{"title":"BEARING WITNESS TO TRAUMATIC MEMORY","authors":"Mengzhu Xia","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046377","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtual witness is actualized through time travel. Ken Liu’s writing contributes a documentary narrative of the witnessing of witnessing that extends the temporal dimension of witness and allows the flow between fictive and factual. This thought experiment posits a perspective into the interweaving acts and performances of witnessing to etch the ethics in witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, particularly in the global context. I argue that Liu’s novella uncovers the ethical relational witnessing in which “prosthetic memory” is produced and that affects postmemorial and the implicated subjects. The virtual reality witnessing bestows a strong agency upon witnesses while yet ethical concerns arise. Liu’s writing shows that witness and testimony both steer the path to shared memory in a possibly ethical way when channelled through moral emotions; virtual reality witnessing generates the private contact with historical experiences rather than one’s lived experiences. Thus, I identify the ethical stakes and possible settlements in witness and testimony when they are taken as continuing, relational acts, and as performances of emotional, sensuous experience, when witnessing and remembering become politicized and instrumentalized. Firstly, witnessing is problematized and debated particularly in terms of the perpetrator’s testimony. I argue that the perpetrator’s testimony can transfer trauma into collective remembering rather than individual redemption. On the debate over negative emotions in witnessing, I argue that through negative moral emotions ethical witnessing and its testimony are motivated, though they are often evaded or appropriated. Further, I demonstrate that empathetic witnessing is indicated in Liu’s writing, by negotiating the sensitivity in witness and testimony with an evaluative distance from the past. Liu’s empathetic narrative is founded on his investigation of historical trauma and his meditation on structural trauma.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2046377","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtual witness is actualized through time travel. Ken Liu’s writing contributes a documentary narrative of the witnessing of witnessing that extends the temporal dimension of witness and allows the flow between fictive and factual. This thought experiment posits a perspective into the interweaving acts and performances of witnessing to etch the ethics in witnessing and testimony of traumatic events, particularly in the global context. I argue that Liu’s novella uncovers the ethical relational witnessing in which “prosthetic memory” is produced and that affects postmemorial and the implicated subjects. The virtual reality witnessing bestows a strong agency upon witnesses while yet ethical concerns arise. Liu’s writing shows that witness and testimony both steer the path to shared memory in a possibly ethical way when channelled through moral emotions; virtual reality witnessing generates the private contact with historical experiences rather than one’s lived experiences. Thus, I identify the ethical stakes and possible settlements in witness and testimony when they are taken as continuing, relational acts, and as performances of emotional, sensuous experience, when witnessing and remembering become politicized and instrumentalized. Firstly, witnessing is problematized and debated particularly in terms of the perpetrator’s testimony. I argue that the perpetrator’s testimony can transfer trauma into collective remembering rather than individual redemption. On the debate over negative emotions in witnessing, I argue that through negative moral emotions ethical witnessing and its testimony are motivated, though they are often evaded or appropriated. Further, I demonstrate that empathetic witnessing is indicated in Liu’s writing, by negotiating the sensitivity in witness and testimony with an evaluative distance from the past. Liu’s empathetic narrative is founded on his investigation of historical trauma and his meditation on structural trauma.
期刊介绍:
Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities was established in September 1993 to provide an international forum for vanguard work in the theoretical humanities. In itself a contentious category, "theoretical humanities" represents the productive nexus of work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The journal is dedicated to the refreshing of intellectual coordinates, and to the challenging and vivifying process of re-thinking. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities encourages a critical engagement with theory in terms of disciplinary development and intellectual and political usefulness, the inquiry into and articulation of culture.