Witness Literature

This book is the first critical monograph to explore the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South. Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and the UK. Drawing on the intersecting fields of literary analysis, biopolitics, testimony studies, trauma theory and postcolonial studies, this book examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma.Ambitious in cultural and conceptual reach, Witness Literature invokes a wide range of texts from within the nations studied and from diasporic writers. These include: eye witness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodia''s Killing Fields; memoirs and autobiographies like Francois Bizot''s The Gate, Loung Ung''s First They Killed My Father and Ajith Boyagoda''s re-told memoir, A Long Watch; Sanam Maher''s biography of the internet star Qandeel Baloch that exposes the truth technologies of the media; pseudonymous work that reconfigures the authorising identity of the witness; novels by diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Vaddey Ratner, Madeleine Thien and Anuk Arudpragasam ; the posthumously published editorial of an assassinated journalist who anticipated his death ; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events including Shehan Karunatilaka''s phantasmagoric novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida ; and such works as Elif Shafak''s Honour , Salman Rushdie''s Shame and Shalimar the Clown. Offering a compelling and surprising analysis of the representation of life under the threat, Minoli Salgado exposes how the mixed cultural allegiances of the border witness mark a double agency that challenges multiple orthodoxies and shows how testimonial work from the Global South maps new moral communities by opening up alternative ways of reading truth, subjectivity, healing and justice.>...

Préface
The first study to explore witness literature from the Global South as it is presented across fiction, nonfiction, memoir and survivor testimony.

Auteur
Minoli Salgado is Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her previous publications include the critical monograph, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2006), the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014) and a book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka's Disappeared (2022).

Texte du rabat

A study of the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony, this book examines writing from the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence. Drawing on literary analysis, biopolitics, border aesthetics and testimony studies, this book examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; it takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an intervention in Western readings of trauma"- Provided by publisher.

Contenu

Introduction: Witness Literature - Politics, Poetics, Ethics
Bearing Witness, Distant Others
Migrant Poetics: Border Witnessing and Double Agency
Witness Literature, Contested Truths

Part One: Memorialising the Cambodian Genocide
I The unnamed dead
II Through the gate with Francois Bizot
III Border controls: the witness and the archive
The New World of Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields
IV The open time of trauma: Loung Ung and Chanrithy Him
V Imaginary witnesses: Madeleine Thien and Vaddey Ratner

Part Two: Sri Lanka's 'War Without Witness'
I Bringing hidden things to light
II Life writing
Authenticating autobiographies: Shobasakthi and Niromi De Soyza
III Memoried truths
Affect and the interhuman: Ajith Boyagoda and Anuk Arudpragasam
IV Magical thinking: Michael Ondaatje's 'long distance gaze'
V Spectral truths
Prosopopoeia and prophecy: Saktirani and Lasantha Wickrematunge
Shehan Karunatilaka's chats with the dead

Part Three: Honour and the Shame of Unbelonging
I Public secrets
False witness: a brief note
Transgressive witnessing
II The public and private faces of honour-based violence: Sanam Maher and Lene Wold
III Migrancy and the borders of belonging: Nadeem Aslam and Elif Shafak
IV Salman Rushdie's rhetoric of protest