Testimonial cultures: An introduction

Abstract

The desire to testify now pervades contemporary culture. The imperative to speak out and to tell one's story operates across the traditional boundaries of public and private spaces, and is mobilised by disenfranchised subjects and celebrities alike. These testimonial forms are evident both in popular culture, such as talk shows and confessional television more generally, and in mainstream politics, as demonstrated by the confessions of public figures, such as the late Princess Diana or President Clinton. Such imperatives have reshaped autobiography, confession and remembrance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, producing new testimonial forms, be they visual, artefactual, spoken, written or even bodily. These numerous testimonies bring with them new obligations of witnessing; readers, viewers, spectators, consumers are all required to become witnesses as they participate in different cultural forms. The demand to match the testimonial moment with the appropriate witness response may produce ambivalent and conflicted reactions: sympathy, terror, relief, recognition, empathy, anger, resentment, denial and disbelief. We have become witnesses to the testimonial projects of survivors of rape and child sexual abuse, cancer and AIDS, racist and homophobic attacks, war and torture, as well as to the atrocities of slavery, the Holocaust and apartheid. Thus, accounts of traumas of exceptional violence and of historical injustice proliferate alongside stories of everyday discrimination or misdemeanour. To some extent, this proliferation of testimonial forms involves an extension of the legal domain into other realms of politics and culture. Testifying to historical injustice since the Holocaust has radically transformed our very notion of politics and its relationship to both truth and justice. The United Nations and its concept of 'human rights' is bound up with the duty to report rights abuses everywhere and anywhere: to both bear witness and to speak, and indeed to close the gap between witnessing and speech. Notions of 'justice' have become bound up with witnessing, testifying and truth telling, whether it is in the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' in South Africa, in the report