of the community. For her, the full citizen of the polis opens a gateway into the eternal return of nature. By its own story the free man could attempt to transcend his own existence. But this happened only if the acts and speeches of the citizen were witnessed by his other peers. It happened, in other words, only in public space. These types of experience were crucial, according to Arendt, because reality itself depends on intersubjective experiences: ‘for us, appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality’ (Arendt, 1998: 50).

Unlike things that are the product of work, actions end as soon as they stop being performed and do not persist over time. They last only to the extent that memory preserves them. In the Greek conception to which Arendt refers, memory is linked to human mortality (Cavarero, 1997). Whereas nature persists and is marked by the cyclical nature of time, human existence is mortal. It can be described as a story that at some point comes to an end. Insofar as it cuts through the circularity of merely biological existence, human life is configured as bios and is not reducible to mere zoé. To become bios, human life must constitute itself as individuality, and this depends on the condition of plurality (Assy, 2008). Indeed, the human being who appears in public, who is seen and heard by a plurality of individuals, is subject to a second birth. His actions are able to initiate new chains of events whose outcome is not predeterminable. Although free, the acting human being is not fully sovereign, both because he manifests himself in a pre-existing public space and because he does not have full control over the consequences of what he does.

Arendt reflects on the emotional moment in the Odyssey where Ulysses weeps upon hearing his own story recounted, using it to illustrate how narrative externalises and objectifies personal histories, rendering them independent of their subjects (Arendt, 1961). She argues that storytelling serves as a response to the paradoxical relationship between human agency and historical outcomes: while history arises from human actions, it is not consciously ‘made’ by individuals (Arendt, 1998: 185). For Arendt, the role of the narrator is to impose a retrospective coherence on the disjointed flow of events, bridging the gap between lived experience and the structured unity of historical accounts. Expanding on this distinction, Adriana Cavarero emphasises that history and narrative operate on separate planes. History, she suggests, exists as a tangible residue of human action, preceding and existing independently of its narration. While all actions generate histories, Cavarero notes that not all histories are destined to be narrated, underscoring the contingent relationship between lived experience and its retelling (Cavarero, 1997: 60).

Narratives produce a history, and so they help to produce also what Arendt calls ‘the web of human relationship’. Narrated history is the result of a constructive process whose outcome is a common world. Integrating new generations into a world that precedes them and will persist into the future is a fundamentally human process (Assy, 2008). It is in this sense that Arendt describes the polis as ‘organized remembrance’ (Arendt, 1998: 198). From this entanglement between the past and present the common world takes shape (Taraborrelli, 2022: 122).

For Bhabha, Arendt signifies ‘the social sphere as a narrative process’. By this process, events pass through an ‘“aesthetic” alienation, or “privatization” of its public visibility’, in order to ‘appear as material or empirical reality’. This transfiguration of events is aesthetical, but it neither aligns with the Kantian idea of bringing an object to its full essence through art, nor with the materialist idea that art merely reflects and reinforces ideological constructions of social reality. Instead, being concerned with the gaps, delays, and ambivalences in cultural representation of social reality, Bhabha looks again to Benjamin thought. Between the events and the narrative reconstruction that transforms them into social experiences there is a ‘lag’. The signification of events does not draw on a linear time, but it rests on a disjunction, a fracture that allows the symbolic eruption of the past (Bhabha, 1992: 143).

This idea of ‘lag’ carries significant consequences for how we think about cultural identity, belonging, and representation. Unlike the linear historical progression that states typically rely on to legitimise themselves as embodiments of collective identity, the ‘lag’ suggests that even national narratives require a phase of ‘alienation from public visibility’ to be reconstructed as empirical reality. This temporal disjuncture destabilises traditional boundaries, emphasising that cultural belonging is not something static or natural but something that is continually renegotiated.

Law, narrative, and human rights

In what sense is this discourse on history and narrative politically relevant? As suggested by Benjamin and Arendt, narrative is essential in defining the collective life of human beings, possessing a public and inherently political dimension. However, in the context of this article, the most significant aspect of narrative lies in its connection not only to identity or cultural belonging but also to a normative universe. This connection forms the political invocation of Bhabha’s right to narrate.

As national identity – emerging as an artificial textual effort to unify diverse temporal and cultural trajectories into a common, homogeneous history – is continually challenged by minorities located in the interstitial spaces of nations, political participation is split between the egalitarian promise of democratic engagement and the discrepant nature of national belonging. Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism is situated precisely within this gap. Engaging with this oxymoronic terminology, he examines the potential for cosmopolitan openness through an analysis of the ‘vernacular’ – the textual-linguistic space of the nation-state. Through this approach, it reimagines the role of human rights in addressing the normative aspirations of groups caught within this gap between belonging and exclusion. Unlike advocates of legal globalism who hope to resolve this antinomy through the juridical integration of states, Bhabha rejects the concentric view of a supranational space aimed at managing national subsets. He does so both due to the historical and cultural arbitrariness on which these national subsets stand and because the local Western nature of human rights prevents them from being universalized in a purely formal sense.

On this basis, in this final section, I will explore the political potential of the right to narrate by examining the intersection of law, narrative, and human rights. To this end, I will refer to two scholars. I will begin by introducing Robert Cover’s concept of ‘jurisgenesis’, which emphasises the generative power of law through narrative. Next, I will examine Seyla Benhabib’s appropriation of this idea to analyse the tension between nation-state sovereignty and human rights. As far as I know, there was no direct dialogue between Cover and Bhabha; however, I find that Cover offers a compelling example of the interaction between law and narrative, highlighting the productive and creative nature of their convergence. Benhabib, in contrast, is influenced by Cover and references Bhabha in her work, particularly on the subject of nationalism (Benhabib, 1997). I consider her approach valuable here as it offers a perspective on how human rights can address marginalisation in democratic participation. Finally, I will synthesise these contributions with the earlier discussion to offer a more comprehensive interpretation of the right to narrate. My goal is to demonstrate how this right fits within a cosmopolitan framework that addresses the divide between formal national membership and actual democratic participation, underscoring the critical role of human rights in fostering political agency for marginalised groups.

In Robert Cover’s (1983) essay ‘Nomos and Narrative’, narrative is a code that binds the social ‘nomos’ – that is, the normative system that bounds a community – the social construction of reality as it is, and visions of what it should or could be. From this entanglement emerges the issue of the ‘meaning of law’. The normative universe is held together by interpretive commitment to the extent that there may be two identical legal orders that may differ in meaning. There is not, Cover argues, a set of legal institutions independent of a narrative: ‘for each constitution there is an epic’ (Cover, 1983: 4). Cover distinguishes two ideal-typical models of nomos: on the one hand, there is a ‘world-creating’ law, on the other hand, there is a ‘world-maintaining’ law. In the first case, we have a corpus of precepts and narratives, a path of education to, and a sense of community based on internalisation and expectation of normative implications. In the second case, differently, we have norms dictated and embodied by social institutions, the absence of a well-defined process of education (since the norms are already in place and coercively guaranteed), and minimum interpersonal obligations based on thin ethical assumptions. The former aims to produce and reproduce a social universe; the latter aims to maintain a social order.

Therefore, law can be seen as a ‘bridge’ connecting a concept of reality to a possible alternative; sometimes employed to stabilise the constituted reality, other times employed to transform it. What makes law part of the dialectical movement between conservation and transformation is its generative power. Not only does the law define norms, but it also opens spaces for new normative production. As Cover shows, this is the case with the first amendment of United States constitution, that protects the freedom of religion. In the example he makes, we read about the clash between Amish communities and constitutional norms, in which the community accepts the norms and, due to this, asserts its right to establish its own distinct and separate nomos. In this situation, insofar as it becomes the constitutive act of a space of freedom which is occupied by a specific nomos, the constitutional norm has ‘jurisgenerative’ consequences. The same thing happens when property law or corporation law encounters other narratives of autonomy and separateness.

Cover’s concept of ‘jurisgenesis’ is an essential component of Benhabib’s (2008) claims in ‘The Philosophical Foundation of Cosmopolitan Norms’. In her essay, she reflects on the paradoxical position of nation-states in relation to the supranational legal context. Insofar supranational norms (like human rights) constrain the institutions, the laws, and the exercise of power of states, they also limit state’s sovereignty. However, in the international space, the political entities that actually determine how much of the principles contained in human rights are respected and promoted are mainly the nation-states themselves. Moreover, in addition to this external paradox, given by the co-presence of the cosmopolitan tension between the supranational principles expressed in human rights and state jurisdictions, there is also an internal paradox given by the discrepancy between ‘territorial sovereignty and democratic voices’ (Benhabib, 2008: 35).

There is never full correspondence in a democratic context, Benhabib argues, between those who are full members of the civic body which should be both the subject and object of sovereignty, and those who fall within the sphere of authority of the state but do not enjoy the rights of full members. For Benhabib, the exclusion of the latter is realised in two ways: either through the status of ‘second-class citizen’, who for cultural, religious, and family reasons is recognised as part of the nation but not part of the demos, or through the status of ‘foreigner’, who are not part of either the demos or the nation. Both second-class citizens and foreigners are subject to state power but do not fully participate in political life. In other words, in contradiction to the meaning that democracies assign themselves, both are subject to a power over which they have no control.

In the interstices of this double structural fracture of democracies the opportunities for political transformation lie. These can be found in the transversal space of the sub-national, national, or supra-national dimensions. Benhabib explains how this is possible through two concepts: ‘democratic iterations’ and ‘jurisgenerative politics’. The former, on the one hand, takes up Derrida’s concept of ‘iteration’, by which we mean a repetition that is not identical to the original but that at every moment in which it is implemented adds something new or produces a variation (Derrida, 1988). ‘Jusgenerative politics’ refers to the ability of norms to open up additional normative niches. Robert Cover, who coined this term, takes the constitutional right of religious freedom as an example. With this right, a religious community living in a constitutional state has the ability to define and submit to its own normative order. In this sense, law – or in the case discussed here human rights – is always generative.

Acting as a normative expression propaedeutic to the rights of the citizen, human rights can be understood as universal cosmopolitan rights (Petrucciani, 2020). Therefore, they represent a reference for all those who are not full members of the demos in a given context: ‘from the moment when the rights of man are posited as the ultimate reference, the established right is open to question’ (Lefort, 1986: 258). Human/cosmopolitan rights inhabit the discrepancy between demos and nation as they allow excluded individuals or groups (in the subnational space) to produce, through a process of democratic iteration, an innovative appropriation of such human/cosmopolitan rights (from the supranational space), in order to claim their place in the demos (part of the national space). This initiates a jurisgenerative process of political transformations. As Eduardo Mendieta summarises in discussing Benhabib’s thesis, ‘individuals, bearers of cosmopolitan rights, can challenge the limits of their own nations from within, catalyzing processes of self-definition and juridical-political transformation’ (Mendieta, 2009, 254).

However, the process of translation or appropriation of human rights is not even. Since the 1980s, human rights have become the primary reference for social justice, yet to fully grasp their transformative potential, an ethnographic study of the transnational flows of global law is required. This is what turns out from the work of Sally Engle Merry (2007), which claims that the main problem for what concern human rights enforcement lies in the gap between the institutional context where human rights are formulated and the social and cultural contexts in which they are applied. In her ethnographic investigation, Merry examines how women’s rights activists in local communities reinterpret human rights principles in ways that resonate with their cultural and social realities. From this, she discusses how human rights – grounded on assumptions of individual autonomy, equity, and secularism – may overshadow emancipatory visions and practice of justice that not fit in Western worldview. To mitigate this, Merry advocates for an anti-essentialist understanding of culture.

This example is paradigmatic of the circumstances that render the right to narrate relevant. The problem of friction between international law and human rights on one hand, and local political claims on the other, is not merely a matter of cultural conflict between the global and the local, or between the West and its ‘others’. Rather, on a cultural level, the emerging issue concerns the rejection of essentialism as an assumption. If collective existence, the relationship with time, memory, and identity depends on narrative activities that are continuously at work – and if law is always related to broader universes of meaning – then overlapping normative spaces cannot be unified through a binary translation capable of producing equivalences between inputs and outputs. In other words, the difficulty does not lie in finding a balance between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the practices of a given culture, but in opening up a space for negotiation based on the very narrative work that shapes and reproduces cultural belonging over time.

Elaborating its own anti-essentialist reading of cultural difference, Bhabha extends the idea of human rights translation by introducing the concept of the ‘right to narrate’. In ‘Democracy De-realized’, he provides the following definition:

I use the term ‘the right to narrate’ to signify an act of communication through which the recounting of themes, histories and records is part of a process that reveals the transformation of human agency. What I mean by narration is close to Hannah Arendt’s account of the agent-revealing capacity of action and speech: ‘Action and speech go on between human beings, as they are directed toward them, and they reveal their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively “objective”, concerned with the matters of the world of things’. Thus narrative as communicative, performative action is concerned with what lies between people, ‘something which inter-ests, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together’. (Bhabha, 2003a: 34) ³

He then proceeds with a series of descriptive oppositions: the right to narrate is not an individual liberal right, but rather a collective or communal right; it is not only a legal and procedural matter, but also a matter of aesthetic and ethical form; it is not an expressive right (like freedom of expression), but rather an enunciative right. With this right, a group can claim its right ‘to mean and to be interpreted, to speak and to be heard, to make a sign and to know that it will receive respectful attention’ (Bhabha, 2003a: 34). Let us analyse these characteristics.

First, the right to narrate is not simply a right that a person is entitled to. Instead, it covers the lag given by the process of signification that intervenes between the actual flow of events and the collective meaningful experience. The ‘lag’ means that we cannot enforce rights through their transparent entitlement. As Rahul Rao argued, much of liberal cosmopolitanism, which sought to develop an international normative framework, has been constrained by an excessive focus on the form of norms rather than their conditions of enforcement (Rao, 2013). Idealising the supranational sphere while neglecting contextual factors, this approach has fostered interventionist narratives based on a spatial juxtaposition of a safe international space acting on dysfunctional states (Orford, 2003). Opposing this nested view, the right to narrate assumes that any level of collective affiliation relies on discrepant, irregular, inconstant processes of identity formation. In so doing, it aims to safeguard the ability of communities to question the universe of meaning they dwell. This means protecting their faculty to accept, reinterpret, renew, or even reject domestic and international norms.

Second, the aesthetic and ethical dimension of the right to narrate highlights its connection to lived experience. As discussed earlier, the idea of narrative that Bhabha borrows from Benjamin and Arendt is about the creation of a collective world. The term ‘aesthetic’ should be understood in a dual sense: both as the perception of the world and as the product of creative expression. The right to narrate is aesthetic and non-procedural because it is not a legal norm; rather, it rests on the hiatus between the pedagogical moment of community building and the ‘performative nature of culture communication’ (Bhabha, 2004b: 228). These two concepts are introduced by Bhabha to explain the double face of national belonging. The first corresponds to the effort to preserve the unity of the nation through the continuity of a narrative that is transmitted by educational institutions through the teaching of history and literature. The second concerns the way in which one’s cultural identity can be creatively enacted to the point of bringing out the contrived nature of national narratives. The right to narrate intervenes by pausing the naturalness of belonging and recognising the creative value of collective experience.

Third, the right to narrate differs from expressive rights like freedom of expression because it focuses on enunciation. While expressive rights emphasise personal autonomy and freedom to voice opinions, the right to narrate is about how stories and experiences are shared, interpreted, and understood within a community. Echoing Sen’s (2009) theory of justice, Bhabha points out that tensions towards justice, emancipation, and equity do not arise from ‘the overbearing “letter” of the Law’; instead,

anger against injustice; the anxiety of oppression; humiliations caused by discrimination and deprivation; the trauma that never sleeps in the wake of violence – these are the political passions of the via negativa that set us on the hard road to normative politics and its horizon of political virtues. (Bhabha, 2003b: 166)

Political mobilisation has a negative ground to the extent that it arises from unjust conditions. However, structural unjust conditions as well as mere feelings of oppression are not enough to foster political changes. Only by bringing out through narrative ‘the human and historical raw materials that haunt norms of rights and recognition’, human rights can relate to specific issues and materialise in space and time. This is why the enunciative moment is needed.

In other words, human rights norms, divorced from the narratives that give them meaning, risk becoming inert abstractions. The right to narrate operationalises these norms by enabling marginalised groups to embed them within their own cultural and historical frameworks. Without this enunciative act – this jurisgenerative labour of translation – human rights cannot transcend their Western-centric origins or address the asymmetrical power dynamics that shape their application.

Conclusion

We can now combine the following elements to complete Bhabha’s framing of the right to narrate. First, drawing on Arendt and especially Benjamin we should rely on a conception of history hinged on the idea of irregular, plural, and unsettled time. Second, according to Benjamin, we should conceive narrative as a public and collective activity that contributes to building the identity of a human group or a culture in the form of collective memory. Third, according to Arendt, narrative on the one hand makes the past cohesive and intelligible, and on the other determines how a community takes responsibility for its past. For her, narrative is linked to experience and agency, so it constitutes the collective dimension within which individual experiences and actions can arise. In the latter sense it represents a political dimension. Fourth, with Cover and Benhabib we see that law is not only an institutional sphere of production and application of norms. Rather, it is always grounded in a narrative context that gives it meaning. Different meanings generate different outcomes. This implies that the law always has a generative power that goes beyond the specific scope to which it is addressed. Therefore, law no longer depends exclusively on abstract codification and local application; rather, the human capacity to shape its collectivity comes into play.

We can start from this conception to highlight the shortcomings in addressing pressing contemporary issues such as migration and multiculturalism. Western societies, although historically connected with other people and places because of colonial history, have become increasingly pluralistic and differentiated in the last decades. As Baban and Rygiel (2014) argue, both assimilationist and liberal multiculturalist approaches failed to address the deeper political and legal struggles of marginalised groups. While assimilationism demands full cultural integration into the dominant national identity, multiculturalism allows for cultural differences only within the procedural and legal framework of the liberal-democratic state. However, the authors argue that both approaches fall short. While assimilationism does not acknowledge the role of cultural belonging for people’s identity and personal development, multiculturalism misrepresents the hierarchical asymmetries between cultural groups that may be formal but not substantially equal in society. Moreover, policies based on those strategies fostered hostility towards migrants, and far-right nationalism grew.

The right to narrate is situated within these considerations. It is not about inclusion in already constituted spaces of citizenship, it does not rest on the principles of multiculturalism or pluralism, just as it is not exhausted in the politics of recognition or identity. Rather, in a sort of consonance with Arendt’s ‘the right to have rights’, it can be thought of as a propaedeutic right to exercise human agency in order to produce a ‘common world’ and with this a public and political space where the enjoyment of other rights is made possible. The main claim is the need to reinterpret social norms, to innovatively appropriate law, and to attribute different meanings to collective life based on narratives other than the dominant ones.

We can think of several real-world situations where such exercise of human agency is at play. For example, against assimilationism and multiculturalism, Baban and Rygiel provide ‘snapshots’ of narrative reinventions of belonging by third-generation German-Turkish individuals. Through various artistic means, they seek to represent their unsettled identities, shaped by the transnational space of their dual heritage. Also, I already mentioned Merry’s ethnographic studies, where she examines how women’s rights activists in local communities reinterpret human rights principles in ways that resonate with their cultural and social realities. For instance, in parts of South and Southeast Asia, activists working to combat gender-based violence do not simply adopt Western human rights frameworks wholesale. Instead, they engage in a process of translation, embedding human rights discourse into indigenous cultural narratives to make them more persuasive and legitimate. Finally, another case is La Gran Marcha, the 2006 U.S. immigration reform protests. As Anne McNevin (2011) discusses, irregular migrants do not simply seek legal inclusion but engage in political practices that challenge conventional understandings of citizenship, belonging, and national identity. In response to the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437), which sought to criminalise undocumented immigrants and those assisting them, millions of migrants and their allies staged a nationwide protest. The ‘Day Without Immigrants’ boycott was not just a demonstration but a performative intervention – a way of re-signifying national belonging through collective action.

These practices and mobilisations are not claims of individual rights asserted by abstract subjects. They are communal in the sense I mentioned earlier: they aim to challenge the collective belonging of the subjects involved. These actions are inherently aesthetic, as they involve artistic and literary representation (German-Turks), cultural translation (Southeast Asian activists), and embodied presence in public spaces (La Gran Marcha). Drawing on different connotations of the term ‘aesthetic’, these actions evoke the ability ‘to mean and to be interpreted, to speak and to be heard’ that Bhabha speaks of. Moreover, they are enunciative in the sense that they emerge ‘via negativa’ from below, articulating political claims based on specific histories, contexts of marginalisation, or dynamics of misrecognition.

Defending these levels of human agency, the right to narrate is not merely one right among others; it is the precondition for any meaningful engagement with human rights. By contesting dominant narratives and asserting alternative histories, marginalised groups create the discursive and political conditions necessary to claim rights on their own terms. Human rights, in this sense, are not universal guarantees but fragile achievements, always contingent on the struggles of narration that precede and sustain them.