(Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures) Gillian Whitlock-Postcolonial Life Narrative - Testimonial Transactions-Oxford University Press (2015)

OX FO R D S T U D I E S I N P O S TCO LO N I A L L I T E R AT U R E S
The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures aim to offer stimulating

and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and
regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary
studies in English.
Under the general editorship of Elleke Boehmer, the Studies in
each case elucidate and explicate the informing contexts of post-
colonial texts, and plot the historical and cultural co-ordinates of
writers and of leading movements, institutions, and cultural debates
within those contexts. Individual volumes reflect in particular on
the shaping effect of both international theory and of local politics
on postcolonial traditions often viewed as uniformly cross-cultural,
and also on the influence of postcolonial writing on the protocols of
international theory. Throughout, the focus is on how texts formally
engage with the legacies of imperial and anti-imperial history.
O X F O R D S T U D I E S I N P O S T C O L O N I A L L I T E R AT U R E S
General Editor: Elleke Boehmer
The Indian English Novel

Priyamvada Gopal
Australian Literature
Graham Huggan
Pacific Islands Writing

Michelle Keown
West African Literatures

Stephanie Newell
Postcolonial Poetry in English

Rajeev S. Patke
OX FO R D S T U D I E S I N P O S TCO LO N I A L L I T E R AT U R E S
G E N E R A L E DITOR : E L L EK E B OEH M ER
POSTCOLONIAL LIFE
NARRATIVES
Testimonial Transactions
Gillian Whitlock
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Gillian Whitlock 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955276
ISBN 978–0–19–956063–9 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–956062–2 (pbk.)
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy
Cover image: © Photodisc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
AC K N OW L ED G E M E N TS
This book was supported by a Discovery grant from the Australian

Research Council, additional support from the University of
Queensland, a fellowship from the Humanities Research Centre at
the Australian National University, and a visiting fellowship at the
Life Narrative Centre of King’s College London.
The enthusiasm and support of Elleke Boehmer, the general editor
of this series and a key reader, has been vital throughout this pro-
ject. This book was inspired by Stephanie Newell’s first volume in
the series, on West African literatures, and encouraged by Graham
Huggan’s earlier volume in the series as well as his reading of drafts of
this one. The scholarship and friendship of Leigh Gilmore, Rosanne
Kennedy, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson have shaped this book
throughout. My colleagues at the University of Queensland encour-
aged this project in many ways, and particular thanks to Francis
Bonner and Jason Jacobs, who inaugurated a course on adaptation
that focused my thinking on how texts move. The AustLit team at
the University of Queensland were instrumental in mapping indig-
enous literature in transit. Others whose work and encouragement
are imprinted throughout include Anne Brewster, Diana Brydon,
Kylie Cardell, David Carter, Deirdre Coleman, Vilashini Cooppan,
Robert Dixon, Dorothy Driver, Kate Douglas, Margery Fee, Mark
Finnane, Debjani Ganguly, Leili Golafshani, Anna Haebich, Joan
Holloway, Craig Howes, Anna Poletti, Margaretta Jolly, Rosemary
Jolly, Sue Kossew, Ashok Mathur, Sarah Nuttall, Roger Osborne,
Hano Pipic, Julie Rak, Kay Schaffer, and Sue Thomas. Special thanks
to Bart Moore-Gilbert for encouraging conversations on connect-
ing ‘postcolonialism’ to ‘autobiography’, and to Carmen Keates and
Chris Tiffin for research assistance.
More expansively these chapters have been informed by discus-
sions and feedback from a number of conferences and seminars
vi • Acknowledgements
where I have presented my thinking on postcolonial life narra-

tive. These include the International Biography and Autobiography
Association conferences in Hawaii, Sussex and Canberra, the
Autobiography in the Americas conference at Puerto Rico, Scenes
of Reading at the University of Sydney, the AULLA Worldmaking
congress at the University of Queensland, Life Writing and Human
Rights at Kingston University, London and Literature in a Global
Age at the Humanities Research Centre of the ANU.
A version of chapter 3 was published in Biography and earlier
thinking on the transits of My Place appeared in Robert Dixon and
Brigid Rooney, eds., Scenes of Reading. My thanks for permission to
reprint.
Thanks as always to Sam and Annika, and to Leo, Ari, Tia, and
Teo. Above all to Gerry, who makes it possible for me to think and
write about contiguous lives.
CO N TE N TS
Introduction 1
Part 1 Colonial Testimonial, 1789–1852
1. Olaudah Equiano and Watkin Tench, London, 1789 15
2. Bennelong’s Letter, Sydney Cove, 29 August 1796 27
3. Saartjie Baartman, St James Square, London,
27 November 1810 35
4. The History of Mary Prince, Claremont Square,
London, 1831 44
5. Roughing It in the Bush, Upper Canada, 1832–52 51
6. The Life, History, and Travels, of
Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh, 1847 58
7. Proximate Reading 65
Part 2 The Passages of Testimony: Contemporary Studies
8. Afterlives: In the Wake of the TRC 75
9. Remediation: Rape Warfare and Humanitarian
Storytelling 107
10. Thresholds of Testimony: Indigeneity, Nation,
and Narration 136
11. The Ends of Testimony 168
Salvage 201
Bibliography 205
Index 231
Introduction
Fanon’s struggle to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the human—

even when he knew that European imperialism had reduced that idea
to the figure of the settler–colonial white man—is now itself part of
the global heritage of all postcolonial thinkers.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, 5)
This book draws together postcolonialism and life writing, to mark out
a field of postcolonial life writing. It follows life narratives on the move,
beginning in Part 1 with slave narratives, letters, memoirs, journals,
and biographies and then moving in Part 2 to a series of case studies of
contemporary testimonial narrative from Africa, Canada, Australia,
the Caribbean, and India. The focus on testimonial transactions
shapes the postcolonial history and cultural dynamics that are mobi-
lized here: moving beyond nation and narration to track transnational
and transcultural passages of life narrative, its volatile currency and
value, and its changing technologies of the self. Frantz Fanon is one
of postcolonialism’s most controversial anti-imperial activists, and his
thinking on human being here introduces a key theme of this book: the
making of the human in and through testimonial transactions.1
In his Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism Robert J. C. Young
argues that there is no single entity called ‘postcolonial theory’:
. . . much of postcolonial theory is not so much about static ideas or practices as

about the relations between ideas and practices: relations of harmony, relations
of conflict, generative relations between different peoples and their cultures.
Postcolonialism is about a changing world, a world that has been changed by
struggle and which its practitioners intend to change further. (2003, 7)
2 • Introduction
With this emphasis on struggle and social activism in mind,

Young shapes his small book using the technique of montage:
juxtaposing perspectives and times against one another, gener-
ating a creative set of relations between them. This approach to
postcolonialism is ref lected in the technique of proximate read-
ing that shapes this book, that draws life narratives into multiple
and changing relations, ‘a series of shorts that stage the contra-
dictions of the history of the present’ (Young, 8). Postcolonial
literary criticism is a comparative and engaged reading practice
that generates creative relations and a ssociations through trans-
actions of texts. Its classic moves—hybridizing, provincializing,
writing back, contrapuntal reading, métissage—actively create
intertextualities. In this book autobiographical narratives are
drawn together: through contiguity, co-location, chronology,
appropriation, and remediation to pursue an active engagement
with textual transactions and social activism: the politics of abo-
litionism, anti-apartheid, indigeneity, feminism, environmen-
talism, refugee rights, for example. We must, as Homi Bhabha
suggests, ‘go looking for the join’ (2010, 26): the ways that the
work of testimony is enjoined in other discursive frames. In
contemporary case studies, for example, the associations that
are set in train by the passages of postcolonial life writing map
textual cultures that extend far beyond their literary cultures of
origin. Testimonial cycles mobilized by the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission and the Inquiry into the Stolen
Generations in Australia create constellations of life writing that
transfer and resonate transnationally, following the routes of ur
texts. In these contemporary studies co-location and contiguity
produce ways of thinking about the limits of testimonial cul-
tures and social activism, for example on the subject of rape war-
fare, and representations of refugees and asylum seekers—those
humans who become ‘things’. The contexts and locations that
shape the ambit of these contemporary case studies are recog-
nizably in the contact zone of postcolonial theory—the legacies
of apartheid, slavery, indigenous dispossession, genocide, and
decolonization across second and third worlds.
The association of postcolonialism and life writing is a recent
development. Although ‘autobiography’ was widely used in liter-
ary criticism last century, it is now generally reserved for a literary
Introduction • 3
canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of self-

hood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western,
gendered male, and (as Chakrabarty’s epigraph suggests) racially
white. Traditional assumptions about autobiographical authorship
and authority prioritize authenticity, autonomy, self-realization,
and transcendence—western Enlightenment values that, as Linda
Anderson observes, associate autobiography with essentialist or
romantic notions of selfhood and the ‘sovereign subject’ of autobi-
ography as it was traditionally understood: ‘[a]‌ccording to this view,
generated at the end of the eighteenth century but still current in the
middle of the twentieth, each individual possesses a unified, unique
selfhood which is also the expression of a universal human nature’
(2001, 5).2 As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, implicit in
the canonization of a selective body of writing as ‘autobiography’
was an assumption that many other kinds of life writings produced
at the same time are of lesser value—for example the slave narra-
tives, women’s journals and diaries, letters, memoirs, biographies,
and travel narratives that populate Part 1 of this book, and that
return as literary heritage in contemporary postcolonial literatures,
recycled in new editions, appropriations, and remediations (2010, 3).
For postcolonial theory, the more expansive category ‘life writing’
is critical for de/colonizing the subject, as these are the ‘minor’ gen-
res that flourished in colonialism’s literary cultures. The traditional
sovereign subject of autobiography and the less exalted or collective
subject of life narrative are entangled in western modernity. These
are proximate subjects, and they complicate the origin myth of
‘autobiography’ in the European Enlightenment with a more hybrid
genealogy.3 Although I will sometimes use ‘autobiographical’ as an
adjective in this book, if it appears as a noun I am referring to a par-
ticular genre of life writing. In this, and in general, the usage of key
terms and concepts here draws on a series of reference books that
establish settings for the field of life writing, for example Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and
Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly’s
Encyclopedia of Life Writing, and Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial
Life-Writing, which introduces and maps the field in a wide-ranging
way.4 Key concepts in postcolonial theory and criticism draw on
the Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham
Huggan.
4 • Introduction
Late last century critical interventions under the broad rubric of

‘de/colonizing the subject’ drew on feminism and postcolonialism
to extend these conditions and limits of autobiography as a literary
genre, an intervention that produced the field now called postcolo-
nial ‘life writing’ or (with an interdisciplinary turn) ‘life narrative’.5
Reading across Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial net-
works, Françoise Lionnet argues for the importance of postcolonial
transculturation, métissage, and appropriation as critical concepts
in this de/colonization of autobiographical literature. The lines of
literary filiation and affiliation are as complex as the ‘bloodlines of
slave cultures’, she argues (1995, 42), beginning to map postcolonial
life narrative in terms of the experiences of the dispossessed and
the passages of testimonial literature in colonial modernity in a way
that suggests the settings for this book. It is, as Caren Kaplan argues,
testimony above all that requires new strategies of reading cultural
production as transnational (and intertextual) activity, for it thor-
oughly unsettles the terms and conditions of classical autobiogra-
phy (1992, 122).
There is then both an historical and a conceptual logic that places
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, the first British slave narra-
tive published in 1789, at the beginning of this book. It is not unusual
for literary histories of autobiography to commence in the late eight-
eenth century and western modernity. However, beginning with
Equiano continues this critical work of de/colonizing the subject of
autobiography, and establishing a postcolonial history of life writing
that recognizes the subjects of ‘colonial modernity’—that space and
time produced by the ‘new world’ encounters with Enlightenment
modernity. As Bart Moore-Gilbert points out in a striking example
of proximate reading, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of Equiano’s
contemporaries and his Confessions, widely celebrated as the first
modern autobiography, was published posthumously between 1782
and 1789. The historical proximity of Equiano and Rousseau, the
Interesting Narrative and the Confessions, the beginnings of life nar-
rative and autobiography, complicates a singular story of the ori-
gins (and pedigree) of autobiographical writing. Rousseau drew on
Enlightenment notions of individualism to celebrate ‘Myself alone .
. . I am not made like any other I have seen . . .’ (2008, 5). In the late
eighteenth century this canonical autobiographical text of western
modernity coexists alongside Equiano’s slave narrative, a testimonial
Introduction • 5
that speaks on behalf of a collective rather than the singular authori-

tative ‘I’. This also draws on Enlightenment humanism and its think-
ing on the ‘rights of man’ to make a claim for recognition and social
justice as a human being, rather than a commodity and a thing. The
coexistence of these very different autobiographical subjects and
texts triggers proximate reading, which is inspired by what Bhabha
calls the ‘join’. Part 1 of this book, ‘Colonial Testimonial’, begins with
a single year, 1789, when Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was first
published, the last volumes of Rousseau’s Confessions appeared, and
the first journals from the penal settlement at Botany Bay appealed
to the metropolitan readership. The proximity of these very different
life writings that begin this book introduces a methodology of post-
colonial reading that engages with literary filiation, colonial moder-
nity, and the ‘bloodlines of slave cultures’. These diverse legacies of
life writing in Enlightenment modernity begin the longue durée of
postcolonial life narrative that shapes the infrastructure of this book.
The concept of history as a durée here suggests the complex tem-
porality of past, present, and future in testimonial life writing, those
‘affective clusterings where history makes its mark’ (Cooppan 2013b,
104). It draws on Franco Moretti’s characterization of life cycles of
literary forms in terms of durée, cycles, and events.6 This longue durée
of life writing begins in colonial modernity, and the transformation
and transculturation of western modernity beyond Europe. For tes-
timonial narrative in particular, Enlightenment thinking on the
emotions—sympathy, pity, and compassion—and on the human—
humanism, humanitarianism, and human rights—produced new
possibilities for social activism. Testimonial ‘cycles’, on the other
hand, are more temporary structures associated with specific cam-
paigns and eras, finite flourishes ‘that last in time, but always only
for some time’, that exhaust their potential, and dissipate as their
form is ‘no longer capable of representing the most significant forms
of contemporary reality’ (Moretti 2005, 17). A series of testimonial
cultures are featured here, including slave narratives associated with
abolition and emancipation campaigns, South African Truth and
Reconciliation testimony and memoir, the emergent testimonial cul-
ture of Dalit activism, and Stolen Generations and Residential School
indigenous testimony in Canada and Australia. The present ‘tense’
of testimony, as Bhabha suggests, can have a transformative
force, but the agency of testimonial cultures is finite. A history of
6 • Introduction
postcolonial life writing is shaped by this ebb and flow of social

activism and resistance. The final phase in Moretti’s life cycles of
literary forms is the ‘event’—the most ephemeral and mercurial
life narrative, a ‘breathless rush’ that is tenuous and opportunistic,
where testimonies catalyse witness briefly. In this book the oppor-
tunism and tenuousness of the ‘event’ shapes essays on the falter-
ing of testimonial narrative on behalf of the vulnerable subjects of
rape warfare and insurgency in the DRC, and on representations
of asylum seekers and refugees, where social suffering also remains
unrecognized. David Farrier remarks on the scandalous absence
of the asylum seeker and refugee in postcolonial studies; this is, he
suggests, the new subaltern who initiates a step beyond postcolonial
discourse, producing new lines of engagement with deterritorialized
sovereignty (2011, 5).7 Here asylum seekers return the endings of this
book back to its beginnings, as affiliations between slavery and the
insidious violence of forced migration return to the ‘bloodlines’ of
postcolonial life narrative in colonial modernity.
This approach to postcolonial life narrative and its textual transac-
tions draws on a turn to textual cultures in postcolonialism (Huggan
2001, Brouillette 2007, Whitlock 2007, Fraser 2008) that insists on the
materiality of the text as an object, a commodity, and an artifact, and
it reads the ‘whole beast’ from snout to tail: cover to cover, peritext
and paratext. It is interested in the changing thresholds that shape
the ebb and flow of life narratives in specific markets or (increas-
ingly) media, and the transfer of texts through adaptation, appro-
priation, and remediation. The global commodification of alterity
creates opportunities for authors, publishers, readers, and critics.
However Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of the emo-
tions raises questions about the emotional and ethical investments
that are made in life narrative by metropolitan consumers. Rather
than associating emotions with individual psychological states,
Ahmed emphasizes the social and cultural work of the emotions as
they attach to different subjects, ideas, and values; emotions ‘produce
the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the
social to be delineated as if they are objects’ (2004, 10). Recent work
on the history of the emotions moves the emotions out of the private
and individual sphere and into collective and plural public spheres,
which Ahmed calls an ‘economy of affect’. Testimonial transactions
create intimate attachments through empathy and compassion, and
Introduction • 7
provoke shame and aversion; however, these are changing currencies

in this economy of affect, which are registered in the ebb and flow of
postcolonial life narratives.
Campaigns for social justice catalyse these passages of mov-
ing testimony. For example, Olaudah Equiano’s tactical appeal to
‘benevolence’, ‘suffering’, and ‘man’ evokes an ethics of witnessing
and sympathetic interestedness that became available for testi-
monial narrative in the late eighteenth century during the cam-
paigns for abolition and emancipation. Equiano uses the historical
and ideological shaping of this narrating ‘I’ to speak as a human
being. Although there is now significant critical work on the role
of the novel in the expansion of sympathy and the invention of
human rights that begins in the western Enlightenment the role of
autobiographical narrative and colonial modernity are also criti-
cal. The association of human rights and narrated lives is a legacy
of Enlightenment thinking, and the ‘bloodlines of slave cultures’.
The ethics of recognition that shape the testimonial contract and
position the reader as witness are legacies of western humanism
that are rigorously contested by postcolonial critique, for example
Frantz Fanon’s identification of the free, autonomous, and rational
subject of Enlightenment humanism with ‘the settler white man’.
Fanon makes this case in a powerful autobiographical account of
his encounter with racism in mainland France, Black Skin, White
Masks (1952). For postcolonialism, the human is a conflicted and
limited concept and autobiographical representations have the
power to represent the impact of this on specific bodies, lives,
and peoples. As Chakrabarty suggests in the epigraph to this
Introduction, Fanon’s response to this was to struggle to hold on
to the idea of the human, and to imagine a ‘new brand of human-
ism’ (Haddour 2006, viii) through postcolonial critique. The desire
to imagine ‘new’ humanisms that attempt ‘to reformulate it as a
non-conflictual concept, no longer defined against a sub-human
other’, is a postcolonial heritage (Young 1995, 125). This struggle
with humanism and its ethics of recognition drives canonical post-
colonial projects—such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, for example,
and Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, with its spe-
cific call for an ethical reading attentive to the encounter with the
other in testimonial discourse. Achille Mbembe questions ‘What
is postcolonial thinking?’ It is, he says, not a critique of the West per se
8 • Introduction
‘but of the effects of cruelty and blindness produced by a certain

conception—I’d call it colonial—of reason, of humanism, and of
universalism . . . it reveals how what passed for European human-
ism manifested itself in the colonies as duplicity, double-talk, and
a travesty of reality’ (2008, 1–2). In this book a series of ‘articulate
antagonists’—Benita Parry’s term for those who disrupt the dis-
courses of subjectivity available to them (2004, 22)—defy the con-
ditions and limits that are offered by the testimonial contract, its
humanitarian ethics of recognition, and the codification of human
rights.
‘Testimonies’, argues Young, are ‘from the people who are looking
at you as you read’ (2003, 8). He is right to suggest there is some-
thing dynamic and interactive about testimonial discourse, which is
generically rhetorical and dialogic: an appeal to an addressee, a text
in search of a witness, a desire to invoke witnessing publics. We speak
of bearing witness to indicate the weight of responsibility and affect
that follows this transfer. Testimony enables accounts of social injus-
tice and oppression, of violence and suffering:
The specific task of literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in that
belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative
capacity of perceiving history—what is happening to others—in one’s own
body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one’s own
immediate physical involvement. (Felman and Laub 1992, 108)
Literary testimonies are performative, rhetorical acts that ‘summon

and beseech us’ as readers. Shifting jurisdictions and global transits of
testimonial narrative record changing, historical thresholds of sub-
altern agency and dispossession. The contemporary case studies in
this book record the vicissitudes of cycles of testimony, and the tenu-
ous rush of a testimonial ‘event’. Subaltern subjects are not voiceless
and nor are they victims, however their visibility, legibility, and audi-
bility are tactical, contingent, and constrained. Equiano manages
the p roduction and dissemination of his Interesting Narrative with
great care, conscious of the vicissitudes of benevolence—as is the
Australian indigenous man Bennelong, whose ‘Letter’ is now anthol-
ogized as a testimonial artifact and foundation text of Australian lit-
erature. Mary Prince is an articulate antagonist who uses her History
tactically, always aware of what can be said to her addressee. In
Introduction • 9
contemporary testimonial literature this tradition of tactical engage-

ments in testimonial transactions continues. For example, in There
Was This Goat, the testimony of Mrs Notrose Nobomvu Konile, one
of the Gugulethu mothers who testified at the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission, remains inaudible and resistant to
‘speaking truth’ in reconciliation discourse and, like Zoë Wicomb
and Yazir Henry, she questions the privileges of enchanted witness.
In Dave Eggers’s biographical fiction What Is the What Valentino
Achak Deng negotiates to produce a fictional form of his testimony
that can engage with the exhaustion of the testimonial cycle gener-
ated by Lost Boys/Child Soldier narrative, where its witnessing pub-
lic is now enervated by compassion ‘fatigue’. Testimonial discourse
involves cross-cultural transactions that create intimate attachments
between those who testify and those who bear witness, and this is an
opportunity for dissent and contestation that is used by these ‘articu-
late antagonists’ across the longue durée of testimonial literature.8
There is an enduring concern that testimonial transactions repro-
duce the dynamics of colonization and dispossession, contributing
to what Rosemary Jolly calls ‘cultured violence’ (2010).9 For example
Saidiya Hartman points out that benevolence and declarations of
slave humanity often intensified the brutal exercise of power, and
reproduced scenes of subjection (1997, 3). The recognition mediated
through testimonial narrative is a fragile cross-cultural contract.
The ‘rights’ that are attached to those who testify in human rights
discourse, the emotional attachments created by benevolence and
humanitarianism, and the humane recognition bestowed through
empathic identification are privileges of the witness, susceptible to
what Elizabeth Povinelli calls ‘the cunning of recognition’ (2002),
and historically contingent. These can be withheld, or they can
disconnect—through aversion, disgust, shame, and compassion
‘fatigue’. Testimony can create a piercing and transformative ‘bear-
ing’ witness that triggers advocacy, responsibility, and account-
ability, which move the reader and produce collective ‘witnessing
publics’, but these are temporary and contingent collectives hailed
through rhetorical address, an active engagement and responsibility
that is subject to change (Torchin 2012, 14). Campaigns for abolition-
ism and emancipation produced opportunities for slave narrative to
make an intervention in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and late last-century discourses of truth and reconciliation triggered
10 • Introduction
testimonial cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Reading

across these testimonial cultures in this book reveals a postcolonial
literary history and tradition embedded in the ebb and flow of tes-
timonial cultures, their opportunism and agency, their limitations
and decline, their new lines of engagement in the colonial present.
Colonial modernity is strangely familiar to us now, in
what has been described as a new age of testimony when Olaudah
Equiano, Mary Prince, Saartjie Baartman, and Bennelong have
vivid afterlives in contemporary literature, and in culture more
generally. In choosing testimonial transactions as a way of navigat-
ing the history and traditions of postcolonial life writing I am not
introducing the field of postcolonial life narrative, or surveying its
canonical texts in this book, for this has been done admirably else-
where. What follows here draws on the theory, history, and heritage
of postcolonial criticism to suggest ways of reading life writing in
and through one of its most radical and conflicted forms: testimo-
nial narrative, and its engagement with the ethical, political, and
historical legacies of those ‘great world events’ fundamental to loca-
tions of culture: slavery, apartheid, dispossession, forced migration.
The location of testimony on the boundary of the human and the
non-human (the animal, the thing, the unborn, and the dead) and as
a discursive threshold that regulates and manages the distinctions
between them is a legacy of the Enlightenment and colonial moder-
nity. Testimony takes us to worlds where the boundaries of the civi-
lized and the strange are perpetually a work in progress, returning
repeatedly to that ‘global heritage’ of postcolonialism: the struggle
to imagine new humanisms and the possibilities for activism and
social change that follow.
Notes
1. See the General Introduction by Graham Huggan (2013b) for a discussion
of the controversy over Fanon and his legacy in postcolonial theory now.
2. For useful surveys of these traditions of autobiography criticism and the
departures instigated by feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructural-
ism, see Smith and Watson (1992, 2010), Stanley (1992), Nussbaum (1995),
Marcus (1999), Anderson (2001), and Al-Hassam Golley (2003).
3. ‘Colonial modernity’ is a term that recognizes the development of mul-
tiple and alternative modernities produced by the global and transcultural
Introduction • 11
dissemination and mediation of European modernity. See Ashcroft (2009)

for a discussion of postcolonialism and alternative modernities.
4. There are also several recent studies, for example Stef Craps’s
Postcolonial Witnessing (2013) on trauma narrative and the special issue
of Biography on ‘baleful postcoloniality’, edited by Salah D. Hassan and
David Álvarez (2013), that adopt a more specific approach to postcoloni-
alism and life narrative.
5. De/Colonizing the Subject is the title of a germinal collection of essays
edited by Smith and Watson (1992) that draws together a number of impor-
tant interventions in the field with a specific focus on the politics of gender.
6. Moretti is inspired by the historian Fernand Braudel here to develop
‘distant reading’, a way of reading across many texts in search of affilia-
tions and interconnections.
7. Farrier develops this argument more extensively in his co-authored arti-
cle with Patricia Tuitt in the Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies
(Farrier and Tuitt 2013).
8. ‘Articulate antagonists’ is used by Benita Parry to describe those who
disrupt colonial epistemologies, and construct their own self inscrip-
tions, drawing on non-western knowledges and traditions: ‘Since the
native woman is constructed within multiple social relationships and
positioned as the product of different caste, class and cultural specifi-
cities, it should be possible to locate traces and testimony of women’s
voice on those sites where women inscribed themselves as healers, ascet-
ics, singers of sacred songs, artisans and artists, and by this to modify
Spivak’s model of the silent subaltern’ (19–20).
9. In her discussion of ‘directions and ends’ in postcolonial studies Benita
Parry presents a trenchant critique of ‘revisionist’ representations of
colonialism as a process of transculturation in a contact zone. ‘If the
purpose is to construe colonialism as a complicated, overlapping and
entangled event, then this should not imply that its operations are to
be understood as necessarily conducted in an interstitial space’ (2004,
8). Parry is concerned that discourse analysis and its representations of
colonialism as transactional can rewrite an historical project of inva-
sion, exploitation, and expropriation as a symbiotic encounter, which
fails to attend to the ongoing violence of colonization (8–9).
10. For a more extensive discussion on the concept of recognition, see
Oliver’s Witnessing (2001) and Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics (2011).
Hesford in particular addresses spectatorship and how a human rights
imaginary shapes processes of legal and cultural recognition that create
witnessing publics through testimonial discourse.
Part 1
Colonial Testimonial,
1789–1852
1
Olaudah Equiano and Watkin
Tench, London, 1789
In the spring of 1789 two very different life narratives were published
in London. The first, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, is a slave
narrative, and Equiano is the first Anglophone writer of African
descent to assume the status of the autobiographical ‘I’. The second
is a memoir, a brief journal by Captain Watkin Tench: A Narrative
of the Expedition to Botany Bay, and the first eyewitness account of
the new penal settlement at Port Jackson, New South Wales. Tench’s
journal was rushed to press by Debrett’s of London and three edi-
tions, a chapbook version, and translations into French, Dutch, and
German appeared that same year. Tench, meanwhile, remained at
Port Jackson and began to write the second instalment, A Complete
Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, published in 1793. Equiano,
on the other hand, published his book by subscription, convincing
buyers to purchase copies prior to publication, and he worked hard to
promote and sell each edition and expand the list of subscribers until
his death in 1797. As the title page records, this was ‘Printed for, and
sold by the Author’, and he met with immediate success: there were
two editions in 1789, and more to follow.
By drawing these two life narratives together and comparing their
textual histories in that London spring of 1789, we read across life
narratives of slavery and penal settlement that circulated in close
proximity in the metropolis and across Europe. Tench and Equiano
are different subjects, and the historical, ideological, and cultural
authorization of these two autobiographical ‘I’s draw on vastly
16 • Postcolonial Life Narratives
different experiences and knowledges. However they have one thing

in common: their value. Each offered an autobiographical account
that gave witness to the previously unseen, and in turn each called
upon the reader to bear witness to unknown and scarcely imaginable
scenes from the ‘New World’. Equiano’s testimony is a first-person
account of suffering, including an account of the transatlantic voy-
age from Africa to slavery in the New World by an enslaved African
survivor. Equiano was not the first Afro-British writer—he was pre-
ceded by Ignatius Sancho and his friend and collaborator Quobna
Ottobah Cugoano—however, the market value of the Narrative and
its usefulness for the abolitionist movement depended on its unique
first-person account of the horrors of the Middle Passage. Tench
too offered an original eyewitness account, of a penal colony that
remained controversial in Britain. Both narratives brought remote
subjects close to home, they appealed to readers to bear witness to
experiences of slavery, colonization, and empire, and they provoked
moral debates about race, indigeneity, and indentured labour in the
management of remote colonial societies. Both draw on the episte-
mological prestige of the eyewitness and its authoritative experiential
knowledge that was a product of New World encounters in colonial
modernity.
Dynamics of testimony and witness that shape the beginnings of
postcolonial life writing are strangely familiar now. We too live at a
time when testimonial narrative is highly valued as a mode of bear-
ing witness to the suffering of distant strangers, and when ‘human
rights and narrated lives’ is a component of political activism and
consciousness raising.1 There is an affinity between the production
and reception of life narrative in colonial modernity and in the ‘age
of testimony’ now: the language of human rights, codified as an inter-
national discourse in the twentieth century, drew on a long tradition
of moral philosophy about the human, and ethical responsibility
for others.2 During the eighteenth century, in association with the
European Enlightenment and the rapid expansion of empire, there
was a change in sensibilities towards an awareness of the suffering of
other living things—both human and animal. This ‘Humanitarian
Revolution’ was associated with campaigns to ameliorate the suffer-
ing of those without social power: women, servants, children, slaves,
indigenous peoples, peasants, prisoners, animals. Its concerns seem
distinctively contemporary now: an ethical turn to recognition of
Olaudah Equiano and Watkin Tench • 17
distant strangers, debates about empathic engagement with others

and compassionate concern for their suffering, a turn to testimo-
nial narrative and bearing witness for those who testify on behalf
of others, an appeal to what we now call ‘rights discourse’. Concerns
about spectatorship, benevolence and pity, the ethics of spectator-
ship, and the making of the human in and through empathic witness
are central to an emerging ethics in the production and reception of
life narrative in colonial modernity. As Anna Laura Stoler remarks,
the distribution of compassion, sympathy, and pity—who had them
and to whom they were rightly directed—was pivotal to the work-
ing of imperial formations and the exacting exclusions and inequities
structured through the architecture of empire (2013, 54). Literature
played a major role in the development of sensibility in this humani-
tarian revolution: there was a rapid rise in literacy during this period,
and the role of the novel and poetry in the ‘invention of the human’ is
demonstrable (Slaughter 2007, Hunt 2007, Scarry 2012).
In the late eighteenth century, as now, there was a surge of auto-
biographical narrative that appealed to the beneficent virtues and an
ethics of empathic witness. Life writing of all kinds from colonial
spaces—memoirs by writers like Tench, eyewitness observers of colo-
nial cultures, and those who gave testimony to slavery and disposses-
sion, such as Equiano—created scenes of witness that actively elicited
recognition of unknown and unseen others, shaping lines of sight
that framed colonial spaces and peoples as bodies of evidence. But
the ‘imperial eye’ is uncertain, and spectatorship is an ethical and
philosophical practice that is subject to debate. In 1789 Tench and
Equiano not only brought so-called new worlds into view, their texts
also demanded a difficult and emotional engagement with them; in
effect they draw the modern reader as secondary witness into being.
They suggest how tenuous and ephemeral this connection with dis-
tant strangers mediated through testimonial narrative can be. When
Tench’s Complete Account was published just a few years later, the
taste for accounts of the penal colony in the Pacific had diminished.
Similarly Equiano’s narrative remained hostage to the fortunes of the
abolitionist movement and public opinion in Britain in the decade
that followed.
Both the Interesting Narrative and Narrative of the Expedition to
Botany Bay invite approaches to life narrative that examine textual
cultures in an empirical and material way. Reading these narratives
together emphasizes that the authority to write and give an account

of oneself that will be recognized as truthful is a hard-won privi-
lege that requires careful negotiation. This is particularly so when
life narrative will offer evidence of the lives of people who do not
speak on their own behalf. By following the ebb and flow of testimo-
nial narratives—how and when they cluster, elicit witness, are traded
and accrue value as commodities, or are depleted and discarded—we
see their changing value in an uncertain ‘economy of affect’ (Ahmed
2004) which attaches compassion (or aversion) to some bodies and
not others. Their currency is generated in the uncertain market of
testimonial transactions.
The colonized engage in this economy tactically. In one of the
many epigraphs that precede the later editions of his Narrative,
Equiano includes the letter penned at Grosvenor Street, London
on 14 May 1792 to the Parliament of Great Britain. In the letter he
presents his autobiography with the ‘greatest deference and respect’
and with the ‘chief design’ of exciting ‘a sense of compassion for
the miseries which the Slave Trade has entailed on my unfortunate
countrymen’:
I am sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so

devoid of literary merit; but, as the production of an unlettered African, who
is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his
suffering countrymen. I trust that such a man, pleading in such a cause, will
be acquitted of boldness and presumption.
May the god of Heaven inspire your hearts with peculiar benevolence on
that important day when the question of Abolition is to be discussed, when
thousands, in consequence of your determination, are to look for Happiness
or Misery! (2003, 7–8)
The framing of the Narrative indicates the co-production of an auto-

biographical self and a receptive spectator and witness in the course
of the abolition movement late in the eighteenth century. The dis-
tinctive shaping of humanitarian narrative, with its detailed and
elaborate descriptions of suffering and direct appeal to the benev-
olent spectator, relies on the personal body—not only as the locus
of suffering but also as the common bond between those who suf-
fer and those who would help, and the means of shaping a powerful
and causal connection between an evil, a victim, and a benefactor
who can ameliorate suffering (Laqueur 1989, 177). Equiano’s tactical
appeal to ‘benevolence’, ‘suffering’, and ‘man’ invokes an ethics of

witnessing and sympathetic interestedness that shapes an affective
relationship between those who testify and those who bear witness
to their suffering.
Ivan Kopytoff’s essay ‘The cultural biography of things’ (1986) helps
establish some settings for reading Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
and the functions of life narrative as a personalizing and humanizing
cultural practice that establishes status and identity. In contempo-
rary western thought, Kopytoff reminds us, we take it more or less for
granted that things—physical objects and rights to them—represent
the material universe of commodities. At the opposite pole we place
people, who are individualized and singularized. However, slavery
treats humans as objects, as commodities that are subjected to trade
and exchange. Slavery begins with capture or sale, when the person
becomes a commodity, and this begins an ongoing process of reso-
cialization into new social identities in the career of the slave; mar-
ginality and ambiguity of status are at the core of the slave’s social
identity, and the possibility of further exchange and commoditiza-
tion remains. Kopytoff’s biographical consideration of enslavement
establishes the terms for his cultural biography of things, however it
is a reminder of how from a cultural perspective biography is associ-
ated with individualization, and that singularity that sets the human
being apart from objects and things, and from the animal. To attach
an image (such as a portrait or photograph) or a ‘proper’ name or a
life story to the enslaved is to challenge their status as a non-person.
From this we can understand the importance of the presence (or
absence and change) of name, status, and image in slave narrative,
and how this is attached to that cultural understanding that sepa-
rates human beings from objects and things. In this way, auto/bio-
graphical representation has a critical role to play in attributing the
status of the human being to the enslaved and the dispossessed in
western thought, where distinctions between human and animal or
thing are constantly produced and policed.
The authority to speak of his experiences autobiographically, as a
narrating ‘I’, becomes available to Equiano in and through abolition-
ism in the late eighteenth century, and it is an opportunity he exploits
with skill. Every element of peritext that surrounds the Interesting
Narrative is tactical:3 the frontispiece includes a portrait of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (now reproduced on the
covers of almost all recent editions) that depicts Equiano in the

garb of the English gentleman—a significant individual, holding
the Bible open to Acts 4:12, gazing directly at the viewer.4 Both the
image and the name are hybrid and diasporic: British and African,
individual and representative—speaking of and for himself and on
behalf of others, and also staking a claim to a common humanity.5
The title page includes ‘Written by Himself’; this was not dictated to
an amanuensis, as was frequently the case with slave narratives. It is
also gendered: Equiano lays claim to freedoms available to African
men, and as his biographer emphasizes, within the hierarchical and
authoritarian order of the British navy, black men could achieve a
distinction unavailable in colonial and metropolitan society. Further
layers of peritext proliferated with each edition as Equiano retained
control of the copyright and engineered the terms of reception
amidst changing currents of metropolitan politics, and challenges to
his own veracity. For example the letter ‘To The Reader’ written in
Edinburgh in June 1792 discounts the ‘invidious falsehood’ that he
was born in the Danish island of Santa Cruz in the West Indies; there
are further numerous letters and petitions bound up with the text that
affirm its authenticity and truthfulness, followed by Equiano’s apolo-
getic remark in the eighth and ninth editions: ‘These letters, and the
Reviewers’ remarks would not have appeared in the Narrative, were
it not on the account of the false assertions of my enemies to prevent
its circulation’ (14). The inclusion of lists of subscribers recognizes
those who funded the first and subsequent editions (subscribers
numbered 894 in the ninth and last edition published in his lifetime).
These public endorsements of Equiano and his narrative, which are
carefully catalogued by location (Bristol, Hull, Norwich, Edinburgh,
and Dublin, among others), are a reminder of the political work of
the Interesting Narrative in Equiano’s lifetime, where the publication
and distribution of the text and his book tours were a ‘performative
manifesto’ that anchored a nationwide effort to convert sympathetic
readers into political actors in the campaign against slavery (Bugg
2006, 1426). A canny businessman and self-promoter, Equiano used
the networks of the abolition movement to secure patronage for his
book; in return he brought to the campaign its most compelling and
subjective account of the traffic in slaves. Peritexts are not incidental
to postcolonial life writing. They indicate that the power to tell a life
story is always subject to others. Copious and changing peritexts of
the Interesting Narrative are a legacy of the transactions that affect its
value as an authoritative account. In the case of Equiano, ‘authentic-
ity’ is not the same as veracity, or truthfulness to lived experience.
Recent debates about whether his claim to African origins and a
first-person memory of the Middle Passage are for rhetorical effect
testify to this. Possibly Equiano was born on a plantation in South
Carolina and heard accounts of the Middle Passage crossing in the
traumatic memory of slaves on plantations there.6 Through the slave
narrative and the abolitionist cause, a certain kind of black subjectiv-
ity became available to Equiano, who was obliged to present himself
to the British public in the image of a Christian gentleman.
Watkin Tench’s narrative seems very different. This is not a tes-
timony on behalf of suffering others. Ostensibly there is no need
to seduce a believing and compassionate reader. There is no pro-
liferation of peritext, no book tours to elicit a believing reader and
further subscribers. Tench is not at risk of becoming a commod-
ity, his status is secure. Nevertheless this journal also appeals to
the humanitarianism of the British public. In a brief ‘Introduction’
penned at Sydney Cove, New South Wales on 10 July 1788, and
writing in the third person, Tench introduces his ‘little tract to the
public’ for their ‘amusement and information’ with some concern.
Reading this alongside Equiano’s Interesting Narrative alerts us
to the tastes and opinions of the public sphere they both seek to
engage:
The expedition on which he is engaged has excited much curiosity and given
birth to many speculations respecting the consequences to arise from it.
While men continue to think freely, they will judge it variously. Some have
been sanguine enough to foresee the most beneficial effects to the parent
state from the Colony we are endeavouring to establish, and some have not
been wanting to pronounce the scheme big with folly, impolicy and ruin.
Which of these predictions will be completed I leave to the decision of the
public. I cannot, however, dismiss the subject without expressing a hope that
the candid and liberal of each opinion, induced by the humane and benevo-
lent intention in which it originated, will unite in waiting the result of a fair
trial to an experiment no less new in its design than difficult in its execution.
(2009, 15)
Both Tench and Equiano appeal to discourses of humanitari-

anism to bear witness, invoking a language of recognition and
benevolence that was a product of Enlightenment modernity.

However Tench, no less than Equiano, was aware of the risks of
devaluing his account by provoking aversion rather than compas-
sion, offering scenes of suffering in the colonies that could not
be accommodated in terms of humane and benevolent witness.
There is reasonable concern here, for Tench is an eyewitness in a
colony where transportation produced inhumane conditions that
degraded human beings and troubled the humanitarian ethics of
sympathy and recognition.
Tench’s Narrative and the subsequent Complete Account engage
with indigenous suffering and dispossession and the subaltern pres-
ence of 700 convict men, women, and children amongst the 1000
members of the First Fleet. Port Jackson was a radical colonial exper-
iment, a settler colony founded as a penitentiary. Although Tench
repeatedly testifies to the well-being of the prisoners, the dehumani-
zation of men, women, and children transported to Botany Bay as
indentured labour is evident. The Narrative includes not only assur-
ances of ‘humane management’ but also glimpses of the suffering
of convicts: ‘[n]‌ecessity compelled us to allot to them the most slav-
ish and laborious employments. Those operations, which in other
countries are performed by brute creation, were here effected by the
exertions of men . . .’ (90). As the enslaved were commoditized, so
the incarcerated were brutalized—both defined as subhuman beings.
Here Tench’s autobiographical ‘I’ occupies the position of the sympa-
thetic, cosmopolitan, and yet disinterested witness. Other accounts
are very different, and engage in empathic witnessing that registers
powerful emotional responses of both compassion and aversion.
Two journals by women travellers who were Tench’s contemporaries
adopt different lines of sight, and testify to the presence of convicts as
a terrifying spectacle in the course of their travels in 1791. These eye-
witnesses draw on a language of sublime association with victims as
‘fellow creatures’ rather than the detached spectatorship of Tench’s
Narrative, with its casual association of the convicts with ‘brute crea-
tion’. These alternative accounts open some new vectors for proxi-
mate reading around Tench’s ‘I’ witness. Here, to return to the idea of
the economy of affect, we see how different emotions are attached to
bodies through eyewitnessing, and how this affective economy draws
on emerging discourses of humanitarianism, and the rights of the
human being.7
In Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) Anna Maria Falconbridge

recoils at the sight of the Third Fleet with convicts for Botany Bay
which set sail from Spithead in January 1791: ‘the sight of those poor
unfortunate beings, and the thoughts of what they are to endure, have
worked more forcibly on my feelings, than all the accounts I ever read
or heard of wretchedness before’.8 Mary Ann Parker, in A Voyage
Around the World, shudders when she sees these same ‘poor miser-
able objects that were landed in great numbers, so that they were soon
reduced to at least one third of that number that quitted England’
(Coleman 1999, 200) eight months later on her arrival at Port Jackson
in September 1791 aboard the Gorgon—coincidentally the ship that
would take Tench home. It was not only Europeans who gave empathic
witness to the suffering that reduced convicts to ‘objects’ and ‘brutes’
rather than ‘fellow creatures’. In his record of May 1791 Tench reports
the Australian Aborigines’ aversion to the sight of severe floggings at
Port Jackson: ‘[t]‌here was not one of them that did not testify strong
abhorrence of the punishment and equal sympathy with the sufferer’
(184). Here it is the compassion of indigenous people that bears wit-
ness, testifying to inhumanity rather than a civilized, humane man-
agement of colonial settlements, and we see why Tench, no less than
Equiano, is anxious to secure the benevolent regard of the metropoli-
tan readership.
Drawing these contiguous narratives by Equiano and Tench (and
Falconbridge and Parker) together in this way takes advantage of the
chronological proximity of their eyewitness narratives in the spring
of 1789 to explore other associations that emerge through proximate
reading. Returning to the colonial archive to include the writings
by women travellers, we see how slave narratives, journals, letters,
and memoirs participate in the new kinds of writing and reading
(and viewing and listening) that shaped new aesthetic experiences
(empathy, sympathy, benevolence, and compassion) which contrib-
uted to the ‘invention of human rights’ that Lynn Hunt traces back to
Enlightenment ethics and the rise of the novel in the late eighteenth
century. This cluster of late eighteenth-century autobiographical nar-
ratives questions the singular focus on the novel in the humanitarian
imaginary, and suggests how humanitarian discourse and its sym-
pathetic imagination was generated by testimony and was shaped in
response to it, an ongoing work in progress that invoked different
figurations of the witness and spectator in life narrative.
Enlightenment political philosophy and theories of literary and vis-

ual representation both shaped the reception of postcolonial life narra-
tives, and were in turn informed by it. Adam Smith’s essay ‘The Theory
of Moral Sentiments’ (1759) dramatized the role of the spectator as a
secondary witness who ultimately remains apart and disinterested. As
Ian Baucom suggests, ethics—attending to the fact, face, and presence
of another and developing a concern for the just treatment of others—is
critical to Smith’s engagement, but his spectator is ultimately a detached
figure, ‘it permits the self . . . to make a purely speculative investment in
the suffering of another without ever having to abandon the safety of its
purely spectatorial position’ (Baucom 2005, 249). We see this, for exam-
ple, in Tench’s account of the ‘humane management’ of convict labour
at Sydney Cove.9 Alternatively, in the ‘shudder’ and ‘strong abhor-
rence’ of the indigenous Australians and the women travellers, Mary
Ann Parker and Anna Maria Falconbridge, we see a different ethical
response to suffering others. Bearing witness to the suffering of convicts
produces an anguished spectatorship. Baucom figures this haunted and
melancholic spectator as a different version of the historical witness,
co-present with the disinterested and speculative onlooker—as proxi-
mate reading of eyewitness accounts of transportation and penal set-
tlement suggests. This anguished witness is transformed itself in and
through looking at the suffering of strangers; this spectator engages
with the body in pain as a shocking aesthetic experience. Edmund
Burke’s treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, first published in 1757, just
before Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’, describes this transforma-
tive experience of bearing witness in terms of the sublime: ‘we enter
into the concerns of others . . . we are moved as they are moved, and
are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which
men can do or suffer’ (cited in Gibbons 2003, 109). Recently, postco-
lonial criticism connects Burke’s aesthetics of violence, sympathy, and
pain to his politics, particularly his preoccupation with the violence of
colonialism in Ireland and India.10 Burke approaches suffering through
volatile emotions rather than the cool response of the detached spec-
tator, challenging aesthetic detachment and the sentimental notion of
sympathy with an ‘anguish of spectatorship’ (Suleri 1992, 46) that can
generate a shocking and imaginative leap across cultures.
The value of these two eyewitness accounts of 1789 is, then, open
to speculation. Both Equiano and Tench draw readers into scenes
of witness, and these generate the aesthetic and political value of

their life narrative. But slavery, transportation, and disposses-
sion challenge humanitarian witnessing with sights of precarious
life, where the recognition of human beings (or beings as human)
is not secured. In testimonial narrative and the exchange between
those who testify and those who bear witness we glimpse the frag-
ile moving boundaries that separate the human from its others: the
animal and the abject, curiosities, beasts and brutes, objects and
things. Scenes of suffering place the anthropocentric discourses of
Enlightenment humanism at risk, and the proximity of the human
to its others challenges the ethics of benevolent recognition that
grounded humanitarian activism.11 These debates about the ethics
and aesthetics of the spectator and bearing witness are triggered by
colonial modernity. They shape the volatile transactions of postco-
lonial life writing—not only slave narratives such as Equiano’s, but
also the journals of eyewitnesses from colonies in the Pacific, and
the first fragments of indigenous life narrative that coincided with
the eagerly anticipated eyewitness accounts of the First Fleet.
Notes
1. This refers to Schaffer and Smith (2004).
2. See Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore’s Theoretical Perspectives
on Human Rights and Literature for a wide-ranging and introductory
overview of this interdiscipline.
3. ‘Peritext’ includes everything on or between the covers of the book; ‘epi-
text’ includes everything outside of the volume, including interviews,
correspondence, reviews, and commentaries. These definitions are
derived from Genette.
4. See Cynthia Freeland’s Portraits and Persons (2010) for an extended
discussion of styles of portraiture and projections of the moral self that
indicates why this representation of self is part of Equiano’s claim to indi-
vidual agency, and how portraiture of the colonized confers recognition.
5. Vincent Carretta points out that Equiano’s description of himself as an
African is strategic: ‘the indigenous peoples of Africa did not think of
themselves as African, they were Ashanti, Yoruba, Fante, or any one of a
number of ethnic groups. Only towards the end of the eighteenth century
did some of the people removed from Africa as slaves begin to adopt the
diasporic identity of “African” ’ (2005, 20).
6. Ironically the debate about Equiano’s origins has been triggered by

Vincent Carretta’s biography, which questions his first-person account
of abduction and transportation from West Africa and suggests he may
have been African by descent, African American by birth, and African
British by choice.
7. On the complicated relationship between colonialism and compas-
sion, see Ashby Wilson and Brown (2009), Barnett (2011), Bornstein
and Redfield (2011). On the history of human rights discourse, see Hunt
(2007), Ishay (2008), Moyn (2010). Critiques of humanitarianism and
rights discourse include Cheah (2006), Englund (2006), Baxi (2007),
Foley (2008), Williams (2010). On humanism as a conflicted concept
that generates debates in feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism,
and posthumanism, see Davies (2008).
8. ‘The only thing that attracted my notice in the harbor, is the fleet with
convicts for Botany Bay, which are wind bound, as well as ourselves.
The destiny of such numbers of my fellow creatures has made what I
expect to encounter, set lighter upon my mind than it ever did before;
nay, nothing could have operated a reconciliation so effectually . . .’
(Falconbridge in Coleman 1999, 50).
9. Luke Gibbons argues that the role of the ‘impartial spectator’ conceived
by Smith merges with Britishness in its colonial guise as a synonym for
progress, civility, and humanity itself, and that it played a formative role
in the fashioning of colonial subjects in India into models of British
gentlemen. Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiment’ was a central text in
Indian government and missionary institutions throughout the nine-
teenth century (Gibbons 2003, 98).
10. See, for example, Suleri (1992) and Gibbons (2003).
11. See Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007) for a precise
discussion of the development of western understandings of race in this
period.
2
Bennelong’s Letter, Sydney
Cove, 29 August 1796
In August 1796 at Sydney Cove the Australian indigenous man known

as Woollarawarre Bennelong dictated a letter that is now archived
and anthologized with the First Fleet journals as one of the first texts
of Australian literature, ‘Letter to Mr Philips, Lord Sydney’s Steward’
(Jose 2009). This is the earliest piece of writing produced by an
Australian Aboriginal author. Possibly we have already encountered
Bennelong in passing. He was captured in November 1789, shack-
led, and held for six months in Governor Phillip’s quarters. Given
this, he is likely to be one of the indigenous people who testified
‘strong abhorrence’ to the sight and sounds of severe floggings at Port
Jackson in Tench’s Narrative. Bennelong became a key interlocutor
between invader and indigenous societies (seen by Tench as a benign
succession between ‘the old, and new, lords of the soil’ [2009, 46]) in
the first years of settlement. He was close to Governor Phillip, and
ultimately lived freely at Government House. His characterization
in auto/biographical writing remains unstable—a native inform-
ant, a conciliator, a trickster, a turncoat, an interpreter who connects
twenty-first-century Australia with the spiritual world that existed
prior to the colony (K. V. Smith). Phillip became his patron and took
him to England on his return in 1792. We can think of Bennelong,
then, as a cosmopolitan man, not unlike Tench and Equiano, drawn
into the networks of patronage that shaped metropolitan society in
the last decade of the eighteenth century, and a powerful figure in
the indigenous communities at Port Jackson, the coastal people col-
lectively known as Eora. Bennelong’s letter is a unique testimonial
fragment amongst the voluminous memoirs from that first decade

of the penal colony, and it appears to been recorded verbatim, using
a version of English that linguists identify as ‘the Sydney language’.
Sidney Cove
New South Wales August 29
1796
Sir,
I am very well. I hope you are very well. I live at the Governor’s. I have every
day dinner there. I have not my wife: another man took her away: we have
had murry doings: he spear’d me in the back, but I better now: his name is
now Carroway. all my friends alive & well. Not me go to England no more. I
am at home now. I hope Sir you send me anything you please Sir. hope all are
well in England. I hope Mrs Phillip very well. You nurse me Madam when
I sick. You very good Madam: thank you Madam, & I hope you remem-
ber me Madam, not forget. I know you vey well Madam. Madam I want
stockings. thank you Madam; send me two Pair stockings. You very good
Madam. Thank you Madam. Sir, you give my duty to Ld Sydney. Thank you
very good my Lord. very good: hope very well all family. very well. Sir, send
me you please some Handkerchiefs for Pocket. you please Sir send me some
shoes: two pair you please Sir.
Bannalong
The currency of Bennelong’s letter remains obscure—its addressee

and signatory are specific but how this circulated as a public and
a private document remains unknown. Letters from the colonies
such as this, with a specific addressee and signatory, were frequently
shared as public documents. This letter, like Equiano’s, indicates
careful intercultural negotiations, a skill in using opportunities to
speak, and it depicts a life that is both familiar—domesticated in
English style with its desire for stockings and handkerchiefs—and
strange—a report on indigenous society that draws on local dia-
lect. In his Narrative Tench responds to the ethnographic interest
in Australian indigenous people as a distant spectator, and in the
first volume of his Narrative he chronicles their customs, appear-
ance, and behaviours with the same speculative eye that assesses
the value of the colony for agriculture, industry, commerce, and the
defence of the realm. In the first instance Tench’s optic is framed
by his knowledge—both first hand and historical—of indigenous
people elsewhere. These lines of sight bring to the global South the
Bennelong’s Letter • 29
thinking on race shared by the Atlantic networks Tench knows so

well (like Equiano). He sees the Australian Aborigines in the terms
of the Atlantic, as ‘Indians’, in a racialized vocabulary that incorpo-
rates African Americans: indigenous people at Botany Bay are ‘as
black as the lighter cast of the African negroes’, for example, and
he compares them to South Sea natives (drawing on his own expe-
riences in North America and the narratives of Pacific explorers
such as Cook and La Perouse). On the other hand, in the extended
Complete Account published in 1793, the lines of sight are differ-
ent: indigenous Australians are individualized and characterized
as distinctive human beings, and no one more so than Bennelong.
Again this suggests a changing economy of affect: different mean-
ings and emotions are attached to the bodies of others in life writing.
In this second volume, widely acknowledged as the most roman-
tic and humanitarian account of the settlement at Sydney Cove in
the First Fleet journals, Tench gives witness to a series of specific
encounters with the Eora, producing vivid ‘portraits’ that humanize
and recognize individual, named subjects.1 Bennelong is a broker in
all of this, not just between indigenous and settler cultures, but also
amongst the Eora who inhabit Port Jackson.
The racial politics of the Black Atlantic were not simply repro-
duced in the global South. As Kay Anderson suggests in her study of
the intersections of humanism and racial thought under conditions
of colonialism, discourses of human distinction were precarious, ste-
reotypes were not locked into place, and generalizations about ‘New
World savageries’ obscure the changing and contingent discourses
about what it meant at different times and in different periods to be
‘properly human’ (2007, 21). What distinguishes Tench’s Narrative
from the later Complete Account is the series of encounters with
indigenous Australians that Tench narrates; in his journal entry for
September 1790 he describes a gradual and continual gaining ‘knowl-
edge of their customs and policy: the only knowledge that can lead
to a just estimate of national character’ (2009, 150). In this second
volume, the remote spectator of the first Narrative is succeeded by a
flawed and implicated witness whose journal draws on the conven-
tions of romanticism and humanism to shape the individual and psy-
chologized depictions of indigenous people as he perceives them in
the course of specific encounters. It is this second journal that intro-
duces Bennelong as a vivid presence in the colonial settlement, and
establishes Tench as a compelling First Fleet memoirist, in his own

time and in ours.2
Encounters in the first person shape both Tench’s Complete
Account and Bennelong’s ‘Letter’. Penny van Toorn speculates that
extended engagement with the invading culture enabled Bennelong
to learn the skills to orally compose this letter, that was dictated to an
unnamed amanuensis. She describes it as an ‘entangled object’: pro-
duced collaboratively, drawing on a range of discourses in the oral
and written genres that Bennelong encountered in postcolonial Port
Jackson. The letter both conforms to British epistolary traditions (in
its polite greetings) and combines and mimics dissonant epistolary
genres (in its address to different addressees, for example, or its very
specific references to gifts in ways that suggest his awkward position-
ing between kin-based exchange networks and European systems
of patronage). Bennelong’s letter shares Equiano’s careful awareness
of its addressee: it is tactical in its deployment of existing rhetorical
conventions to shape its autobiographical ‘I’, and in its awareness of
the patronage of its various addressees; it gives witness on behalf of
others in an ethical framework shaped by mutual rights and recipro-
cal obligations. The ‘Letter’ testifies to the dynamics of first contact,
both discursively and materially. Discursively it signals the coexist-
ence of indigenous networks of kinship and the systems of patronage
installed by European governance. As a material object, the letter is
a ‘news-carrying, kinship affirming’ thing, a cross-cultural entre-
preneurial maneuver (2006, 68) that grasps Bennelong’s precarious
life between ‘civilized’ and indigenous societies on his return from
England.
The proximity of Tench and Bennelong extends well beyond Port
Jackson, and the letter testifies to cross-cultural exchanges in both
the colony and the metropolis. In his letter, Bennelong recalls his
recent visit to England (he returned to Sydney Cove in September
1795), where in the spring of 1793 he was presented in London as an
exotic curiosity just as Tench’s Complete Narrative was published,
and as Equiano continued to promote his Interesting Narrative using
the testamentary networks abolitionism and humanitarianism made
available to enslaved Africans (the sixth and seventh editions of the
Interesting Narrative appeared in 1793). In the Complete Account
Tench imagines that Bennelong will visit London as the new Omai,
the young Pacific Islander taken back to Britain as a ‘specimen’ of
South Pacific man by James Cook’s second expedition in 1774. Mai, as

he was known, gained the patronage of Joseph Banks and became a
celebrity. A popular spectacle wherever he went, Mai was painted by
Joshua Reynolds and inspired both respectable literary works as well
as popular ephemera, both written and pictorial. The spectacle of the
‘visiting savage’ was a phenomenon of eighteenth-century British
imperial culture, producing debates about the ethics of spectatorship.
For example, Mai’s celebrity raised concerns amongst the metropoli-
tan intelligentsia about the risk of ‘transporting a simple barbarian
to a christian and civilized country to debase him into a spectacle’
(cited in Fullagar 2008, 51). As an indigenous man, Bennelong was
potentially the next Omai, a spectacle and specimen in debates about
savagery, primitivism, and human difference, and he was taken to
England with hopes for his ‘gentrification and civilisation’ (Kay
Anderson 2007, 89).3
However, 20 years after Mai’s visit, Bennelong inspired none
of these things. In the first instance he lodged in Mayfair, close to
Berkeley Square, in the home of William Waterhouse, and an ink
sketch signed ‘WW’ shows him wearing a frock coat, ruffled shirt,
and spotted waistcoat (K. V. Smith, 2013). His presence as a ‘visiting
savage’ failed to produce the curiosity his patrons, Tench and Phillip,
had anticipated. It was the fauna that Phillip transported home with
him—four kangaroos—that became curiosities on public display. In
speculating on these different reactions to ‘embodied savagery’ dur-
ing the eighteenth century, Kate Fullagar suggests it reflects not so
much a change in the meaning of savagery over such a short period
but a change in the purchase of savagery in public discourses about
British imperial culture. Like Kay Anderson, Fullagar emphasizes
that meanings of savagery attached to New World peoples in the
late eighteenth century were not yet categorically fixed as subhu-
man in terms of the stadial theories of human progress that were
in place later, in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, attributions
of savagery were dehumanizing and signalled radical otherness, and
the British press reported Bennelong’s presence in these terms: less
than human, sharing the instincts of ‘the beasts in the field’.4 It is
the absence of curiosity and humanitarian witness that distinguishes
Bennelong’s visit, which remained a private and everyday affair.
Indeed his letter suggests this with its request for domestic goods
and its amiable address to the people who cared for him during his
illness and grieving for the death of his fellow countryman and trav-
elling companion, Yemmeramwe. Fullagar’s description of the let-
ter as ‘jaunty and solipsistic’ reads it as a private document this way
(2009, 47).
Other readings of Bennelong’s letter place it as a testimonial
artefact—a marker of historical injustice and survival. Recent inter-
pretations of it as ‘melancholic’ signals an interpretation of the
‘Letter’ as a testimonial encryption of social suffering that bears wit-
ness to the dispersal and dispossession of indigenous Australians
(Heiss and Minter 2008, 7). To read Bennelong’s ‘Letter’ in this way
suggests other interpretations of the indifference to this indigenous
man, as not just ‘oversight’ but aversion. The conquest and dispos-
session of indigenous peoples was a problem for British colonial
expansion that was met in a variety of ways: treaty, land seizure,
genocide, and, in Australia, terra nullius, the denial of rights of
prior occupancy. Indigenous testimonial, such as Bennelong’s let-
ter, emerged in the circumstances of dispossession, and the active
campaigns for indigenous land rights and sovereignty that would
create the threshold for indigenous testimony as a strong counter
discourse came much later, in the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury. Late eighteenth-century readers of Tench’s Complete Account
could be in no doubt about the immediate and devastating impact of
the penal settlement on the Eora; this was no benign ‘contact zone’
where equals engaged amicably in transculturation. Tench bears
witness to the sight of the dead and the dying at Port Jackson in the
wake of the smallpox epidemic in 1790.5 This is one of the marks of
humanitarian discourse in Tench’s journal for, as Laqueur suggests
(2009), an awareness of the presence of the dead was a feature of the
humanitarian imaginary. Bennelong reported that one half of the
Eora who inhabited the coast in the vicinity of Port Jackson had
died from smallpox in the first years of invasion, and he lost close
members of his family to the epidemic (K. V. Smith 2013). However,
in 1793 the publication of Tench’s narrative of indigenous suffering
and Bennelong’s presence failed to elicit compassionate witness to
the plight of the Aboriginal population at Port Jackson. This is a
harbinger of the expectation that the ‘old lords of the soil’, as Tench
refers to the indigenous people in his first journal, would silently
disperse and disappear, a dying race. Dispossession authorized
by the assumption of terra nullius effected a systematic erasure of
indigenous Australians from lines of sight, and the lack of recogni-

tion of Bennelong and passing interest in the affairs of the remote
penal colony in the metropolis testifies to this growing acceptance
of ‘humane management’ despite evidence of colonial violence and
dispossession. Equiano was right to feel concern about the fragility
of humanitarian compassion and the compassionate witness engen-
dered through testimonial narrative. It is a tenuous transaction.
As a testimonial artefact, Bennelong’s letter is read variously. The
framing of him in obituaries as a tragic figure who ended his life
as a victim of alcoholism on the margins of white settlement per-
sonalizes and individualizes history, capturing him as emblematic
of Aboriginal decline, failing to adapt to the inevitable progress of
‘civilization’. In fact Bennelong did not fade into obscurity in 1795.
Recent biographical research reveals that he resumed a traditional
Aboriginal lifestyle, regained authority as a leader amongst the
Eora, remarried, and had a son. He died at the age of 50 in 1813, a
respected elder mourned by his people. At the same time, an obitu-
ary in the Sydney Gazette commemorated him as a ‘thorough savage’
whose barbarity remained unchanged by his benevolent treatment
in Britain (K. V. Smith, 2013).6 As Emma Dortins suggests, the rep-
resentation of indigenous people as flawed or tragic individuals in
life writing (for example, biography, memoirs, and correspondence)
masks and diminishes the trauma of colonization as inevitable fate.
Alternatively, the letter can be read as a testimony to the social suf-
fering that followed invasion—a record of collective and shared pain
and loss, an opportunity to speak that is carefully cultivated by this
cosmopolitan indigenous man.
Notes
1. The Eora people are the coastal Aboriginal inhabitants of this region.
2. Watkin Tench is now a familiar figure in contemporary Australian
accounts of the first settlement. He features in the creative non-fiction of
Inga Clendinnen’s ethnohistory Dancing with Strangers and in histori-
cal fiction, such as Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, where he inspires the
character ‘Silk’. The Narrative has been adapted, rebadged, and reprinted
as 1788, edited by the well-known public intellectual and activist Tim
Flannery, an authoritative figure in debates about how heritage is defined

and understood. Peritexts of 1788 emphasize his endorsement of this
foundation narrative for a twenty-first-century readership. All of this
raises questions about the dissemination of first contact narrative in
contemporary Australian literature. See, for example, Deirdre Coleman
2004.
3. For a discussion of how Omai featured in the discourse of the ‘fancied
stranger’, see Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic (2005) and Fullagar (2008).
4. Fullagar (2009, 37).
5. Laqueur (2009) discusses references to the corpse in humanitarian dis-
course during this period.
6. See Emma Dortins (2009) for an extended critique of this tragic version
of Bennelong’s history and, more generally, the articles by K. V. Smith
(2009, 2013) and Kate Fullagar (2009).
3
Saartjie Baartman, St James
Square, London,
27 November 1810
By drawing different readings of Bennelong’s ‘Letter’ together in this

way this fragmentary testament becomes a microhistory of conquest
at Sydney Cove and the changing value and evaluation of indigenous
people both in our time and theirs. Bennelong’s story introduces
difficult questions for postcolonial readings of indigenous life nar-
rative. What happens when indifference or aversion displaces com-
passionate concern and renders indigenous people invisible in this
way? There is no necessary connection between social suffering and
humanitarian response, and testimonial narrative is always at risk of
failing to mobilize sympathy and concern—as Equiano well knew.
The biographers of Saartjie Baartman, an African indigenous woman
famed as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, point out that ‘the closer we get to the
defeated and the lost, the more fragmentary the evidentiary record
becomes’ (Crais and Scully 2009, 5). Like Bennelong, Baartman
has been individualized as a flawed ‘tragic figure’ that confirms the
inevitable degeneration and demise of indigenous peoples as set-
tler colonization proceeded apace in Australasia, Africa, and North
America. She too is a troubling presence, a diasporic, multicultural,
transcontinental being caught between very different worlds—ulti-
mately her story circulates through Dutch, British, and French impe-
rialisms. As an indigenous African woman exhibited in London and
Paris early in the nineteenth century, Baartman became a curiosity, a
subject of speculation, a ‘thing’. Various biographical representations
of Baartman—in biography and in fictional narratives such as Zoë

Wicomb’s David’s Story—focus on the changing presence and sta-
tus of Baartman as a named and individual human being. What she
brings to this account of postcolonial life narrative is an insight into
humanizing discourses in colonial modernity, and their impact on
auto/biographical representations of indigenous subjects under west-
ern eyes.
Two recent biographies flesh out the historical ‘I’ of Saartjie
Baartman, and this biographical interest in her reflects her status as
an icon in the ‘new’ South Africa, post apartheid. She was a Gonaqua
woman born in the Eastern Cape in the late 1780s, in the lands of
the Khoekhoe people in a time and region of violent dispossession
and extermination of indigenous people by the Boers. Not only was
she born into a culture where there was no clearly marked identities
for ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘you’, but the array of names in her birth family
are lost, as are details of her birth. What remains is her first name,
‘Saartjie’, the Cape Dutch diminutive for ‘Sara’, which marks her as
a colonist’s servant. Baartman left the frontier in the late 1790s with
Pieter Cesars, an itinerant trader, and travelled with him to Cape
Town where she became a domestic servant during the first decade
of the nineteenth century, when the Dutch and British competed for
control of the colony. Her biographers now suggest that Baartman
gave birth to three children, all quickly deceased, and that she worked
as a servant in various households. There is some speculation that the
well-established cosmopolitan subculture of erotica and prostitution
at the Cape in this period included Baartman’s first performances
as the ‘Hottentot Woman’ at the military hospital and, perhaps, at
the African Theatre. Both sites are indicative, for nineteenth-century
anthropology took the prostitute and the African woman as the gro-
tesque bodies that marked the boundaries of anarchy and culture,
animal and human (Levy 1991, 68). By the time Baartman sailed for
London, making what was for indigenous Africans an illegal Atlantic
passage in 1810 with Cesars and Alexander Dunlop, a surgeon and
entrepreneur, the plan was that they would make money exhibiting
Baartman as ‘Sartjee, the Hottentot Venus’, an authentic tribal sub-
ject for European spectators.
What follows is a notorious and gendered turn on the tradition
of importing ‘savages’ as ‘bodies of evidence’: specimens and spec-
tacles for popular entertainment. Images of Baartman on display
Saartjie Baartman • 37
as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, both drawings and cartoons, are familiar

and remain widely circulated even now.1 Her spectacular presence
evoked pleasure, fascination, aversion, and desire as well as compas-
sion. An object of imperial curiosity in Georgian London, she was
an erotic wonder signalling all that was strange, alien, sexually devi-
ant, and monstrous; an explicit spectacle of flesh and touch; an indi-
vidual frozen beyond history and time as the authentic indigenous
subject before the ethnographic eye; and the missing link in the natu-
ral history of humankind. Enlightenment intellectuals—Rousseau,
Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu—were fascinated by the place of
the Hottentot, a tribal group placed as a bridge between man and
the animals, neither securely ‘in’ the category of the human being
nor definitively out of it, a lower species marking the limits of the
human in changing ontologies of the human and non-human world.
The emerging sciences of evolutionary anatomy and biology, anthro-
pology and sexology referred to the ‘Hottentot Venus’ to stabilize
notions of a racial type. Saartjie Baartman arrived in Paris early in
the nineteenth century, just when speculations about the Hottentot
as lower mammals moved from travel literature into the centre of
scientific enquiry, and she was presented for view as the female
Hottentot, the very case study that scientists thought might provide
the missing link between humans and animals (Crais and Scully
2009, 133). Most notoriously the ‘Hottentot Venus’ became a foun-
dation of nineteenth-century scientific racism following Georges
Cuvier’s scientific observation of her body in the Natural History
Museum in Paris, where she died in 1815. Cuvier produced a plaster
cast of her entire body, and then removed her brain and genitalia,
for display at the Musée de l’Homme. Baartman’s anatomical body
became the template for European views of ‘the Hottentot’ and ‘the
primitive’ in the emerging sciences of evolutionary biology and phys-
ical anthropology. Her body parts remained on display in Paris until
1974. In 2002 Baartman’s remains were repatriated to South Africa
and interred as a national icon in a burial ceremony in Cape Town.
All of this presents a dramatic case study of how cultural discourses
shape bodies of evidence to determine what parts of the body ‘speak’
as biographical evidence, and how cultural meanings are assigned to
skull, skin, skeleton, genitalia, tongue, lips. Or, alternatively, when
the body remains absent, mute, or naturalized into transparency.
How bodies are identified—sexed and gendered, racialized, regarded
as unruly and grotesque or disciplined and normative—becomes a

work in process at scenes of visual witnessing in colonial moder-
nity. Baartman is the indigenous woman who became spectacular
as a ‘thing’, abject, a monstrosity displayed as an object of curiosity
before witnesses repeatedly and for profit, both pre- and post mor-
tem. Displays of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ throw other scenes of witness
in colonial modernity into sharp relief. The Enlightenment idea of
the human as a work in progress placed colonial subjects at the lim-
its of the human, and from there they might be ‘civilized’ by com-
passionate recognition in humanitarian terms, or dehumanized as
a monstrosity. Either way, the privilege of conferring human status
was securely attached to the figure of the white man as spectator and
eyewitness.
For example, shortly after Baartman first in appeared in London
in 1810 the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay wrote a letter to the edi-
tor of the Examiner in response to the spectacle of the ‘Hottentot
Venus’, invoking terms of humanitarian ethics and abolitionist poli-
tics to introduce a troubled account of being subjected to the sight
of her:
To a contemplative and feeling man few things are so painful as to behold

the degradation of his species: under whatever disguise the spectacle may
be veiled, whether as an object of science or natural research, it is nev-
ertheless a disgusting, afflictive and mortifying sight. (cited in Holmes
2007, 77)
Macaulay testifies to the act of viewing as a spectacle that degrades

those who look—the well-being and dignity of both the spectator
and the spectacle are centre stage. Most importantly given anxie-
ties about Baartman’s status, he bears witness and lays claim to their
shared species identity in the family of man, concerned to settle all
questions of her status and rights through sympathetic identification
rather than scientific enquiry. Macaulay reframes the spectacle of the
‘Hottentot Venus’ in terms of an ethics of compassionate witness.
Drawing on abolitionist discourse, he raises questions about the
ownership of Baartman, and the role of Dunlop and Cesar as specu-
lators: is Baartman a slave, the property of Cesars and Dunlop, as well
as an indigenous African woman? Along with fellow abolitionists in
the benevolent African Association he was successful in securing a
writ of habeas corpus2 to be issued on Baartman’s ‘keepers’ and in

November 1810 an enquiry proceeded into Baartman’s status and led
to an interview with Baartman on 27 November at Duke Street, St
James Square, and a testamentary scene where solicitors, court offic-
ers, and a translator fluent in Dutch interviewed her to ascertain her
status and her situation. Finally Baartman’s own testimony entered
a legal record.
Given the opportunity to lay claim to Macaulay’s humanitarian
concern, she refuses the identity of the suffering ‘other’ made availa-
ble to her by abolitionist discourse, and she claims to be contracted to
perform of her own free will. The judgement that followed dismissed
Macaulay’s case, and the ‘Hottentot Venus’ continued, a spectacle
located at the cusp of human and non-human worlds, and caught
up in the anxiety to fix the distinction between them. Baartman’s
refusal to engage in the testimonial contract offered by humanitar-
ian narrative and accept the benevolent gaze of the British public
with Macaulay as her witness raises difficult questions about subal-
tern agency, culturally determined knowledges that ground concepts
such as free will, and uncertainties about what constitutes freedom to
speak for an indigenous African woman raised in conditions of colo-
nial slavery at the Cape. Choices such as this must always be histori-
cally and contextually situated, and framed with doubt. Baartman,
no less than Equiano, was tactical in taking opportunities for resist-
ance, as her biographers remark: ‘the context deeply constrained
Sara Baartman’s opportunity to talk to history. Her words slip away;
they mimic what might have been. They caution history, and those
who believe in the power of historical fact, that individuals rarely can
speak truth to power’ (Crais and Scully 2009, 101).
The Baartman case set a precedent, and others took the oppor-
tunity to enter into the contract of humanitarian discourse that
emerged through this testamentary encounter. Macaulay’s turn to
compassion and the sympathetic imagination, and the connection
of this affective response to ameliorative action and intervention—
obtaining the writ of habeas corpus before the Court of King’s
Bench—set new terms for legal action to curtail the suffering of oth-
ers. Macaulay requested the court to protect Baartman’s inalienable
rights as a human being, and this compassionate concern for stran-
gers and the desire to act on their behalf by a concerned third party
is fundamental to modern western understandings of human rights
activism. ‘The Case of the Hottentot Venus’ also set a precedent in

that Baartman, a non-national, was offered the rights extended to
British citizens under the provisions of habeas corpus. In recent
Anglo-American jurisprudence, where the claims of refugees
detained in sovereign territory is a contentious issue, this case is still
cited as a precursor. It sets a precedent in hearings that contest the
rights of those held in detention at Guantánamo Bay, and the rights
of aliens within common law following the restrictions of the protec-
tion of habeas corpus in the course of the ‘war on terror’. Ironically
the ‘Hottentot Venus’, regarded by some as a closer relative to the
apes than humans, set new terms in the prosecution of human rights
activism that remain alive in contemporary jurisprudence and on
behalf of the dispossessed.
Baartman’s refusal to become the subject of compassionate
action and humanitarian activism raises enduring questions about
testimony, witnessing, and humanitarianism in colonial moder-
nity. What conceptions of the human are naturalized at scenes of
witness such as this? What forms of subjection and resistance were
available to the indigenous and the subaltern subjects of empire?
How do sympathy and compassion reproduce racialized and
gendered privileges of spectatorship? What difference does gen-
der and sexual difference make? What is the ‘I’ that is crafted in
and through testimonial narrative? All of these questions circle
around the intersubjective relations between those who testify and
those who bear witness, and they recur in contemporary postco-
lonial life narrative. In ‘Three Women’s Texts and Circumfession’
Gayatri Spivak speculates on how Eurocentric approaches such
as feminism and postcolonialism might approach ‘other’ women
such as Saartjie Baartman: ‘The academic feminist must learn to
learn from them, to speak to them, to suspect that their access
to the political and sexual scene is not merely to be corrected
by our superior theory and enlightened compassion’ (1987, 135).3
Elsewhere Spivak suggests the problematics of this relation-
ship are sharply defined in and around testimony above all, for
‘[t]‌estimony is the genre of the subaltern giving witness to oppres-
sion, to a less oppressed other. Editorial control varies in degree,
but is never absent’ (1998, 7). What drives much thinking and writ-
ing about testimony and subaltern women, Spivak suggests, is a
desire to consolidate the self, and the self-enhancing experience
of ‘enlightened compassion’ in testimonial transactions. The sym-

pathy, spectatorship, benevolence, and engaged imagination of
Enlightenment moral philosophy is, for Spivak, a self-enhancing
practice of humanitarian engagement, a metropolitan investment
in systemic inequality.
Spivak’s classic and controversial essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
draws attention to the vital role of the addressee and the problem of
‘hearing’ subaltern speech in the reception of women’s testimony in
particular, for ‘woman is doubly in shadow’. In the terms of Spivak’s
essay, Baartman’s refusal might be understood as ‘enigmatic, inde-
cipherable, though not completely invisible’ (Morris 2010, 6). The
presence of Saartjie Baartman at the scene of witness invoked by
Macaulay produces a brief glimpse of her as a speaking subject that is
archived in biographical representation. This is, as Chandra Talpade
Mohanty argues in her critique of representations of ‘third world’
women in western feminism (2003), a testimonial trace and inscrip-
tion that is audible. Like Bennelong’s ‘Letter’, this is a microhistory of
a fragment of testimony that indicates the limited recognition avail-
able for self-representations of indigenous people. Bennelong died in
1813 at Port Jackson, captured in settler obituary as an example of the
irredeemable savage. On her death in Paris in 1815, Baartman became
a body of evidence exhibited to demonstrate stadial discourses of
savagery.
Drawing Bennelong and Baartman into proximity in this way
can obscure different social and cultural dynamics that shaped
the life histories of these two cosmopolitan and indigenous peo-
ple from the South. However, biographical and autobiographical
artefacts—and here I have drawn together recent biographical
studies as well as obituaries, letters, journals, drawings and por-
traiture, and travel narratives of the period—indicate the volatile
and relational subjects and subjectivities of colonial modernity
that come alive in autobiographical representations of all kinds,
both in their time and ours. They also question representations
of silent ‘subaltern’ subjects and assert the agency of those who
resist this address in and through humanitarian activism, pro-
ducing those inscriptions of self that Benita Parry calls ‘articulate
antagonists’: those who use opportunities for self-representation
opportunistically (2004, 22). In testimonial life narrative, the
humanitarian contract between those who testify and those who
bear witness establishes bodies of evidence and lines of sight that

are contested and subject to change. For example Tench’s two
journals ref lect upon his experiences of a sequence of encounters
with the Eora, and these local experiences change his percep-
tions of indigenous peoples. Nevertheless the status of the human
that is attributed to the enslaved and the indigene by the com-
passionate humanitarian witness is contingent: both Bennelong
and Saartjie Baartman are consigned to the limits of the human
post mortem. The ‘invention of the human’ and ‘the humanitar-
ian revolution’ of the late eighteenth century were vital projects
that shaped new terms for autobiographical representations that
could speak of collective subjectivities and social suffering. Yet
compassionate humanitarian witness struggled to engage with
the scenes of horror and abjection that were released by testimo-
nial narrative. We see this generic engagement of testimony and
witness when abolitionist campaigns were revived in the nine-
teenth century, campaigns that established the context for the
publication of the experiences of a West Indian woman, Mary
Prince.
Notes
1. The ‘Hottentot Venus’ was exhibited as a spectacular sight in London and
Paris on account of her alleged ‘steatopygia’ (produced by an accumula-
tion of fat in the buttocks) and the presumed presence of the ‘Hottentot
apron’ (the longation of genital labia). Today images of Baartman as
‘Hottentot Venus’ are still casually displayed, by delegates at academic
conferences, for example. Saidiya Hartman, writing about slavery in the
USA, points out that the familiarity of images such as this reinforce the
spectacular character of black suffering and raise questions about ways
we are called upon to participate now in scenes that reveal the uncertain
line between witness and spectator (1997, 3–4).
2. The writ of habeas corpus (‘that you have the body’) is a process for secur-
ing the liberty of the subject by affording immediate release from unlaw-
ful or unjustifiable detention whether in prison or in private custody. By
it the High Court commands the production of the subject, and inquires
into the cause of imprisonment. If there is no legal justification for the
imprisonment the subject is ordered to be released (Rachel Holmes 2007,

208).
3. Spivak frames this call for a focus on the other in terms of a useful series
of questions: ‘not merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How
am I naming her? How does she name me? Is this part of the problematic
I discuss?’ (1987, 150)
4
The History of Mary Prince,
Claremont Square, London, 1831
In Spectres of the Atlantic, his cultural history of the Zong atrocity,

when 133 slaves were thrown overboard from a British slave ship to
enable an insurance claim for lost ‘cargo’ in 1781, Ian Baucom traces
the emergence of abolitionism and human rights in the late eighteenth
century, and the birth of the figure of the ‘witness’. Sympathy, senti-
ment, and the witness, he argues, are located in an ethical dilemma:
a response to distant suffering that presents a discourse of human
rights as suffering’s solution, a radical impulse always on the verge of
moderating itself, and a liberal impulse always haunted by the ghost
of melancholy (2005, 194). The encounter between Zachary Macaulay
and Saartjie Baartman indicates some these enduring ethical issues
attached to humanitarian witness: its problematic investments in the
suffering of others, the proximities of compassionate witness and a
prurient spectatorship, and the unreliability of empathic engagement
that we now call compassion ‘fatigue’. Macaulay’s social activism also
indicates a cosmopolitan interest in social justice and activism, a leg-
acy of slavery and abolitionism that draws on discourses of human
rights, humanity, and humanitarianism that shape the genres and
modes of testimonial life narrative in colonial modernity.
Baartman’s refusal to accede to Macaulay’s intervention on her
behalf, which we glimpse only through the lens of biographical writ-
ing now, raises questions about embodiment, voice, and agency—all
key issues for reading life writing, as Smith and Watson insist. The
case of women subjected to the most brutal forms of colonial coer-
cion and dispossession, and the question of how biographical and
The History of Mary Prince • 45
autobiographical representation can represent this, are critical issues

for postcolonial criticism. So, for example, by refusing Macaulay’s
intervention and choosing to remain in the company of her ‘keepers’,
Baartman may be deploying the limited agency available to subal-
tern women: a tactical manoeuvring within the terms of her sexual
exploitation, negotiating greater autonomy within those limits. Jenny
Sharpe reads one of the canonical texts of postcolonial life writing,
The History of Mary Prince, in this way. The possibility that these
subaltern women gain a limited control that is available to them and
become articulate antagonists not through discourses of emancipa-
tion but through negotiating terms of self-exploitation is very different
to agency as this is conventionally understood, as self-determination.
It is a tactic of the brutally dispossessed. Coercion and the inequali-
ties of power instituted through slavery extend across the Atlantic to
England, suggests Sharpe: ‘For this reason The History of Mary Prince
needs to be read as a testimony of the power relations between master
and slave in the West Indies, on the one hand, and the West Indian
slave woman and abolitionists in England on the other’ (2003, 151).
By associating cosmopolitan London households and the geographi-
cally remote colonies in Africa and the West Indies, Sharpe draws
attention to the transfer of power relations legitimated by slavery that
migrate to the metropolis. For women such as Prince and Baartman,
agency might be exercised by withholding story, by selective and tac-
tical disclosure that recognizes the limitations of the humanitarian
recognition offered by the abolitionists in England.
The History of Mary Prince has become a canonical text for think-
ing on testimonial narrative, and rightly so, for this composite
account ‘related to’ an amanuensis in 1831 demands a postcolonial
reading that is open to issues of gender and sexuality, and to the
expansive autobiographical cultures that draw on the bloodlines of
slavery. Like Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, the discursive threshold
that enabled Prince’s History was produced by abolitionism, with the
renewal of anti-slavery campaigns in the 1820s, but drawing these two
slave narratives together immediately indicates the differences that
gender makes in the production of autobiographical voice, embodi-
ment, and agency. The title page of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
states ‘Written by Himself’ and the frontispiece includes a portrait
that establishes his individuality and presence, and his authority.
Mary Prince’s History is, we learn from the title page, ‘Related by
Herself’, to an amanuensis, and there is to date no portraiture or vis-

ual representation of Prince that we know. Following the publication
of his Narrative Equiano was a canny self-promoter. On the other
hand a series of court cases followed the publication of the History;
these called Prince’s integrity into question and, despite extensive
research, there is no knowledge of what happened to her after her
appearances in court in 1832 (Thomas 2011). Prince’s ownership of
the narrative and the distinctiveness of her voice within it remain
subject to debate. Equiano’s testimony suggests the limited free-
doms that became available to black men, and Mary Prince’s account
reveals how gender and sexuality constrain the voice, embodiment,
and agency that become available for women in slave narrative.
Sue Thomas’s recent research in the West Indies (2014) indicates
that Prince’s earlier experiences in the Moravian communities of
Antigua played a major role in the generation of her life narrative
and its voice, and this suggests the focus on the cosmopolitan pro-
duction and reception of her History has been overstated. The con-
duits of life writing that circulate around and about this text reach
out to South Africa and Canada as well as Antigua. In this way it
demands an expansive imaginative geography of slavery and the
bloodlines of postcolonial life narratives. What is so compelling
about the History for postcolonialism is its graphic representation
of testimonial transactions on the page, both in Prince’s relatively
short narrative and the extended marginalia and appendices that
enclose the text and proliferate with each new edition. The narra-
tive begins in childhood memory, which immediately records the
status of herself and her parents as private property: ‘I was born at
Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda, on a farm belonging to Mr. Charles
Myners. My mother was a household slave; and my father, whose
name was Prince, was a sawyer belonging to Mr. Trimmingham, a
ship-builder at Crow-Lane’ (Prince 2000, 57). This was around 1788,
when Bermuda was a self-governing British colony and about half
of the population of 10,000 was enslaved. Mary Prince is, then, a
contemporary of Saartjie Baartman, who was probably born around
this time in the Eastern Cape.
Here too Kopytoff’s essay on the cultural biography of things sug-
gests how the enslaved become things, as property that moves in and
through commodification and exchange. Prince was sold for the first
time as an infant, purchased, and given to a girl about her own age in
a family where her mother was a household slave. ‘I was made quite a
pet of by Miss Betsey, and loved her very much. She used to lead me
about by the hand, and call me her little nigger. This was the happi-
est period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my
condition as a slave’ (57). This dehumanization of the child as a ‘pet’
is a precursor to the brutality that occurs when, around 1805, her
mother is forced to ‘ “carry my little chickens to market”, (these were
her very words)’ (61). This introduces a theme that runs throughout
the History: the brutalization and dehumanization of both those who
are enslaved and those who own and trade them as property. This
is the knowledge of the older, narrating ‘I’ that relates the History,
with an understanding that eludes the child. This recurs later when,
around 1805, upon the death of their owner, Prince’s mother took
Mary and her sisters Hannah and Dinah to the slave market, where
they were sold ‘like sheep or cattle’. In an account filled with grief
and terror, Prince remembers that ‘black morning’, again empha-
sizing the commodification and dehumanization of human beings
who are enslaved, and drawing on tropes of abolitionist discourse
that emphasize the bestialization of both the enslaved and those who
participate in their trade:
I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in

the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to pur-
chase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could
no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. I was then put up
for sale. (62)
She fetched about £38, ‘a great sum for so young a slave’, and became
the property of Captain I__ at Spanish Point. The association of the
human and the animal, the object and the thing recurs in the scenes
of subjection that are related by Mary Prince, and these draw atten-
tion to the changing and contingent discourses about what it means
to be properly human in postcolonial life writing, and the function
of auto/biographical representation as a humanizing cultural prac-
tice. As Sara Salih remarks in her Introduction to a recent edition
of the History (2004), it is not just truth and accuracy that are at
stake in affirmations of authenticity and veracity here but Prince’s
humanity itself. The History maps out slavery not as a fixed status
but as an ongoing process of social transformation, which involves
a succession of phases and changes in status through ongoing trade

and acquisition, through resocialization and rehumanization. The
slave, Kopytoff suggests, becomes in fact reindividualized by acquir-
ing new statuses (by no means always lowly ones) . . . but the slave
usually remains a potential commodity (1986, 65)—and this is so for
Mary Prince.
The brilliance of Prince’s History for postcolonial criticism is its
insight into the production of slave narrative as part of this ongoing
process of status acquisition in the career of the enslaved. Copious
introductions, prefaces, supplements, appendices, and marginalia
surround Mary Prince’s testimony, and her editor Thomas Pringle
is omnipresent, and threaded through the History in footnotes and
commentary, forever supplementing and authenticating Prince’s
account, at times drawing on his own colonial experiences at the Cape
Colony (121). This is, as I have argued elsewhere (Whitlock 2000), a
crowded scene of relating, listening, transcribing, and editing slave
narrative where the authority to narrate and the cultural determina-
tions of what counts as truth are carefully negotiated. The testimo-
nial transactions in and around this History demonstrate, as Jenny
Sharpe suggests, the power relations that occur between Prince and
the abolitionists, and these draw the production of the slave narrative
into that ongoing process of status acquisition and individualization
that shapes the career of the slave. Throughout the narrative Mary
Prince is ‘carefully examined’, and she is kept under Pringle’s ‘scru-
tiny’ and ‘watchful eye’ for a ‘period of observation’ to determine her
decency, propriety, and delicacy (115). The third edition of the History
in 1831 included a new Appendix. A testimonial was added following
enquiries ‘from various quarters respecting the existence of marks
of severe punishment on Mary Prince’s body’ (130). Mary Pringle,
the editor’s wife, writes to Mrs Townsend, one of the secretaries for
the Birmingham Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, from
Claremont Square on 28 March 1831:
My husband having read to me the passage in our last letter to him, express-
ing a desire to be furnished with some description of the marks of former
ill-usage on Mary Prince’s person,—I beg in reply to state, that the whole
back part of her body is distinctly scarred and, as it were, chequered, with
the vestiges of severe floggings. Besides this, there are many large scars on
other parts of her person, exhibiting an appearance as if the flesh had been
deeply cut, or lacerated with gashes, by some instrument wielded by most

unmerciful hands . . .
In order to put you in possession of such full and authentic evidence,
respecting the marks on Mary Prince’s person, as may serve your benevo-
lent purpose in making the enquiry, I beg to add my own testimony to that
of Miss Strickland (the lady who wrote down in this house the narratives of
Mary Prince and Ashton Warner), together with the testimonies of my sister
Susan and my friend Mrs Martha Browne—all of whom were present and
assisted me this day in a second inspection of Mary’s body. (130–1)
Here Prince’s body becomes a spectacle, exhibited in a testamentary

scene where a body of evidence is seen by eyewitnesses as truth: what
is taken down from Mary’s lips remains suspect, but the flesh can-
not lie. Testimony incarnate, which is inscribed on the body and leg-
ible to these benevolent witnesses, authenticates her story of abuse.
Moira Ferguson points out that Prince would have been well within
her rights, as evangelicals conceived of them, to refuse their request
to view her body on grounds of modesty (1992, 295). As with Saartjie
Baartman, cultural discourses shape what parts of the woman’s
body can be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ in testimonial narrative. Along with
the absence of portraiture—that humanizing autobiographical rep-
resentation that represented Bennelong and Equiano as English
gentlemen—both Baartman and Prince were exhibited as bodies of
evidence. The amanuensis Susanna Strickland hears and transcribes
Prince’s History, yet it is what she sees that testifies authentically to
the suffering of Mary Prince. The information admissible as evidence
of her life is governed by the kind of woman her abolitionist sponsors
and middle-class English readers considered a reliable eyewitness to
slavery (Sharpe 2003, xiii).
This scene of benevolent witness recalls those scenes of subjec-
tion, the ‘handling’ and ‘examination’ of Prince’s body in Bermuda
and Antigua, where she is traded as a commodity. As Sharpe sug-
gests, the proximity of power relations between master and slave in
the West Indies and abolitionists and Prince at Claremont Square
becomes apparent, as the inequalities of power instituted by slav-
ery extend across the Atlantic. In this way Prince’s History calls
attention to the ethical dilemma of bearing witness to black suffer-
ing that recurs in the longue durée of testimony and witness: what
does the exposure of the black body and its violation yield? In her
discussion of the scenes of subjection in American slave narrative,

Saidiya V. Hartman argues that what is at issue in scenes such as
this viewing of Prince’s body by the benevolent abolitionist women
and now again in its presentation to contemporary readers as liter-
ary heritage is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line
between witness and spectator. Notions of reform, consent, and pro-
tection were implicated in colonial power, rule, and domination. It
was often the case, Hartman suggests, that benevolent correctives
and declarations of slave humanity and rights sustained the exer-
cise of power on the captive body (1997, 3). In Prince’s History, and
the intertexts that proliferate about it, both in her time and in ours,
there is a vivid demonstration of these proximities of benevolence
and violation. By drawing together Equiano, Bennelong, Baartman,
and Prince as articulate antagonists, postcolonial criticism returns
to enduring concerns about the politics of recognition and the pro-
duction and consumption of life narratives as exotic products from
‘other’ worlds. These enduring ethical dilemmas of testimony and
witness are embedded in the politics of race and racialization in colo-
nial modernity across the Atlantic. The question ‘Can the subaltern
speak?’ has preoccupied postcolonial criticism, though the way the
question is posed presupposes the questioner herself is not subaltern,
for a subaltern would ask, ‘Can we speak?’ (Seed 2013, 99).
5
Roughing It in the Bush,
Upper Canada, 1832–52
In recent debates about ‘white civility’ and literary history in Canada,

George Elliott Clarke has argued that discussions of white identity
formation in Canadian criticism need to attend to critical race the-
ory, and the slavery of both indigenous people and Africanadians:
‘notions of blackness as well as redness affected conceptions of social
status and state formation’ (2009, 1). Essential to the brilliance of
Prince’s History as a resonant text for postcolonial reading is the
demands it makes on its readers to grasp the vast spatial and cultural
geography of the Atlantic in colonial modernity, and its ‘intimate
empire’ of life narrative (Whitlock 2000). The History is the epicentre
of a cluster of auto/biographical representations. Prince’s account of
slavery in the West Indies reaches across to the earlier experiences of
her editor Thomas Pringle in the Cape Colony and the later experi-
ences of her amanuensis Susanna Strickland, who became the canon-
ical Canadian writer Susanna Moodie. She is the author of a series of
sketches of pioneering life in Upper Canada (now Ontario) between
1832 and 1839 that were published as Roughing It in the Bush, or Life In
Canada (1852). Her husband, J.D. Moodie, and her sister, Catharine
Parr Traill, are also authors who publish distinctively colonial and
gendered autobiographical narratives. By reading Prince’s History
and Moodie’s autobiographical sketches as proximate texts we can
begin to read for the implications of notions of blackness, whiteness,
and redness in the way Elliott Clarke suggests, mapping the expan-
sive transatlantic routes of life narrative and racialization in colonial
modernity.
Susanna Strickland is a marginal presence in Prince’s History,

the ‘other’ woman at the scene of translating oral testimony
into publishable script. In January 1831 in her correspondence
Strickland describes the task of writing ‘Mr Pringle’s black Mary’s
life from her own dictation and for her benefit’ (Ballstadt et al.
1985, 57), and in turn in her History Mary Prince takes the oppor-
tunity to draw her scribe into view and assert her ownership of the
text: ‘I will say the truth to English people who may read the his-
tory that my good friend, Miss S__, is now writing down for me’
(2000, 84). The text is carefully managed with the ear and hand
of the amanuensis as a presence that regulates what can be said
and recorded. Both women embody a particular ensemble of race,
gender, and sexuality shaped by the politics of abolition. Susanna
Strickland met her husband, John Dunbar Moodie, in the Pringle
household in the early summer of 1830, as she was working on the
production of the History. The presence of J. D. Moodie in the
Pringle circle confirms its associations with settler colonialism at
the Cape, and he subsequently published his memoir Ten Years in
South Africa in 1835. Memoirs, testimony, sketches, letters—auto-
biographical genres and artefacts accumulate around and about
this circle to create a network of intertexts across Africa, Europe,
and the Americas.
Within a week of testifying to the veracity of Prince’s testimony at
Claremont Square, Susanna Strickland’s letter of 9 April 1831 records
her marriage and presents one of the last sightings we have of Mary
Prince:
I was on the 4th instant at St Pancras Church made the happiest girl on earth,
in being united with the beloved being in whom I have long centred all my
affections. Mr Pringle ‘gave me’ away, and Black Mary, who had treated her-
self with a complete new suit upon the occasion, went on the coach box, to
see her dear Missie and Biographer wed. I assure you, that instead of feeling
the least regret at the step I was taking if a tear trembled from my eyes, it
was one of joy, and I pronounced the fatal obey, with a firm determination
to keep it. My blue stockings, since I became a wife, have turned so pale that
I think they will soon be quite white . . . (Ballstadt et al. 1985, 61)1
The power relations between slaves and owners and between

slave women and abolitionists in England are reproduced here in
Moodie’s correspondence. The title ‘Missie’, used in the History for
Roughing It in the Bush • 53
Miss Betsey, who owned Prince as her ‘little nigger’ and ‘pet’, reap-
pears, and the reference to possession—‘Mr Pringle’s Black Mary’—
likewise carries connotations of coercion and ownership into
seemingly benevolent metropolitan relations. This letter is astutely
aware of gendered and racialized status and autonomy, both oth-
ers’ and her own. Susanna and John Dunbar Moodie and their baby
daughter left England in July 1832. Shortly after landing they pur-
chased land near the shores of Lake Ontario in Upper Canada and
a year later they relocated to the backwoods, to Douro in the Rice
Lake region. Their backwoods property was close to Susanna’s sister
and companion, Catherine Parr, and her husband Thomas Traill, a
Scotsman and fellow officer of John Moodie, who also emigrated in
the summer of 1832. Their brother Samuel Strickland, who had emi-
grated some years earlier, was nearby. However, Moodie’s sketches
make few references to this settler community, for their autobio-
graphical narrator is characterized as an isolated and increasingly
beleaguered presence in the wilderness. In part this is rhetorical,
a narrative device that contrasts with the different generic conven-
tions used by her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. It was, we know from
letters exchanged between the sisters, not an accurate reflection of
reality. Parr Traill’s autobiographical account of pioneering life,
The Backwoods of Canada (1836), is cast in the genre of an emigrant
handbook. It creates a highly competent domestic subject, focusing
on the sociability of settler life. Moodie’s sketches on the other hand
are highly imaginative, gothic, and deeply troubled. In ‘A Change
in Our Prospects’, one of the final sketches in Roughing It, Moodie
recalls leaving backwoods pioneering life forever, ‘For seven years
I had lived out of the world entirely . . . I looked double the age
I really was’ (501) she mourns.
Through the surge of settler emigration in the 1830s, Upper
Canada is a hive of life writing in colonial modernity. A number
of middle- and upper-middle-class women, mostly newly married,
who emigrated and became settlers, wrote letters, journals, guides,
and memoirs. This profusion of gendered autobiographical writing
is a sign of the pressure to redefine classed and gendered notions of
respectability, but it is the association with Prince in Moodie’s biog-
raphy that triggers the kind of critical reading that Elliott Clarke
calls for, attentive to the production of white civility in a racialized
landscape. We come to know Moodie and her Canadian sketches
differently through her association with Prince and the abolitionist

intelligentsia in London in the spring of 1831.
We see this immediately in one of the first Canadian sketches she
sent to be published, which narrates their arrival in the St Lawrence—a
narrative of their first day in the ‘New World’ that deterritorializes
the conventions of eyewitness life narrative.2 The young Mrs Moodie
is the narrated ‘I’ of this sketch, a spectator and eyewitness. The
narrative follows her eye, translating the sight of the land from the
deck of the ship aesthetically in terms of distant and middle space,
drawn to the unfolding sights that ‘your eye follows’. However, the
visual aesthetics of romantic eyewitness discourses are repeatedly
disrupted. The fallible, emotional character at the centre of the epi-
sodic sketch is deceived by what she sees from the deck of the Anne.
Later, ashore, the young Mrs Moodie, baby in arms, is stunned by the
strife of tongues, disgusted at the sights of infection and savagery.
Under the influence of romanticism during the nineteenth century,
as Ian Baucom points out, sensibility discourse became increasingly
haunted and melancholic—the spectator aware of itself in the act of
looking and bearing witness. This is a feature of Susanna Moodie’s
autobiographical ‘I’—as it is in those two earlier accounts of gendered
eyewitness in the journals of Anna Maria Falconbridge and Mary
Ann Parker, who recoil at the sight of the suffering convicts on their
voyages. Moodie’s first sketches focus on the jarring incongruence
between conventional lines of sight and aesthetic responses to the
sublime and the deceptive ‘New World’ experiences that confront her
eyewitness. The sketches artfully exploit the fantasies of a grieving
and estranged narrator, susceptible to ‘fits of melancholy’. This is an
inspired and complex version of the autobiographical ‘I’ as the settler
wife and mother, constructed by the narrating ‘I’ of an older Mrs
Moodie. The world Moodie enters into through the waterway is a dis-
ordered one, superficially sublime but repeatedly deceptive, blurring
boundaries between human and animal worlds. These are all signs
of contamination and disarray, the temporal and spatial disorder of
the colony where, as we find repeatedly in life narrative in colonial
modernity, references to the limits of the human abound.
The commitment to evangelicalism and abolitionism, which drew
them together in the Pringle circle, was vital to how Susanna and John
conceived of their gendered, ethnic, and class identities as settlers in
Upper Canada. Catherine Hall’s analysis of middle-class behaviour
emphasizes the connections between the emergence of the Victorian

domestic subject and the anti-slavery campaigns. This gendered,
classed, and ethnicized subject is articulated through the separation
of the spheres of appropriate feminine and masculine conduct and
influence; an affirmation of middle-class propriety as opposed to
aristocratic licentiousness and working-class disorder; an imagined
national community of Englishness or Britishness that marginalized
Welsh, Scottish, and Irish ethnicities. In evangelical discourse in par-
ticular the conflation of a class, ethnic, and gendered identity in terms
of domesticity was emergent in the late eighteenth century and domi-
nant by 1830—we see these associations immediately in the ethnic and
gendered identities that become visible and audible in Moodie’s eye-
witness sketch, with its ‘cargo of lively savages from the Emerald Isle’
and degenerate women. Hall’s discussion of ‘civilizing subjects’ in this
period (including Macaulay & Son, her relational biography of the
abolitionist Zachary Macaulay and his son, the eminent historian and
politician Thomas Macaulay) identifies the association of ‘civilization’
with ‘Englishness’ in an imperial and imperializing project across
metropole and colonies (2002). The association of humanitarianism
and the civilizing mission with domestication is apparent through-
out auto/biographical representations in colonial modernity, both
visual and literary. It frames the essential portrait that accompanies
all editions of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative: a visual depiction of the
narrator as a domesticated urban man. It reappears in Bennelong’s
request for stockings and handkerchiefs, which draws on his expe-
riences of the metropolis and signals his awareness of appropriately
civilized behaviours and accessories that transform the savage into
the civilized. And, again, in Thomas Pringle’s assurance that Mary
Prince has all the attributes of English middle-class domestic gen-
tility: ‘she is remarkable for her decency and propriety of conduct—
and her delicacy, even in trifling minutiae, has been a trait of special
remark by females of my family’ (105). Benevolence, compassion, and
humanitarian sensibilities were attributes of middle-class respect-
ability and responsibility, part of this repertoire of domesticating
others and, as Hartman suggests, required for the dutiful submis-
sion required of black subjectivity, and its fashioning of individuality
(1997, 7). The association of domestication and dissolution, the haunt-
ing awareness of the limits of the human at the frontiers of white
settlement, confound the eyewitness in Moodie’s autobiographical
sketches. Amongst that batch of first Canadian sketches is ‘The Walk

to Dummer’, a melancholic account that becomes the last sketch of
the long descent into poverty in Roughing It, just before the change of
prospect that will enable the impoverished Moodies to leave the back-
woods. As in the ‘Grosse Isle’ sketch, degeneration and primitivism
become floating signifiers; they can easily attach to the genteel settlers
themselves. Dummer is the last clearing on the English Line, in the
midst of dark impenetrable forest that is the fitting abode ‘for every
unclean beast’: terra incognita.
As George Elliott Clarke’s reminder of the connections of blackness
and redness in constructions of white civility in colonial modernity
suggests, Moodie’s earlier connections to abolitionism shape represen-
tations of indigenous people in the Canadian sketches. The young Mrs
Moodie feels a strong connection with the Indian women, produced
by her traumatic experiences of poverty, maternity, and abjection in
the backwoods. However, Moodie’s earlier abolitionist experience
recorded in Prince’s History informs the privileges of benevolence that
are attached to white civility and gentility. Her eyewitness account of
the Indians at Rice Lake draws on an abolitionist discourse of frater-
nity as well as the tropes of the noble savage and the dissolute Irish: ‘the
Indian is one of Nature’s gentlemen—he never says or does a rude or
vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians who form the sur-
plus of over-populous European countries are far behind the wild man
in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy’ (21). It also remains embed-
ded in a disavowal that recurs in settler colonialism: the Indian people
are a dying race, a finite presence: ‘a mysterious destiny hangs over
them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely
sweeping them from the earth’ (318). Early indigenous autobiography
from the Rice Lake region contests these settler privileges of benevo-
lence and fraternity, and it suggests how indigenous life narrative in
colonial modernity projects both compliance and defiance.
Notes
1. Since Mary Wollstonecraft feminist critiques of marriage associated mar-
riage with a kind of slavery for women, an association which hinged on
‘obedience’ and a loss of property and independence which by law accom-
panied marriage for women. Strickland associates her change of status
with a change of voice; the ‘bluestockings’ were intellectual women who

took their place alongside men in urban intellectual circles from the end
of the eighteenth century.
2. Two sketches entitled ‘Scenes in Canada’ were published in the Victoria
Magazine in September and November 1847, and these became ‘A Visit to
Grosse Isle’ and ‘Quebec’, the first two sketches in Roughing It in the Bush.
6
The Life, History, and Travels, of
Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh, 1847
In 1847, as Susanna Moodie’s first series of Canadian sketches

appeared in the periodical press in Upper Canada, an
autobiography—the first autobiography written by a Canadian

Indian—became a bestseller, published in New York, with six edi-
tions that first year. The author was Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh, known
as George Copway. As with Tench and Bennelong, the contigu-
ity—chronological and geographical—of these autobiographical
accounts by Moodie and Copway invites speculation about associa-
tions between life writings from what are conventionally identified
as very different literary constellations. In his preamble, ‘A Word to
the Reader’, Copway negotiates a place to speak as an indigenous
man in the first person, drawing on the humanitarian discourse of
benevolence and charitable response to give witness as a ‘stranger’.
His language of Christian conversion and evangelical faith draws
on traditions of spiritual autobiography. As with Equiano and
Prince, so in indigenous testimony Christianity made available a
language of suffering and redemption that shapes the ideological ‘I’
of the narrative. However, as with these slave narrators, indigenous
narrative opened spaces for testimonial cast in collective terms of
the social suffering of an oppressed people that exceeds the dis-
courses of evangelicalism and abolition.
Copway’s Life, History, and Travels is generally recognized as the
first autobiography in Native American literature. It is in part an eth-
nohistory, telling in the first person the story ‘laid up in my memory’
The Life, History, and Travels, of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh • 59
(1847, 19) of his tribe and family in the Rice Lake region of Upper
Canada, where he was born in 1818:
My parents were of the Ojebwa nation, who lived on the lake back of
Cobourg, on the shores of Lake Ontario, Canada West. The lake called Rice
Lake, where there was a great quantity of wild rice, and much game of dif-
ferent kinds, before the whites cleared away the woods, where the deer and
the bear then resorted. (11)
Interestingly Copway’s History begins with the defeat and disposses-

sion of the Hurons by his great-grandfather’s tribe, who then estab-
lished themselves
amidst the gloom, which shrouded the once happy and populous village of
the Hurons; here their bones lay broad-cast around his wigwam; where,
among these woods once rang the way cry of the Hurons, echoing along
the valley of the river Trent . . . Their graves, forming a hillock, are now all
that remain of this once powerful nation. Their bones, gun barrels, toma-
hawks, war spears, large scalping knives, are yet to be found there. (13–14)
As this extract suggests, there is a melancholic discourse of the witness

in both indigenous and settler life writings from this region. Copway
describes the dispossession of the customs and epistemologies of the
Ojibwa people as a racialized and ongoing dispersal through white col-
onization, and he identifies ‘whites’ and ‘settlers’ as racialized identi-
ties. The dispersal and removal of indigenous people in Upper Canada
is a betrayal of trust (not a mysterious destiny). Copway testifies to the
ritual traditions of indigenous hunting, migration, and occupation of
the Rice Lake region and the insidious exchanges that destroyed these
lifeways, drawing on personal memory in the first person:
My grandfather lived here about this time, and held some friendly inter-
course with the whites. My father here learned the manners, customs and
worship of the nation. He, and others, became acquainted with the early
settlers . . . know . . . . . . . . And I know the day when he used to shake the
hand of the white man, and, very friendly, the white man would say ‘take
some whiskey’. (20)
In the year of Copway’s birth, 1818, the Ojibwa ‘surrendered’ 1,800,000

acres of their territory in Upper Canada to the British government,
and on this point he turns to make a direct address to his reader,

eliciting not compassion but reason in response:
For how much, do you ask? For $2,960 per annum! What a great sum for
British generosity! Much of the back country still remains unsold, and
I hope the scales will be removed from the eyes of my poor countrymen, that
they may see the robberies perpetrated upon them, before they surrender
another foot of territory. (21)
Copway’s autobiography coincides with the pioneering auto-

biographical narratives of settler colonialism, the letters, guides,
memoirs, and sketches written by the Moodie circle. This nar-
rative of the long and conflicted indigenous history in the Rice
Lake region is a claim to prior occupation of lands colonized as
backwoods, clearings, wilderness, and woods, the terra incognita
of pioneering discourse. Moodie herself makes no reference to
Copway, although her sister Catharine Parr Traill does mention
his Life in her fiction for young adults Canadian Crusoes (1986,
103). For Copway, testimony to indigenous dispossession draws on
a language of recognition that appeals to an ethics of exchange
and reciprocity. From the beginnings of testimonial life narrative
in settler literatures, indigenous writers testify to benevolence and
generosity as tactics of conquest and deception in the dispersal
of their people. This is a rights discourse that gestures to justice
through property law and their rights of ownership through prior
occupation.
George Copway’s autobiographical account testifies to the rapidity
of the physical and cultural colonization and dispossession of land,
languages, traditional knowledges, and kinship communities that
disinherited the Ojibwa people in the course of his own lifetime. The
surge of Ojibwa autobiographical writing in missionary journals that
precede Copway’s account testifies to the success of the Protestant
evangelical project in the Rice Lake region. There is no authentic
pre-contact indigenous identity to secure a ‘writing back’ to empire
here; the grounds of evangelical certitude are opposed not by a sim-
ple assertion of an antagonistic cultural tradition (Bhabha 2010, 49).
Copway’s melancholic witness is inevitably compromised and com-
plicit in the benevolent and romantic appropriation of the noble sav-
age as ‘Nature’s gentleman’, a docile, domesticated body of difference.
This is a sign of the limited modes of subjectivity and agency cultur-

ally available to indigenous autobiographical subjects. However, by
reading Copway’s Life, History, and Travels and Moodie’s Roughing
It in proximity we can shape another territory of translation, which
reflects on Enlightenment humanism and its discourses of civility.
The melancholic witness is an ethical and aesthetic positioning of
the spectator that testifies to successive and ongoing dispossession,
to the spectral presence of the dead, and a haunting sense of loss.
Postcolonial criticism is frequently drawn to philosophies of his-
tory that imagine an ongoing presence of the past. This situates liter-
ary texts both within the historical particularity in which they are
produced and, through recurrence and repetition, as an inheritance
which is ‘compelled to reengage the ideological struggles of an earlier
moment’ (Baucom 2005, 20). In ‘Dissemination’, his essay on ‘Time,
narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, Homi Bhabha turns
to Derridean ‘hauntology’ and to Fanon’s critique of the homogenous
time of the nation’s narrative to clock ‘postcolonial time’. This turns
aside from teleological traditions that relate past and present in lin-
eal, chronological order (which organizes the ‘anthological’ order of
national literary histories, for example) and what Bhabha calls the
‘polarized historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern’ that
anchors narratives in terms of origins, modernity, historical prior-
ity, and cultural supremacy. ‘Dissemination’ turns instead to ideas of
‘disjunctive time’ and unreconciled narratives that focus on repeti-
tion and the ongoing implications of the past in the present.1 These
encounters with the past, Bhabha suggests, introduce ‘an otherness
or alterity to the present’ (2010, 226), drawing texts into signifying
spaces of ‘iteration’ and repetition rather than progressive or lineal
seriality. ‘Dissemination’ problematizes ‘beginnings’ and ‘origins’ in
literary history and criticism. It turns to the ongoing ‘forgetting’ of
history—in fact an obligation to forget—and the constant assertion
of national sovereignty and subjectivity constitutive of the nation’s
narrative, and its struggle to sustain a lineal and singular time/line
of narration. Ruth Frankenberg argues the history of the self-naming
of white people as white is linked to imperial and colonial expan-
sion, simultaneous with the making of (white dominant) nation
states: ‘examining this history makes clear, indeed, why it is that race,
culture and nation slide so smoothly one into another in the pre-
sent, providing alibis for each other in contemporary social, cultural
and political discourses about race, nation, identity, ownership, and

belonging’ (1993, 9). As literary heritage, life writing is mobilized in
the public domain, where it bears witness to the past and engages
in the ongoing work of defining ideas of society, citizenship, and
subjectivity. ‘Heritage’ refers to a specific mode of commemorative
memory work tailored to present-day purposes. Chris Healy defines
the particular power of ‘heritage’ objects as not only a conjuring of
the past or an evocation of history, but also the deployment of his-
tory in imagining and defining citizenship and governance: ‘herit-
age refers to the mobilisation of historical understanding and social
memory in institutional and citizenly forms’ (2008, 102) In settler
cultures particularly, heritage returns to places of primary settle-
ment repeatedly, anxiously, obsessively. So, for example, the recent
republication of Tench’s Narrative as 1788 coincides with a resur-
gence of thinking about the settlement at Port Jackson as a ‘child of
the Enlightenment’—rational, humane, secular, and scientific—one
example of the ‘management’ of history in terms of white civility. The
reincarnation of Susanna Moodie as a spectral presence in contem-
porary Canadian literature also renews the currency and presence of
the melancholic witness, and its enduring association with benevo-
lence, ‘white civility’, and the conquest of indigenous peoples.
Colonial life narratives are more widely available now than ever
before. Literary histories and anthologies in Australia and Canada
incorporate indigenous testimony, explorer writings, and settler
journals as foundational texts in national literary histories; femi-
nist critics celebrate the tenacity and ingenuity of indigenous and
pioneering women in revised editions and anthologies; studies in
travel writing, postcolonialism, and life narrative produce new cir-
cuitries of production, reception, and interpretation. So, to return
to Frankenberg, the question of whether the adaptation, appropria-
tion, and remediation of these narratives participates in the ‘smooth
sliding’ of race, culture, and nation into the present and an ongoing
assertion of white civility remains. What kinds of spectatorship (or,
to return to Bhabha, ‘inscapes’) are enabled by the dissemination of
these accounts? These are critical questions about the ‘afterlives’ of
colonial life writing for postcolonial criticism. For example, Cynthia
Sugars and Laura Moss adopt chronological time as a measure for the
anthology Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts; how-
ever, they are alert to the fact that this necessarily places indigenous
narrative as a post-invasion discourse. So they begin with a Preface,

an autobiographical narrative by a contemporary indigenous
writer: Brian Maracle’s statement of indigenous epistemologies and
chronotopes that remain prior to, and independent of, historical
time. This recognizes indigenous sovereignty and actively relocates
the national literature in terms of indigenous presence. It draws on
autobiographical narrative to bear witness to the incommensurable
life histories of colonial modernity, questioning the ‘anthological’
time of nation and narration.
Reading life narrative ‘in postcolonial time’ reassesses these
renewed investments in colonial life writing. Ethical questions that
begin with testimonial transactions in colonial modernity remain
current, as critiques of white civility and the ‘smooth sliding’ of the
past into the present suggest. Alternatively, life narratives can present
the past as ‘unreconciled narrative’ and introduce a newness or alter-
ity to the present, as Bhabha (following Frederic Jameson) suggests.
So, for example, when Sara Salih associates Mary Prince with asylum
seekers in the most recent edition of the History it produces new and
dissonant associations, returning to the ‘bloodlines’ of slave cultures
that flow through life narrative. Similarly, networking Prince’s slave
narrative, Moodie’s sketches, and Copway’s autoethnography across
these chapters responds to Elliott Clarke’s association of slavery and
indigenous dispossession, and the entanglement of whiteness, red-
ness, and blackness. His suggestion in an interview about writing
and ethics that Roughing It is ‘really—audaciously—a displaced slave
narrative’ (Kyser 2007, 863) is one of several recent readings that open
up new ways of tracing the connections between Strickland/Moodie
and Prince, and the ongoing social life of the History.2
Why might postcolonial criticism in particular be interested
in contiguities and proximities, and in entanglements such
as this? A shift away from earlier binary models (such as cen-
tre and periphery, for example, or colonizer and colonized) and
nation-based imaginaries and the turn to alternative grammars,
connections, networks, and frameworks in contemporary post-
colonial studies—Mbembe’s ‘time of entanglement’ in the post-
colony (2001), Gregory’s ‘colonial present’ (2004), Nixon’s ‘slow
violence’, Chakrabarty’s ‘provincializing Europe’—question his-
toricist interpretations. Historicism refers to Europe as an origi-
nating presence, ‘history effectively happens “for the first time” in
the west, and people in the non-west are always effectively behind
their western counterparts’ (Huggan 2013b, 423). Alternative
humanisms, imaginative geographies, and multiple modernities
recur in postcolonial theory and practice now, as globalization and
transnational relations reframe the earlier modes and models of
postcolonial scholarship (Brydon 2013, 427).
Notes
1. Bhabha’s examples include the uncanny presence of doubled and divided
selves of Freud’s ‘cultural’ unconscious; the ‘profound ambivalence’
of Benjamin’s narratives of modernity; the ‘double and split’ time of
national representation that questions the homogenous and horizontal
view associated with the nation’s imagined community; and Jameson’s
‘political unconscious’ that drives the return of unreconciled narratives.
2. See, for example, Thomas’s reading of Moodie’s later prose (2014) and
Medovarski’s reading of Moodie as a diasporic writer (2014).
7
Proximate Reading
It is not unusual for life narratives to be spectacularly successful, with

multiple editions and translations, and then to fall into obscurity
until some later date when they find a new reading public. For their
contemporaries and ours, the value and currency of these narratives
accrue from their status as testimonial: eyewitness accounts of ‘new’
worlds caught up in conquest and colonization. Proximate reading
is interested in the closeness of what might seem to be very different
narratives in terms of ‘literary sociality’: ‘that is relations between
readers, texts and the meanings that bind these relations together’
(Gelder 2010, 1). This sociality, and these shared relations, are shaped
by discourses of testimony and witness that energized postcolonial
life narrative in colonial modernity, and set in motion a wider field
of associations across life writing, a meshwork of letters, memoirs,
guides, biographies, notebooks, journals, travelogues.1
It is not unusual for literary histories of autobiography to begin
in the late eighteenth century, in association with western moder-
nity. Bart Moore-Gilbert reminds us that Jean-Jacques Rousseau
was one of Equiano’s contemporaries; he died in 1778 and from
1782 to 1789 his autobiographical writings were published post-
humously (2009, xi). Rousseau’s Confessions is generally regarded
as the first modern autobiography because it draws on revolu-
tionary and distinctively modern ideas about the self in terms of
individual sovereignty and autonomy—this is the ‘self-interested
individual of property who was intent on assessing the status
of the soul or the meaning of public achievement’ (Smith and
Watson 2010, 2), it is not a subject that is commodified as private
property. It affirms the uniqueness of the individual personality:
‘an irreducible sense of self which can be distinguished from

all social, cultural, and religious identities, and which indeed is
experienced most intensely in reaction against those identities’
(Patrick Coleman 2008, vii). This is clear from the very beginning
of the Confessions, the sovereign subject and authoritative ‘I’ of
western humanist autobiography:
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imita-

tor. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this
man is to be myself.
Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any
other that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that
exist. (5)
Rousseau’s ‘Myself alone’ assumes an authentic self-identity that

emerges from psychic interiority, an essential sovereign self within
the narrating ‘I’, which lies ‘unified, evidentiary, even expectant,
awaiting transmission to a surface, a tongue, a pen, a keyboard’
(Smith 1998, 108). This self-expressive theory of autobiography natu-
ralizes an intimate relationship of body, text, and reader that seals
the narrating, narrated, and historical ‘I’. In a postcolonial reading of
Rousseau’s Confessions, Moore-Gilbert draws attention to the impor-
tance of ethnicity and the presence of ‘other worlds’ in Rousseau’s
autobiography: ‘this founding text of a highly influential new model
of the western Self, and of its narrativisation, is characterised by
extensive and complex imbrications with non-European Others’
(2005b, 302). The Confessions is a complex text, and postcolonial
criticism can have things to say about it by drawing it into global
networks in this way.
Beginning with colonial modernity we observe another tradition
that arose in proximity to this canonical autobiographical literature
of western modernity. The ideoscapes of Enlightenment humanism
that gave rise to Rousseau’s ‘Myself alone’ also enabled the projec-
tion of collective subjects and traumatic histories through testimo-
nial transactions in other worlds. The concept of ‘colonial modernity’
opens ways of thinking about the beginnings of postcolonial life writ-
ing. Rousseau’s sovereign subject is associated with that turn to the
‘invention of the human’ that Lynn Hunt describes as a great project
of western modernity in the eighteenth century. Colonial modernity
Proximate Reading • 67
expands ways of thinking about this ‘great project’ conceptually,

geographically, and temporally. The ideoscapes of Enlightenment
humanism were embedded in European empires in an era of con-
quest and expansion. For postcolonial critics, from Franz Fanon
to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak,
among others, the singular and sovereign subject of Enlightenment
humanism—Rousseau’s ‘myself alone’—is always implicated in

imperialism and race, and cast in the form of ‘the settler-colonial
white man’. Sovereignty was a privilege not extended to the enslaved,
the dispossessed, and the disinherited. However these are, no less
than Rousseau, subjects of Enlightenment modernity and narrated
lives. Both Fanon and Chakrabarty insist on the promise of human-
ism for colonized subjects. By focusing on colonial testimonial here
(eyewitness life narratives that emerged from colonial spaces within
the period of ‘first contact’) I have mapped the opportunities for self-
representation that were produced by the humanitarian turn from
the late eighteenth century, which is critical for histories of life nar-
rative as well as the novel.
In testimonial narrative a narrator speaks publicly on behalf of the
many who have suffered, and lays claim to truth and authenticity in
accounts of social suffering. We see this very explicitly in the slave
narratives by Equiano and Prince. Testimony struggles to give wit-
ness to the unspeakable and indescribable trauma of many to those
who bear witness—spectators who are privileged, possibly benefi-
ciaries and complicit in exploitation and oppression in other worlds.
For the dispossessed, the opportunities to draw on discourses of
humanism to bear witness to the terror of colonial modernity are
constrained. Testimonial narrative can enable subaltern access to a
powerful voice to speak as a political subject; however, as Spivak’s
case study of the testimonial of Bhubaneswari suggests, in colonial
testimony mutually untranslatable discourses collide and the capac-
ity to speak in humanist terms from a position of subjectivity, eco-
nomic liberty, and political agency is limited (Morris 2010, 7).
This is, as Chakrabarty suggests, the limited promise of human-
ism. Humanitarianism enabled those whose sovereignty had been
radically compromised to give testimony and to elicit compassion
and empathy in response. Rousseau’s sovereign subject celebrated
its liberation from collective identities; however, for others, such as
Olaudah Equiano, to claim a place to speak autobiographically as an
African was to stake a claim to recognition. Those who testify speak

on behalf of a collective and about collective trauma, such as geno-
cide, dispossession, slavery, removal. These are catastrophic events
that are visited upon a people, they are not the fate of tragic individu-
als. To individualize and psychologize testimonial traces of social
suffering of this magnitude—for example the practice of represent-
ing subaltern and indigenous people such as Bennelong, Copway,
or Baartman as tragic and flawed individuals in auto/biographical
discourses—is to misrepresent a key feature of social suffering: this is
collective historical trauma.
Spivak’s writings on testimonial narrative and subaltern speech
draw attention to the unreliability of its addressee, who is called
upon to bear witness. In the absence of its witness, testimony fails:
the sound of one hand clapping. To return to metaphors of currency
and value, testimonial life narrative travels on shifting sentiments of
witness and spectatorship, and it is vitally dependent on its capac-
ity to engage in affective transactions. The history of affect, benevo-
lence, empathy, sympathy most particularly, is vital in the shaping
networks of testimony and witness. Lauren Berlant emphasizes the
close associations of compassion and aversion (2004), and this sug-
gests the volatile contracts that are established between those who
testify and those who bear witness. The paper empire of first-person
narratives in colonial modernity—journals, memoirs, traveller’s
accounts, letters, sketches, journals, diaries, and so on—repeatedly
return to lines of sight and bodies of evidence that produce these
autobiographical subjects. We see this in Tench’s conflicted accounts
of first contact and the ‘humane management’, or, more ostenta-
tiously and creatively, in Susanna Moodie’s sketches, where the mer-
curial historical and narrated ‘I’ spectacularly deconstructs itself.
The figure of the spectator is inherently narcissistic, constituted in
and through the act of looking. Concerns about the privileges and
narcissism of benevolence, which recur in debates about humani-
tarianism, are everywhere apparent in colonial modernity. This is a
legacy that returns now, in contemporary accounts that bear witness
to testimony, and it is the subject of the next chapter, on responses to
Truth and Reconciliation testimony.
Frequently testimony is defined as a ‘sub-type’, secondary to
the canonical western autobiographical narrative of me, myself,
I. These chapters track a selection of postcolonial narratives that
emerged alongside the autobiographical narratives of ‘the west-

ern Self ’, and entangled with it, drawing on shared ideoscapes
of Enlightenment humanism. The co-presence of discourses of
human rights and humanitarian compassion and the anxieties and
constraints around what it means to be human are fundamental to
the longue durée of postcolonial life narrative. This testifies to the
promise of social justice, recognition, and democracy that mobi-
lized testimonial narratives, and at the same time it gives witness
to the limits and exclusions of these freedoms. As Fanon asserts,
the rights of ‘man’ have been available to the privileged few, despite
the global language and cosmopolitan promise of egalitarianism.
The literary history of both individual and collective forms of auto-
biographical narrative in modernity begins in the late eighteenth
century, in the proximity of Rousseau’s Confessions and Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative, in fact.
The concern with the ‘sociability’ of testimonial narrative—when
it travels and assumes new forms and finds different publics, or
when it fails to pay due regard to experiences of suffering—shapes
the contemporary case studies in the following chapters. These track
networks and routes of testimonial life narrative in a series of trans-
actions. When does testimony become a transformative agent that
commands witness and changes ways of thinking about self and
others? When does it become propaganda, a ‘soft weapon’ in the
colonial present? Most importantly, how does testimonial narrative
travel across cultures, media, and histories in pursuit of social jus-
tice? These contemporary studies will focus on the transformations
of testimony through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation,
where testimonial narrative travels in global networks of intertex-
tual and transtextual transfer and exchange.2 Testimony can thrive
and trigger powerful and transformative cycles—such as Truth and
Reconciliation narratives in South Africa, and Stolen Generations
and Residential School narratives in Australia and Canada. It can
enable emergent traditions of Dalit life narrative, through transmis-
sion. On the other hand it can fail to bear witness to social suffering—
for example the faltering testimonies to rape narrative in the Congo,
and the aversion to refugees and asylum seekers. These are issues
for later chapters on the dissemination of testimony. The proximate
readings of testimonial narrative in colonial modernity in this series
of ‘shorts’ that stage the contradictions of history (Young 2003, 8)
are symptomatic, and they present some ways of thinking about

postcolonial life narrative in a longue durée. Other nodes, routes,
montages, networks, and associations remain to be mapped.
Testimonial transactions are transnational and transcultural,
embedded in global networks of traumatic memory and witness,
campaigns for social justice, reconciliation, and reparation. Texts,
like identities, do not travel one way, from centre to periphery, from
past to present, but in bits and pieces, through repeated transits,
and across media, transforming in various settings and places, and
convening different publics at different points in their social lives
(Hofmeyr cited in Nuttall 2009, 3). Thinking about life narrative in
terms of circuits, layers, overlapping fields, sociality, and transna-
tional networks, diasporic histories, proximities, and shared fields of
discourse and exchange, as I do here, creates an approach to the tex-
tual cultures of postcolonial life narrative that grasps the proximities
generated by testimonial narratives. The intellectual and emotional
convergences that empower testimony are tenuous thresholds that
terminate and evaporate, becoming meaningless and unintelligi-
ble. Modes of translatability and entanglement are short-lived, and
spectral (Nuttall 2009, 3) and yet they can resurface, to assume vivid
and extraordinary afterlives through adaptation, appropriation, and
remediation.
The contemporary case studies that follow draw these ways of
thinking about life narrative into a complex temporality of past, pre-
sent, and future, tracking those ‘affective clusterings where history
makes its mark’ (Cooppan 2013b, 104) in and through postcolonial
testimonial narrative in a longue durée. Colonial testimonial nar-
ratives remain potent and proximate still, and they are mobilized
variously in the colonial present as heritage. For example the 2007
commemoration of the 1807 Act of Parliament to abolish the slave
trade in Britain featured Olaudah Equiano as a celebrity; he was,
as James Walvin remarks, ‘ubiquitous’ (2007, 12). At the exhibition
dedicated to Equiano at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
late that year, the visitors’ first encounter was with the ‘Equiano suits’
made by the Hockley Youth Project during the Culture Clubs’ activi-
ties associated with the exhibition. One of these suits of many colours
suggests the renewed currency of Equiano’s image now: ‘The fame
and fortune Equiano gained gave us the idea to put him on to paper
money like the Queen. Lots of us designed and made money and in
the end we had so much we could cover an entire suit’ (Torrington

et al. 2007, 35).3 A number of these artworks associate Equiano with
wealth and fortune, and his ability to make money from things
others regarded as worthless. For the participants in the youth pro-
ject he is a ‘wheeler dealer’: ‘we dream about being able to make our
fortune like Equiano’. This owes less to the Narrative, with its call
for social justice and testimonial on behalf of the enslaved, than to
the entrepreneur who ‘buys’ his freedom and purchases a suit to cel-
ebrate. This version of Equiano is a creation of a biography: Vincent
Carretta’s Equiano, the African: The Biography of a Self-Made Man
(2006), translated into the argot of contemporary youth culture in
Birmingham. It is, none the less, a testimony to the opportunism
and agency of this autobiographical subject, and its capacity to renew
agency through remediation and appropriation from text to textile.
In the longue durée of life narrative we track the continuities and
change in the transmission of autobiographical narrative in this
way—across the enduring association of Equiano and his Narrative
with the vicissitudes of abolitionism and campaigns for human
rights, for example, and the legacy of tireless entrepreneur forever
promoting his book and its cause in provincial cities such as this.
At the same time, the Equiano suits break with tradition and create
new witnessing publics for his life story: drawing on the art museum,
for example, and the turn to ‘the testimony of things’ and material
culture in testimonial life narrative. The ‘self-made man’ is now, as
he always was, a product of the possibilities and constraints of life
narrative, an autobiographical ‘I’ whose currency is negotiated in
the ongoing transactions of testimony and witness, an auto/bio-
graphical composite whose ‘true’ history is questioned by his biog-
rapher. Equiano remains a vibrant presence, shaped and reshaped in
moments that are discursive, historical, and cultural, taking every
opportunity to draw attention to the historicity and locatedness of
stories and selves, together.
Notes
1. Smith and Watson’s discussion of the ‘spaces of sociality’ in autobio-
graphical narratives is relevant here as a way of approaching the rhetorical
negotiations across boundaries that occur in testimonial transactions

(2010, 44).
2. I am drawing here on Liz Stanley’s useful work on intertextual and tran-
stextual transfers (1992). The first emphasizes how life narrative engages
with other autobiographical acts, and the second with genre crossings
between, for example, life writing and fiction. The latter are the subject
of chapter 11.
3. A slide show of the Equiano suits is available online at <http://www.equiano.
org/culture_club.html>. Accessed 18 November 2013. The quotations that
follow are from that slide show. The catalogue is edited by Torrington et al.
(2007).
Part 2
The Passages of Testimony
Contemporary Studies
8
Afterlives
In the Wake of the TRC
I also believe that every single creative person in the country is react-
ing to the more than two thousand overwhelmingly black TRC tes-
timonies that have been fed into the air in recent years—either by
contradicting, confirming, nuancing, undermining, finding another
style of being black/white/female voice, or even ignoring them.
Antjie Krog (Brown and Krog 2011, 57)
Travelling with Ur Texts

In The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha is mindful of the time when
the ‘present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest’ (2010, 26).
In the wake of testimony, he suggests, we must go looking ‘for the
join’, for ways that the work of testimony is enjoined in other dis-
cursive frames. The present ‘tense’ with testimony, and ‘arrested’ by
it, grasps its contemporaneity, opportunism, and vulnerability. The
audibility and visibility of testimony fades: the attention of the sec-
ond person called to witness in and through testimony is a fragile
enchantment, and the ‘witnessing publics’ that arise in response to
testimonial narrative are tenuous and conflicted. Textual cultures of
testimonial life narrative map its changing currents: the rush and
urgency of a succession of editions, which fade and then can become
vivid again when translated into a later historical moment. The pro-
liferation of marginalia, epitext, and peritext calibrates the audibility
of these voices. For example Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Saartjie

Baartman, and Bennelong are volatile subjects who testify to histori-
cal trauma in colonial modernity. Their afterlives in contemporary
literature occur through the uncanny power of testimonial narra-
tive to cross a discursive threshold and command witness anew. In
this way testimonial narrative is adapted, appropriated, remediated,
and brought alive in transnational networks of exchange. However,
the shelf life of testimony is always limited, even though it has the
potential to accrue value again, in new circumstances that enable
campaigns for social justice elsewhere. The eruption of those ‘great
world events’ that Bhabha identifies, such as slavery and apartheid,
drives transformations of literary form that pass these stories on
through remediation, appropriation, adaptation. The South African
Truth Commission (TRC) produced a definitive cycle in the history
of testimony and witness late last century; postcolonial life narra-
tive continues to be ‘arrested’ by it, and productively so. The idea of
aftermath is the focus here, and the ongoing legacies of the TRC that
are incubated in its ur texts, most particularly Antjie Krog’s trilogy
of memoirs, now known collectively as Country of My Skull, and J. M.
Coetzee’s fiction Disgrace.
An extensive literature and criticism on testimony and witness
surrounds the TRC, a project of collective and individual remember-
ing that sought to ‘restor[e]‌the human and civil dignity’ of victims
of gross human civil rights violations under the apartheid regime
between 1960 and 1993 by ‘granting them the opportunity to relate
their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims’
(TRC 1, 140). Testimony was fundamental to the project of reconcilia-
tion, reparation, and renewal in the new South Africa, and ‘commis-
sioning the truth’ in the service of nation building and reconciliation
was an integral part of an international regime of human rights by
the end of last century (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 65). The commit-
ment to narratability—to witness and confession—in discourses of
reconciliation and reparation produced a turn to the politics and eth-
ics of reconciliation that emerged late last century, where testimony
accrued currency and value as a way of redressing historical injustice
and facilitating individual and collective recovery. The TRC recog-
nized different kinds of truth, and paramount among these was the
‘personal or narrative truth’ of witnessing the subjective experience
of suffering and victimization, a truth based on people’s ‘perceptions,
Afterlives: In the Wake of the TRC • 77
stories, myths and memories’ (TRC 1, 112). Now, in the aftermath,

literary criticism actively engages with what Rosemary Jolly calls
‘cultured violence’: ways that testimonial narrative and its rhetori-
cal forms can implicitly render some subjects available for violation
(2010, 9).
There is a belatedness about testimony in South African literature
and criticism now, a desire to open other ways of thinking and writ-
ing about contemporary public and private life.1 The desire to move
on, beyond the TRC, produces life narratives that question its trauma
cultures. For example, Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009) is a
rebel yell. In hot pink livery with its provocative title embellished
in silver script, this memoir demands attention. What does it mean,
Dlamini asks, for black South Africans to remember life under
apartheid with fondness? His book draws on ‘reflective nostalgia’,
an engagement with the past that is shaped in terms of longing.2 He
insists that nostalgia is about the present, and about present anxi-
eties that make him ‘cherish scattered fragments of memory’ (18).
These fragments are rich with memories of a happy childhood in the
black township of Kathelong during apartheid. Cast in the inner and
sensory terms of nostalgic memory, this township is part of a global
world: familiar with the sounds of Elton John and Marvin Gaye as
well as Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens; barracking for the
Afrikaner boxer Gerhardus Coetzee as ‘one of ours’. In this global
register of nostalgic memory Dlamini’s memoir evokes transnational
affiliations with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities as intertexts.
Dlamini’s apartheid South Africa was never black and white; there
are shades of grey, zones of ambiguity, which individuals traverse in
the course of their daily lives, that are always connected to ‘multiple
elsewheres’. Native Nostalgia is both autobiographical narrative and
cultural biography, a gathering of fragments of memory, ‘souvenirs of
the imagination’. These sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes of
township life, the ‘sense’ of the township, are the embodied pleasures
of nostalgic recall, and yet are shaped by precisely historicized tech-
nologies: the history of radio; township cosmologies; youth cultures
and social distinction; and the moral economy of mutual exchange
and obligation that regulated neighbourhood life. Native Nostalgia
presents different and irreconcilable pasts and contrary practices of
traumatic and nostalgic memory that circulate in proximity through
current life narrative. The narrative of truth and reconciliation that

links the work of testimony and traumatic memory to individual and
collective healing in the ‘new’ post-apartheid South Africa is called
into question by nostalgic memory work like this. For Dlamini the
TRC ‘master’ narrative that dominates the historiography of the
struggle obscures the complexity and richness of life amongst black
South Africans even under colonialism and apartheid. It renders
black South Africans as ‘faceless masses who experienced apartheid
in the same way, suffered the same way, fought the same way’ (18).
Dlamini’s ‘souvenirs’ challenge the privileged association of trau-
matic memory and truth through the TRC.
Likewise the collection of life narratives gathered in Liz McGregor
and Sarah Nuttall’s anthology At Risk: Writing on and over the
Edge of South Africa deliberately turns to ‘candid, intimate voices’
to challenge the testimonial culture of the Truth Commission
(2007, 9). These narratives are, the editors argue, a ‘second wave’
of post-apartheid life narrative that arises in a ‘new age’ of writ-
ing ranging across diverse social issues (AIDS, crime, new forms of
mobility and migration, consumerism). This reaches beyond a litera-
ture of testimony and empathic witness to grasp the lived textures
and transformations of public and private lives beyond the TRC.3
Amidst this second wave, post-apartheid life narrative turns to rep-
etition and reiteration, to cycles and sequence. In 2009–11, Nelson
Mandela’s biography is followed by Conversations with Myself; Antjie
Krog’s Country of My Skull becomes a trilogy with the publication of
Begging to be Black, her third memoir; J. M. Coetzee’s autrebiogra-
phy is published as a trilogy in one volume for the first time, Scenes
from Provincial Life. A distinctive and networked criticism emerges
from an intelligentsia that turns to ‘entanglement’ as a key structur-
ing concept for post-apartheid literature and culture. The book that
makes this case, Sarah Nuttall’s Entanglement, is also published in
2009 (as is Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia).
This intertextuality creates the point of entry for this chapter. First,
it turns to ‘ur texts’ of the TRC, the carriers of African testimony
and witness to a transnational witnessing public. Second, it follows
conversations about literature and philosophy that open new ways of
thinking about postcolonial aesthetics and humanism in response
to cultured violence. The term ‘ur text’ is used by Mark Sanders in
Ambiguities of Witnessing (2007) for texts that have become essential
in thinking about the TRC, and about its work of reconciliation and
reparation in the wake of apartheid. Ur texts are highly self-reflexive
compositions: the language and medium of the art is both the sub-
ject and the object of the work. Most importantly, they incubate a
deeply flawed subject, the ‘troubled, amnesiac white South African
psyche’. The phrase comes from J. M. Coetzee’s appreciation of
William Kentridge’s work, and it recognizes a fellow traveller (2010).
For Coetzee, like Dlamini, the position of the victim and witness in
testimonial narrative has been an ongoing preoccupation, most obvi-
ously in his novel Disgrace (1999), which is ubiquitous in discussions
of post-apartheid South Africa, and that deliberately refuses to mime
and bear witness to the African testimony of Petrus. This is a concern
in Coetzee’s Lives of Animals (1999) too, where Elizabeth Costello
is invited to Amsterdam to give a lecture on ‘Witness, Silence and
Censorship’. These fictions are transparently self-referential yet
opaquely autobiographical—the author Coetzee and the characters
David Lurie and Elizabeth Costello are entangled subjects. So too
is the ‘autrebiographical’ subject of Coetzee’s trilogy Scenes from
Provincial Life. By using the third person to speak of the self, and
drawing the ‘autre’ into biography, to ‘other’ the self, Coetzee’s tril-
ogy is no more intimate or reliably self-referential than the proximate
fictions of Lives of Animals and Disgrace, with their ambiguous auto-
biographical connections of author and autobiographical subject,
and human and animal worlds that collide in a violent holocaust.
Third, thinking with ur texts tracks the dissemination of South
African life narratives in the wake of the TRC transnationally, and
historically in the longue durée of postcolonial life narrative. It
is symptomatic of post-apartheid writing that Elizabeth Costello
travels from Australia to the Netherlands for her lectures on wit-
nessing, and that David Lurie, the protagonist of Disgrace, is preoc-
cupied with the language of European romanticism in Cape Town.
This transnational migration of text is evident elsewhere: Antjie
Krog’s autobiographical trilogy Country of My Skull concludes
with philosophical discussions with an Australian philosopher in
Berlin, and early versions of the memoir appeared in the British
press. Ur texts and their distinctive entanglement in testimony
and witness move beyond nation and narration. They migrate into
the global networks of postcolonial literature, feminist criticism,
world literature, and ‘traumatic literature’, recently identified as a
new literary constellation (Rosendahl Thomsen 2008, 138). Ur texts

become nodes—points in a transnational network where things
come together only to be re-routed again, in multiple and ongoing
intertextual associations.4 This kind of networked criticism is, as
I have argued earlier, a feature of postcolonial approaches to life
narrative.
An entanglement of humans, things, and non-human creatures,
of human subject and inanimate object recurs. As Nuttall argues,
in the wake of the suffering and violence of slavery, colonization
and apartheid, where the boundaries of what it meant to be human
were being negotiated and tested daily, a reformulation of human-
ism is required.5 Ur texts transform genres, modes, and media
to reflect on this legacy from the perspective of the witness: art,
film, and theatre in the case of William Kentridge’s installa-
tions; fiction and autrebiography for Coetzee; memoir for Krog.
A ‘post-humanist’ inflection calls humanity, humanitarianism,
and the humane into question. For example Kentridge’s Ubu and
the Truth Commission, an assemblage of drawings, photomontage,
film, puppetry, and actors by Kentridge (in collaboration with Jane
Taylor) is one of the ur texts of the TRC that inspires extensive
commentary. In performance the puppets re-enact actual testi-
mony from commission transcripts. Jolly’s discursive analysis
of cultured violence suggests that in order to effectively under-
stand social violence our most intimately held notions of what
it means to be human need to be thoroughly scrutinized (2010,
38), and so they are. The human, mechanical, and animal images
of Kentridge’s installations, the ‘animal holocaust’ that haunts
Elizabeth Costello, and the treatment of non-human animals and
corpses in Disgrace question speciesism and anthropocentrism.
Shifting discourses that demarcate human and non-human beings
and the proximity of human, animal, and thing troubles ur texts.
This ‘posting’ of humanism is a sign of abiding tensions within
humanism, and of a questioning of what resources for political
agency it offers for postcolonial theory and its thinking on auto-
biographical representation. What resources does memoir bring
to this critique of cultured violence and its ‘posting’ of human-
ism? This question produces the extended reflection on testimony
that preoccupies Antjie Krog’s trilogy of memoirs, the collective
Country of My Skull.
Transformative Daily Listening . . .

What remains of the archive of ‘more than two thousand overwhelm-
ingly black TRC testimonies that have been fed into the air in recent
years’? (Brown and Krog 2011, 57). This hub of the TRC is now an
online archive at the commission website, which includes selections
of transcripts of testimony, the volumes of the final report, the legis-
lative frameworks that established the commission in 1995, and some
extracts of film and radio commentary that capture presentations of
testimony. It includes the catalogue of testimonial abstracts that was
published in South Africa in August 2002 in the seventh and final
volume of the Report, which has been described as a ‘monument’
to black suffering. These abstracts record the names of victims and
summaries of the testimonies of those ‘who came forward to speak
of their suffering’, the victims whose ‘stories symbolize the greater
experience and suffering of our people, many of whom were not able
to come forward to tell their own story’ (TRC 7, Foreword).6 The TRC
received statements from 21,290 people of whom more than 19,050
were found to be victims of a gross violation of human rights.7 It elic-
ited testimony and provided an infrastructure whereby individual
narratives of suffering were gathered into the making of a collective
memory. In this way, as the ‘Foreword’ to the Report suggests, those
who spoke of individual experiences of the ‘horrors of the past’ tes-
tified on behalf of many others who could not come forward to tell
their story.
Bearing witness to testimony was an ethical and affective
imperative that shaped an imagined community for a ‘new’ South
Africa: the production and reception of testimonial narrative was
folded into larger narratives of a community of the nation shaped in
terms of an ethics of recognition, reconciliation, and reparation.8 The
affective and ethical work of testimonies to human rights violations
was framed as acts of a new and national citizenship, articulated
within an ethical framework that draws on the distinctively African
humanist ethics of ubuntu, the international discourse of human
rights, and Christian humanitarianism. These cross-cultural philo-
sophical groundings extend long-established historical associations
of testimony, witness, humanism, and rights discourse discussed in
Part 1 of this book. The figures that inhabit this testimonial archive—
victim, perpetrator, bystander, and beneficiary—are not unique to
the TRC, but the performance and circulation of these African sto-
ries across multi- media platforms produced ‘transformative daily
listening’ (Mark Sanders 2007, 137) and haunting embodiments and
figurations of suffering and responsibility that are its distinctive
legacy.
Antjie Krog’s memoir Country of My Skull (1998) is embedded in
this testimonial culture. It reproduces testimony, performs an affec-
tive response as the second-person witness, and it circulates through
multiple editions and remediations that produce a belated and exten-
sive transnational witnessing public.9 Country of My Skull is now
the title of an autobiographical trilogy, a sequence that includes A
Change of Skin (2003) and Begging to be Black (2009). The ‘troubled,
amnesiac white South African psyche’ of the ur text has become the
definitive proxy witness in a transnational public sphere, where the
memoir is read ‘efferently’ as a book whose lessons can be read off
the page and applied to life (Barnard 2006, 15; Garman 2010, 188).
Krog’s trilogy is an extended and troubled reflection on the ethics
and aesthetics of bearing witness to African testimony, along with
a coda, There was this Goat (2009), which returns to a single haunt-
ing testimony. Intertextual links permeate Krog’s memoirs, where
creative non-fiction and fiction engage in debates about the limits
of humanism and its ethics of bearing witness, the appropriation of
testimony by the second-person witness, and the status of memoir as
a mimetic form.
Creative non-fiction transforms memoir—a genre traditionally
associated with an account of the authoritative self in history—
to ‘host’ TRC testimony. This is a genre of life narrative that has
been identified as ‘the’ genre of South African writing now, a writ-
ing that makes its meanings at an unstable fault line of the literary
and the journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial, and that
negotiates and narrates the complexities of post-apartheid identi-
ties, and rethinking whiteness in particular (Brown and Krog 2011,
57). The ‘troubled amnesiac white psyche’ of this ur text is a public
intellectual, a journalist and well-known poet, a mother, lover, and
wife, a daughter, an Afrikaner and an anti-apartheid activist.10 The
page is a collage of prose, poetry, Afrikaans, English, and multiple
autobiographical ‘I’. Krog’s writing cuts, cites, and decontextualizes
through ‘découpage’ at the same time as it reassembles, recontextu-
alizes, and aggregates (Rostan 2007, 148). This suturing of multiple
autobiographical forms into a composite memoir ‘hosts’ testimony

in the presence of a narrating ‘I’ that is complicit in the damage of
apartheid. As a celebrated Afrikaans writer and the daughter of
an Afrikaner family with an ancestral history that extends back to
the pioneering history of the Boers, she is a beneficiary of the race-
based and ethnicized apartheid hierarchy. The trilogy includes an
extended and intimate account of the history, language, and culture
of the Afrikaner that humanizes and indigenizes this settler culture
through nostalgic memory. This resonates with Dlamini’s turn to
‘reflective nostalgia’, and the question of what it means to recall life
under apartheid in terms of nostalgic and sensory childhood mem-
ory.11 At the same time the trilogy is an extended enquiry into ways
of thinking about belonging, and the possibilities for reformulat-
ing post-apartheid identity in terms of the expansive and inclusive
African humanism of ubuntu that exceeds and questions the ethics
of western humanism. Nelson Mandela’s biography is an intertext,
as the work of translating this biography into Afrikaans becomes
the focus of Krog’s speculations about what ‘African’ means in a
new and expanded post-apartheid nation in A Change of Tongue.
The autobiographical narrator’s work on an Afrikaans translation
of Mandela’s iconic post-apartheid life narrative and her symbolic
journey to Timbuktu, where she reads in Afrikaans and is recog-
nized as an African poet, establish the claims for Afrikaans as an
indigenous African language. In a prescient analysis of extracts
from Country that was published in the English press in 1998, the
novelist Zoë Wicomb argues that Krog’s memoir plays a major role
in the rehabilitation of whiteness and refiguring of Afrikanerhood
in the new state (1998, 363).
Like Kentridge’s Ubu play, Krog’s ur text takes testimony into itself
to reproduce the dynamics of witness of the TRC. Rosemary Jolly
suggests the translation of TRC testimony into a performative event
potentially victimizes the survivor who testifies and consigns him/
her to abjection yet again. It also risks positioning those who are cast
as witness/listeners to the testimony ‘in the second person’ in com-
plicity. A juxtaposition of animate actors and inanimate puppets,
human and animal, is essential to the irony of Kentridge’s Ubu; those
with human form are inhumane, and the wooden puppets that stake
a claim to be human ‘perform’ a human and empathetic response
(Jolly 2010, 34). The risk that is engaged in Ubu and staged in its
elaborate post-human assemblage haunts compositions that host tes-

timony, as Sanders suggests:
the wooden puppets representing witnesses disclose ambiguity and equiv-

ocality—a voicing of testimony but also the possibility of mistranslation
and therefore of ventriloquism—of semic and thus of wider cultural vio-
lence, which may, against the best will in the world, compound the viola-
tion to which a witness testifies . . . an inauguration of voice may also be an
inauguration or repetition of violence. (2007, x)
These concerns about testimony and cultural violence are a legacy of

the Truth Commission that preoccupies its ur texts.
Host/age
Country is both host and hostage to TRC testimony. It is Sanders’s
reading that establishes the first of these relations between literature
and testimony most eloquently in terms of a unique intimacy and
mutuality of the TRC and this memoir: the seventh volume of the
TRC report acknowledges the importance of the literary imagination
in the work of reconciliation and reparation by taking into itself as
epigraph the lyric poem that concludes Krog’s memoir, ‘Country of
Grief and Grace’. In turn, the memoir incorporates testimony: ver-
batim and without comment in some cases, and with extensive and
speculative metacommentary in others. For Sanders this ‘hosting’ of
testimony establishes a ‘hospitality to the words of witnesses’: Krog’s
memoir ‘mimes’ exchanges before the commission, ‘setting to work,
in its own textual conduct, the basic structures that emerge between
questioner and witness’ (1998, 150). By invoking ‘hospitality’ in its
Derridean sense Sanders is gesturing to the ‘ambiguities of witness-
ing’: how can literature after apartheid set to work an ethics of advo-
cacy? How can it ‘host’ the testimony of victims?
What Sara Ahmed calls the ‘economy of affect’ that is attached to
testimony becomes an issue as the memoir formulates an authorita-
tive account of bearing witness to the TRC in transnational networks
where it circulates through remediation, adaptation, and appropria-
tion. Ahmed’s ‘currency’ of emotion tracks how testimony moves and
creates value, how compassion, empathy, fear, aversion are triggered
in response. Country of My Skull stages an engagement with testimony

as an affective encounter, an empathic engagement that humanizes
both narrator and witness, and that ‘performs’ reconciliation. The
memoir has been remediated into a Hollywood film, republished
in an adapted American edition, extended across African editions,
and is the focus of an extensive scholarly commentary. Its intimate
association with the TRC and its authoritative status was established
from the start. In peritext on the jacket of the first South African edi-
tion, André Brink claims: ‘Trying to understand the new South Africa
without the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be futile;
trying to understand the Commission without this book would be
irresponsible.’ The second African edition includes an endorsement
by the chairperson of the TRC, Archbishop Tutu. Now non-African
researchers depend on the memoir to ‘feel’ an appropriate and
empathic engagement—with the archived black women’s testimonies
at the Truth Commission website, for example (Oboe 2007). Other
audiences can ‘hear’ the testimony of the shepherd Lekotse only
through Krog’s ‘familiarisation’ of his account (Jolly 2010, 32). The
memoir is annealed to the TRC through affect, embracing the media-
tion of Archbishop Tutu’s ‘theology’ of reconciliation and its vision
of a shared humanity created through a witnessing public. As a radio
journalist, Antjie Samuels created the sound bites of black testimony
from the TRC and her voice triggered a ‘transformative daily listen-
ing’ during the hearings. As a memoirist her formative influence on
the production and reception of this testimony continues: ‘the fram-
ing capacity this text has come to hold in the academic world has been
enormous’ (Henry 2012, 110). Now, through the transits of this ur text
this traumatized autobiographical narrator—a multiple ‘I’ that is con-
fessional, conflicted, complicit, shamed, fearful, and enchanted—has
become a proxy witness and authoritative mediator for a transnational
witnessing public. But does this ‘hosting’ testimony become ‘hostage’
to the commission, reproducing its institutionalized listening?
For Yazir Henry, a Western Cape activist tortured by the secu-
rity police, the memoir appropriates black testimony long after
the work of the commission has ceased. Henry argues the suc-
cess of Krog’s memoir indicates a failure of the TRC to provide
an ethical framework for the ongoing management of its archive
of testimony: ‘together we—Krog/Samuel and I—are symbols
not only of a past event and experience, we are also symbols of
a national story that is not yet over, and that continues to strug-
gle with itself in search of a dialogic truth not so easily settled.
But her story is not mine’ (2012, 111). In an ‘Envoi’ to Country of
My Skull written by ‘Antjie’, its autobiographical narrator, there
is a final confession: ‘I have told many lies in this book about the
truth. I have exploited many lives and many texts . . . I hope you
will all understand’ (1998, 281). Henry refuses to consent to this
creative non-fiction: ‘she does not have the moral right to edit,
represent, interpret, render and benefit from my testimony, my
pain, and my experience as a black South African in the way she
does’ (2012, 112). For Henry the pressure to present a testimony
framed in the institutionalized framework of national redemp-
tion and reconciliation was a violation that is repeated as Krog’s
memoir appropriates his testimony to render a selection of canon-
ical narratives audible and available to a transnational witness-
ing public. The ‘inauguration of voice’ in the memoir repeats a
violent appropriation experienced when he appeared as a witness
at the TRC itself; this voice is not his. The co-option and contain-
ment of his testimony in Krog’s memoir becomes what Jolly calls
‘deaf listening’: an institutionalized witness reproduces his testi-
mony as ‘cultured violence’—an ongoing violation.12 This critique
reframes the relationship between Krog’s ‘second-person’ witness
and her readers; an ethical engagement and ‘hosting’ of testimony
becomes appropriation, voicing and ventriloquism, and the com-
modification and consumption of suffering and loss.
Albocentrism
The critical reception of this ‘enactment’ of witness in Krog’s
memoir precedes the publication of Country of My Skull in 1998.
Symptomatically, it begins in London, indicating the reach of this
witnessing ‘I’ to a receptive public beyond South Africa from the
very outset. In a prescient commentary on the first versions of the
memoir, journalistic extracts published in an article called ‘Cry,
the Beloved Country’ in the London newspaper The Guardian in
1997, the South African novelist Zoë Wicomb drew attention to
the place of Krog’s self-representation in a remaking of whiteness
in Afrikaner writing after apartheid. She astutely anticipates the
attraction of the conflicted and self-reflexive witness that Krog

performs, and challenges the privileges of a racialized and ethni-
cized witnessing subject embedded in a politics of whiteness. The
verbal and visual representation of black testimony, and Krog’s
grief-stricken response, prompt Wicomb’s extended discussion
of the rehabilitation of whiteness in post-apartheid Afrikaner
writing. Why, she asks, does The Guardian ‘want to translate
[Krog’s] tears into that of a black woman’, or why is Krog’s text
‘slid under the signification of blackness’? (1998, 364). Wicomb’s
novel, David’s Story, responds to these questions, and resonates
with concerns on the commodification of witness and testimony,
and how black bodies are presented to white eyes. Wicomb’s cri-
tique of Krog’s ‘white right to grief ’ (365) questions the ethics
that animate the first-person narrator of Country of My Skull well
before the memoir becomes the authoritative mediation of TRC
testimony for an international readership. Reading Krog’s mem-
oir and Wicomb’s novel as proximate texts draws out questions on
the role of fiction and creative non-fiction in the aftermath of the
Truth Commission, and the limitations of truth-telling genres of
life narrative.
In Wicomb’s novel the amanuensis is a powerful presence;
she elicits David Dirkse’s testimonial, and this narrative device
returns to the proximity of witness and amanuensis that recurs
in the production of testimony—historically in slave narrative, as
we have seen in Part 1. In the novel there is an ongoing struggle
between David and his errant unnamed amanuensis, who is the
first-person narrator, and an intrusive presence. Symptomatically
it is the testimony of women that remains obscured in David’s
Story, and inaudible to the amanuensis. This includes the suffer-
ing of the spectral figure of Dulcie, a woman active in the ANC
resistance under apartheid, as well as Saartjie Baartman and Eva/
Krotoa, both Khoi women caught up in the early settler history
of the Cape. David’s account includes the histories of Baartman
and Krotoa; however, the amanuensis is deceptive, and leaves both
of these narratives out of the final text despite her assurances to
the contrary. These are narratives that elude the official archive,
and the installation of the amanuensis as narrator and the erasure
of these women’s histories (once again) reflect on the revival and
renewal of colonial histories in post-apartheid writing. As Dorothy
Driver points out in her extensive ‘Afterword’ to the American edi-

tion of David’s Story, Saartjie Baartman became an icon of national
renewal in the ‘new’ South Africa, and Wicomb’s novel is an early
yet sharp questioning of speaking ‘truth’ in reconciliation dis-
course (2000, 218). The multiple intertextual relations that emerge
in David’s Story are characteristic of the aesthetics and politics
of the disturbing moments of recognition that Wicomb creates.
Although David’s Story draws the history of women and ethnic
minorities into the fiction, Wicomb does not try to ‘give voice’
to those who were marginalized by colonialism and apartheid.
Instead, Driver suggests, she ‘dramatizes’ the literary, historical,
ethical, and philosophical issues at stake in any attempt to retrieve
history, truth, and voice, or to think in terms of national and eth-
nic identities (216). In this way David’s Story, like J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace, participates in what Vilashni Cooppan identifies as a
‘post apartheid literature of affect’, which questions mimetic Truth
Commission literature (like Country of My Skull) that imitates and
reproduces the discursive, figurative, and diegetic conventions of
‘testimonial culture’:13
Staging the circulation and exchange of grief, anger, shame, nostalgia, and
forgiveness, mimetic TRC literature invites the reader to take in others’
emotions as one’s own so as to learn the lesson enjoined on the collective
subject of the new South Africa: move on . . . [this] fetishizes wounding nar-
ratives of pain, injury and loss as what is required ‘for every citizen to read
and know,’ thus making wound synonymous with nation and effectively
producing a melancholic nation that holds on to its past, even as it seeks and
claims to shed it. (2012, 51)
Wicomb’s reading of Krog’s journalism makes vivid the limita-

tions of the ‘troubled amnesiac white South African psyche’ that is
the narrating ‘I’ of Krog’s memoirs. It interrupts the easy associa-
tions in efferent readings of Country, and relocates the reader into a
space where the affective force of the memoir and its translation of
testimony through the ‘second-person’ witness are thought out dif-
ferently. An appropriation of TRC testimony through memoir that
privileges an ‘albocentric metropolitan’ spectator and auditor con-
cerns Wicomb (1998, 365). Questions of ‘voice’, of audibility, in the
new South Africa become more urgent as the memoirs are extended
into a trilogy. The series of memoirs circle around the privileges and
possibilities of the liberal-humanist idiom and its implications in an
identity politics that Wicomb perceives in those first fragments of
Country: nostalgic Afrikaner memory, and the desire to shape a pres-
ence for Afrikaans language and writing in the post-apartheid liter-
ary canon where the struggle for Afrikaans as an indigenous African
language is a critical issue.
In an eloquent defence of the work of narrative and narrative
analysis post apartheid, Rosemary Jolly points out that narratives are
forms of listening that can ‘hear’ or capture certain subjects within
the contemporary social, political, and cultural moment, while
remaining constitutionally ‘deaf’ to others, and this renders them
inconceivable:
the narrative forms we use to describe the past and to relate to it here and
now can be seen as forms of listening that hear or capture certain aspects
of the narrative of transition, but can remain deaf to, or ignore, others.
This is what I term ‘deaf listening’; and it obtains in different modes of . . .
entrenched, or cultured, violence. (2010, 5)
How life narratives ‘listen’ and ‘hear’, or ‘remain deaf ’, to the tes-
timony of survivor-narrators presented at the TRC in particular is
critical for Jolly’s analysis of cultured violence. This may become a
way violence continues to become cultured through deaf listening
in post-apartheid literature. ‘Hearing’ occurs through openness
to the ‘unspeakable’, and in the ‘TRC-Desmond Tutu moment’
these unspeakable things included certain topics (for example
AIDS, poverty, and claims for reparation in the South African
context) and emotions (for example anger or grief that resist rec-
onciliation). To listen is to inhabit an uncomfortable world with
the victim-survivor (Jolly 6). Deaf listening, on the other hand,
occurs when testimonial narrative remains incomprehensible, and
victims remain alienated and disembodied. We can identify signs
of ‘deaf listening’ that trouble Wicomb in her reading of ‘Cry, the
Beloved Country’: the black women who testified at the commis-
sion are presented as ‘spectacles’, as victims audible only through
the grief of Krog’s privileged witness. The promise of the TRC was
the promise of listening, remarks Jolly (2010, 17), but not all of the
voices that spoke could be heard in and through that moment.
Hearing Mrs Konile

In the Foreword to Begging to be Black, the final volume of the
Country of My Skull trilogy, Krog acknowledges colleagues ‘who
continued the destabilising conversations that Sandile Dikeni started
many years ago’ (2009, ix). Linguist Nosisi Mpolweni and psycholo-
gist Kopano Ratele are Krog’s interlocutors in conversations that
occur over an extended period in Cape Town long after the TRC
concluded, and they return to one single testimony from the second
week of hearings on human rights violations, on 23 April 1996. These
conversations are now gathered in a co-authored enquiry: There Was
This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose
Nobomvu Konile and there are extracts in Conditional Tense. This
composite life narrative returns to the archive of TRC testimony
and draws together a complete transcript of Mrs Konile’s testimony
in Xhosa and a new English translation by Mpolweni; conversa-
tions, historical accounts, and extracts from the original Truth
Commission report; and an account of a visit to Mrs Konile at her
remote Transkei village of Indwe. It focuses on a single and inaudible
testimony, and an extended reflection on the ethics and responsibili-
ties of compassionate witness.14
The testimony given by Mrs Konile, one of the Gugulethu moth-
ers, is about the death of her son Zabonke.15 This is a ‘cold case’: no
trace remains at the TRC website, no recollection amongst the
testimonies that created empathic engagement, and her surname
is misspelt in records of the Gugulethu incident. There is a brief
description of this cryptic testimony in Country of My Skull. There
Was This Goat confirms what we already know about the thresholds
of testimony in colonial modernity: it must be rendered ‘audible’
in the discursive frameworks and institutional contexts that dis-
seminate testimony; its strangeness must be domesticated if it is to
‘belong’ and elicit compassionate response and witness. But Mrs
Konile remains strange: she refuses to forgive and adopt the recon-
ciliatory politics of the TRC to frame her testimony. Her unforgiv-
ing anger contrasts with the testimony of Cynthia Ngewu, one of the
other Gugulethu mothers whose response becomes ‘emblematic’.16
Mrs Konile’s testimony is proximate to this canonical account, pre-
sented at the same hearing, and Cynthia Ndewu’s audibility makes
Mrs Konile’s intransigence more apparent: ‘we realised that the
dominant discourse at the Truth Commission had no way of “hear-

ing” Mrs Konile. Her narrative defied all the elements that render
narratives “audible” within what we considered to be the dominant
discursive framework operative at the hearings’ (Krog, Mpolweni,
and Ratele 2009, 46). As a result Mrs Konile is excluded from the
inclusive terms of citizenship that were formed through discourses
of reconciliation. Nor is she visible as a bereaved mother, a promi-
nent category in TRC public discourse (Sandra Young 2012, 123). Mrs
Konile cannot be ‘humanized’: her testimony questions the domain
of the human understood in terms of the traditions of western and
African humanism that Tutu brought into the work of the TRC. In
a hypothetical conversation between white witnesses in There Was
This Goat one of the auditors explains the ‘economy of affect’ in this
transaction:
I thought that the public narration of trauma could form a bridge between
our disparate historical experiences, because with the testimony of the
other three mothers, I was there! I felt that through my empathy and careful
listening I could form a kind of cross-cultural solidarity that could enable
us to create a new community. But Mrs Konile’s story was just one big bar-
rier! She made it impossible for me to hear her as a fellow human being. (25)
Here is the ‘join’ that is vital to the technologies of testimony as it is

understood in humanist terms: in the transaction of testimony both
parties are drawn into the domain of the human, and, in the case
of the TRC, the reconstituted healed nation. Both become human
together. When testimony remains strange, empathic engagement is
disabled, and both parties are at risk of remaining abject: less than
human.
In There Was This Goat the scholarly praxis of the writer, lin-
guist, and psychologist are brought to bear on this cryptic testimony.
Their conversations are inspired by a specifically African human-
ism: ubuntu and its formulation of the task of the intellectual ‘to
be an advocate for that which is strange’ (99). They return to the
archive and retrieve the original Konile testimony and develop new
interpretations—linguistic, psychological, cultural—that set out to
render it audible, belatedly. First, a new translation of the original
Xhosa version finds errors in translation and transcription of the
original TRC text, and a series of cultural codes and references that
resist translation from Xhosa to English. This reveals the testimony

is embedded in a dream of the goat and a connection to an ances-
tral world that is cultural, psychological, spiritual, and political; in
this way it draws on indigenous knowledges and rural traditions of
storytelling that remain foreign to the TRC. Second, the relevance
of western trauma theory and the Holocaust to interpreting African
indigenous testimonies is called into question: ‘understanding so lit-
tle of what she was saying, dare we discuss her testimony using the
same theories and categories identified in severely tortured people
and traumatized Holocaust victims?’ (27). Are other tools needed to
translate the testimony of this Xhosa woman?17
Third, the researchers visit the remote Transkei village of Indwe,
and have a face-to-face meeting with Notrose Nobomvu Konile herself
to establish an ‘indigenous framework’ for this testimony. The risk of
further traumatizing a woman who had already re-experienced her
traumatic loss in public and the investments of the researchers in her
testimony are ethical issues here: ‘she would be expected to relive a
harrowing, life-destroying experience, for which she would get noth-
ing, while we would be able to write a paper for which we would get
acknowledgement and our university would get money’ (125).18 The
visit introduces a new element into this translation zone: the evidence
of profound and structural poverty, and a recognition of ‘insidious
trauma’: the death of her son is not a singular event in Konile’s life
story but part of ongoing trauma due to dislocation, poverty, and,
most recently, AIDS. The TRC hearing attached traumatic meaning
to one particular event, the death of Zabonke and the political strug-
gle against apartheid, but the story of this indigenous woman’s life is
‘inextricably’ linked to death—her husband, siblings, and offspring.
‘I don’t think I have the tools to hear poverty,’ says ‘Antjie’ in the
conversations that follow the visit to Indwe. A decade after the TRC,
the failure to address poverty and social suffering in the new South
Africa is very clear, and the case of Mrs Konile indicates the ‘deaf
listening’ of cultured violence—now, as we see, embodied in ‘Antjie’,
Krog’s autobiographical narrating ‘I’.19
This testimony recalls a long tradition of gendered testimony and
witness in scenes of recognition convened around, for example,
Mary Prince and Saartjie Baartman. The language of hospitality
that places those who testify as strangers to be humanized through
compassionate witness is reversed at Indwe. In her own community
Mrs Konile is an articulate and resilient woman, who manoeuvres

effectively within the constraints of the post-apartheid order, where
she is as impoverished as she has always been. Mrs Konile has
agency, resilience, and eloquence. She is (to return to Dlamini) no
longer one of the ‘faceless masses who experienced apartheid in the
same way, suffered the same way, fought the same way’ (2009, 18).
Here the researchers are strangers, and dependent on Mrs Konile’s
hospitality. Mrs Konile refuses to be defined through a testimonial
contract and compassionate witness—like Mary Prince and Saartje
Baartman, who used the resources that were available to resist
the gift of benevolent recognition. She is an articulate antagonist.
Historical trauma and social suffering—a long cross-generational
history of conquest, colonization, and apartheid that was experi-
enced by the Mfengu people—shape indigenous collective mem-
ory, and it is this that authorizes Mrs Konile’s testimony, which is
tactical:
every time she told the story of Zabonke’s death, she had to make choices—
for whom am I telling this, why am I telling this, what are the circum-
stances of the telling?—and these determine what she is to depict and what
to leave out, what to adapt to the moment of telling and what to add. (187)
Enchanted Witness
In the Epilogue to There Was This Goat we learn that Krog returned
to Cape Town from her fellowship in Berlin in 2008, the focus of
Begging to be Black, to news of Mrs Konile’s death some weeks before.
The book becomes a work of mourning at this point: where does
the death of the research subject and the strong emotions it causes
fit into the academic scheme of research? ‘Whatever we were doing
didn’t save her, didn’t change her life, in fact, didn’t do a thing for
her,’ remarks ‘Antjie’. ‘I feel bereft of an opportunity to be a person
to her, to present to her some other kind of whiteness’ (213). ‘Antjie’s’
desire to ‘perform whiteness’ indicates the prescience of Wicomb’s
association of black testimony, white grief, and reformulations of
Afrikaner identity post apartheid. Ultimately Mrs Konile’s testi-
mony remains strange. Attempts to affectively ‘integrate’ her, and
to imagine ways of ‘living-together-ness with her’ (207) fall apart,

and this is not only due to her untimely death. The master narrative
of the TRC cannot render this testimony and its account of pov-
erty, unforgiving anger, and indigeneity audible; it also resists the
humanism of empathic engagement and ‘mutual becoming’ that the
researchers desire.
A final scene of recognition occurs in the Epilogue, which returns
to traditions of bearing witness in colonial modernity: the research-
ers meet with Mrs Konile’s daughter, and ‘read’ her body for its
corporeal truth.
As we looked at Thandeka, we were completely enchanted. Marks on her

hands and legs made visible the hard life she had led when she was younger . . .
All three of us could pick up that we were moved, and deeply so. That in a
family so persistently destroyed, so driven from deprivation to despair, the
last surviving member could be so . . . shiningly not only a survivor, not only
becoming middle class—but that she could be so humane. (214)
Here the witnesses are ‘moved’ to confer the humanity that Mrs
Konile resisted. This ‘enchanted witness’ returns to earlier scenes
of benevolent witness in postcolonial life narrative (in The History
of Mary Prince, for example). The researchers extend recognition to
Thandeka, and so a ‘deaf listening’ to Mrs Konile’s testimony con-
tinues. The promise of There Was This Goat is a recognition of the
strangeness of testimonial discourse, its deterritorialization of the
human; however, this final scene gives ‘body to the very form that it
attempts to hollow out’: the ‘enchanted’ witness.
Strange testimony confounds its witness. The location of testi-
mony on the boundary of the human and non-human (the ani-
mal and the thing, the unborn and the dead), and as a discursive
threshold that regulates and manages the distinctions between, is
both generic and historical, as I have argued in Part 1. It manifests
in slave narrative, in the careful domestication of both narrator
and witness that we see earlier in Equiano’s Narrative and Prince’s
History, and in Macaulay’s attempt to draw Saartjie Baartman into
the fold of victims in need of humanitarian activism. It recurs in
representations of indigenous peoples in colonial modernity in
the changing registers that respond to the emerging discourses
of scientific racism and its categories of essential difference. There
Was This Goat offers an extended and eloquent further example of

benevolent investments of the second person in subaltern/indig-
enous testimony. Mrs Konile’s testimony resists domestication. To
the contrary, it releases accounts of violence and trauma that draw
the limits of the human into question. In this way it is closely asso-
ciated with the testimony of the Gugulethu mothers to the TRC,
which returns repeatedly to the animal and the insect to deplore the
dehumanization of their sons.20 Are their sons less than dogs? Are
they less than ants that they are abused and mutilated? Testimonial
narrative frequently invokes terror by transgressing the limits of
the human in this way: dogs run loose; there is breakdown of the
species boundary between the human and its others. The appeal to
the human recognition that is made in and through testimony in
the wake of the structural violence of colonialism (such as slavery,
dispossession, or apartheid) is an attempt to restore both the indi-
vidual and the community and redeem a ‘civilized’ order; however,
the testimony of the dispossessed repeatedly returns to the limits
of the human.
Testimony is a process of ‘becoming human’ where the bound-
aries of the civilized and the strange are perpetually a work in
progress; the promise of humanitarian intervention and human-
ist discourses to secure recognition and restore order is perpet-
ually deferred. A gift of Mrs Konile’s ‘strange testimony’ is an
insight into the transactions of human ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ in
and through testimony. Both the title and the cover of the There
Was This Goat refuse humanizing discourses of western biogra-
phy. There is a portrait photograph of Mrs Konile in the book,
but the cover image and title refers to the goats that are a famil-
iar sight in the remote Eastern Cape township of Indwe, and an
enigmatic reference to indigenous lifeways in the testimony Mrs
Konile offers to the TRC. Strange testimony deterritorializes its
compassionate witnesses, resists domestication, and questions
networks of witnessing and advocacy. This questioning and
reformulation of the meaning of human ‘being’ is generic to the
transactions of testimonial narrative. The ‘human’, ‘humanity’,
and ‘humanitarianism’ are called into question; these are (to
return to Fanon and the remark that introduces this book) con-
tested subjects in postcolonial critique.
‘Fixing’ Memoir
The cycle of transactions set in train by the TRC returns to these
abiding concerns of postcolonial testimonial in the longue durée: the
exchange of testimony and witness, the changing value and currency
of testimony, the making of the human in and through these narra-
tives of precarious life. Long after Antjie Samuels recorded the ‘sound
bites’ that became ‘transformative daily listening’ during the course
of the TRC, as the archive of black testimony falls silent, and there
is a desire across the South African intelligentsia to ‘move on’, the
‘troubled, amnesiac white South African psyche’ that is the epicentre
of Krog’s trilogy of memoirs remains preoccupied with the promise
of transformation and renewal, of becoming other, through bear-
ing witness to testimony. From the pre-texts of Country of My Skull
that Zoë Wicomb reads in London, and the ‘sound bites’ of African
testimony the radio journalist Antjie Samuels profiles during the
hearings, through to Begging to be Black, the final instalment of the
trilogy, and later in Conditional Tense (2013), this autobiographical ‘I’
is nourished, redeemed, created, haunted in response to testimony,
and deeply troubled by the ethics and politics of enchanted witness
and its implication in cultured violence. These memoirs become a
performative bearing witness to testimony in the second person.
For critics of postcolonial life narrative the etymology of ‘mem-
oir’ is significant in mapping its various incarnations. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary ‘memoir’ precedes ‘autobiography’ by
more than a century. ‘Autobiography’ appears in 1809 as ‘the writing
of one’s own history’, associated with the singular and the individual.
‘Memoirs’ precedes it in 1659 as ‘a record of events not purporting to
be a complete history but treating of such matters as come within the
personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain par-
ticular sources of information’. The OED cites Grey’s Correspondence
in 1769: ‘Why then a writer of memoirs is a better thing than an his-
torian’. Why ‘better’? In her entry on memoir in The Encyclopedia of
Life Writing Helen Buss speculates this is possibly because ‘memoirs
personalize history and historicize the personal’; memoirs are not
only about individuals, they are also about an event, an era, an insti-
tution, a community—they are, in short, more collective (Buss 2001,
595). Now, when ‘memoir’ has become a generic term for autobio-
graphical narrative in general, particularly in North America, these
distinctive histories of ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ are obscured.21

In her thinking on ‘de/colonizing the subject’ Lee Quinby returns
to this etymology of ‘memoir’ and argues for its particular impor-
tance for postcolonial literary criticism. ‘Memoirs’ draws on a col-
lective and discontinuous sense of self, Quinby argues. It destabilizes
the unified selfhood of ‘autobiography’ to present composite, anec-
dotal, multiple, and discontinuous subjectivities. This ‘ensemble’
accentuates the conflicts and confusions of identity, and a discur-
sive ‘I’ caught in the turbulence of a specific moment in history, in
‘countermemory’ and ‘the consciousness of ghostly presences from
the past that impinge upon our presence now’ (1992, 301). Julie Rak
also suggests that memoir ‘haunts’ autobiography and is associated
with unstable identities, between public and private, ‘auto’ and ‘bio’,
between literary discourse and non-literary writing (2004, 306). Like
testimony, memoir is generically disposed to the collective, and the
historical, and to technologies of the self that resist the singular ‘I’ of
autobiography.
This suggests a generic ‘fix’ of memoir: the kinds of discursive auto/
biographical worlds it brings into being; its frames or ‘fixes’ that are
formative and performative (Frow 2007, 1633). From the very begin-
nings of postcolonial life narrative, memoir and testimony coexist in
proximity, different yet contiguous ‘fixes’ on narrating a self—we see
this in the proximity of Bennelong’s letter and Watkin Tench’s jour-
nals, for example, or the narratives by George Copway and Susanna
Moodie in Part 1 of this book. The generic ‘fix’ of memoir is the ‘I’
of the eyewitness, the prerogative of the authoritative, public, and
literate ‘I’ that animates numerous anecdotal forms of life narrative
that comprise the paper empire of colonial memoir: letters, journals,
accounts, histories, sketches, and so on. As the symptomatic readings
of Tench’s journals and Moodie’s sketches in Part 1 indicate, memoirs
are composite, incomplete, discontinuous—formative and performa-
tive, as John Frow suggests. Testimony conventionally draws a very
different history into view: the experiences of the disempowered and
the dispossessed, which stake a claim to recognition and social jus-
tice, drawing on discourses of human rights and energized by cam-
paigns of social activism.
This generic history draws Antjie Krog’s memoirs and the TRC
testimonial cycle into the longue durée of postcolonial testimonial
narrative together, as a meditation on the ethics of testimony and
witness. ‘Antjie’, the historical, ideological, narrating, and narrated

‘I’ of Krog’s creative non-fiction, is a composite subject of memoir.22
From the very beginning, in the pre-texts Zoë Wicomb reads in the
British press in 1998, it is evident that a troubled and troubling per-
sonification of a public I/witness that draws testimony into memoir
is the genesis of this ur text. Country of My Skull both personal-
izes history—presenting the TRC and the Mandela years from the
perspective of one of its engaged public intellectuals—and histori-
cizes the personal—this witnessing ‘I’ is a discursive creation of the
TRC. The trilogy of memoirs becomes an extended reflection on the
belatedness and historicity of this witnessing ‘I’, and her desire to
‘become’ something other through empathic witness. Finally these
most difficult questions about humanism, ethics, and testimony are
returned to Europe, and to thinking about J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
and posthuman philosophy there. In the final volume of the trilogy,
Begging to be Black, there is a meshwork of life writing: philosophi-
cal conversations, letters, a biographical account of the Basotho king
Moshoeshoe and the colonization and conquest of the Basotho peo-
ple, recollections of traumatic events narrated earlier in the trilogy,
and a writer’s journal about reading and writing in Berlin. A silent
intertext to all of this is, we now know, There Was This Goat, and
the project to bear ethical witness to that resistant testimony of Mrs
Konile.
Two proximate conversations animate Begging to be Black, and
both interrogate humanist frames of recognition that trouble the
researchers in There Was This Goat. The first is a creative non-fiction,
an exchange between the Basotho king Moshoeshoe and the
French missionary Eugene Casalis, and it returns to traditions of
non-western, specifically southern African, humanism. This is a ‘first
contact’ encounter in what is now Lesotho in 1833. The Australian phi-
losopher and interlocutor featured in the memoir reminds the poet
that attempts to ‘understand the colonised are in order to control and
dehumanise them even more effectively’ (Krog 2009, 93), and so it is
as the dispossession and dispersal of the Basotho by European set-
tlers occurs during Moshoeshoe’s reign. These conversations explore
an alternative to western humanism, a communal ethic and African
indigenous tradition that is embodied in Moshoeshoe, who prefig-
ures the African humanism of Mandela and Tutu. This pre-contact
African ethic, grounded in a non-anthropocentric personhood, for
example the belief that animals have souls and are a personal exten-
sion of the self, is fundamental to this indigenous ontology. Ubuntu
presents an ‘interconnectedness with the “wholeness of life”—reli-
gious and secular, spiritual and material . . . it implies a cosmological
dimension, a human and non-human world that encapsulates plants,
animals, a spiritual god, and ancestors’ (184). Moshoeshoe’s African
humanism is understood as fluid and inclusive, beings are intercon-
nected through a variety of simultaneous links and networks—like
Mrs Konile’s invocation of ‘African individuality within community’
(Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele 2009, 63). In his speculations on African
modes of writing the self Achille Mbembe argues that life writing is
inseparably connected to the problematics of self-constitution and
the western philosophy of the subject in the wake of slavery, coloni-
zation, and apartheid (2001). Later he goes on to observe that post-
colonial thinking on these issues becomes open to alternative ways
of reading modernity that critique colonial reason, humanism, and
universalism and engage with the possibilities of new humanisms
(2008). The conversation between Moshoeshoe and Casalis, which
draws ‘third-generation’ African writing on non-western human-
isms into the ethical framework of the memoir, opens the memoir to
postcolonial thinking in this way.23
So too does a second and contiguous dialogue between the auto-
biographical narrator ‘Antjie’ and an Australian philosopher, who
remains unnamed.24 This is a ‘southern conversation’ embedded
in the politics of settler colonialism—both the philosopher and the
writer speak of the legacies of indigenous dispossession in the south,
as beneficiaries. This occurs in Europe, at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Berlin, where signs of collective guilt and remembrance
are nearby—‘Strange how soon one becomes aware of how every-
thing here reeks of unlodged guilt . . . different layers of grief emanate
from Berlin’ (Krog 2009, 157). This scene connects colonial violence
and Holocaust atrocity with ongoing grief work, an example of
what Michael Rothberg calls ‘multidirectional memory’: collective
memory work that moves across and connects European and post-
colonial contexts. By staging these conversations in Berlin, in open
recognition of the legacies of the Holocaust and colonization that
surround her there, the European genocide enters into the thinking
on the ethics and aesthetics of bearing witness to violence in post-
apartheid literature—for example Theodor Adorno’s well-known
reflections on the possibilities for literature in the wake of atrocity

are further intertexts that emerge as Antjie becomes immersed in
Paul Celan’s poetry, the verses that provoked Adorno’s questions
on writing and violence. This returns to a question that concerns
the researchers in There Was This Goat: what is the relevance of the
Holocaust and western trauma theory to thinking on indigenous
African testimony?
The topic of the philosophical conversations in Berlin is the limits
of western humanism, and what the philosopher brings to discussion
is his expertise on Deleuzean thinking on becoming and ‘lines of
flight’. Antjie reflects:
He has many things in my eyes that should disqualify him as a possible dis-
course partner (white, male, teaching Western philosophy in Australia), but
I have read a provocative paper he wrote on the concept of becoming-animal
in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, and it is this concept of ‘becoming’
that I am interested in. Not becoming-animal or becoming-woman as in
Coetzee’s book, but becoming-black. (92)
The philosopher and poet/memoirist come together, then, as readers of

an ur text; both Coetzee and Deleuze enable this conversation. Begging
to be Black is dedicated to Petrus, the African protagonist in Disgrace,
and other postcolonial intertexts emerge: ‘Antjie’ makes notes on a
thick manuscript file ‘bearing words in bold letters inspired by The
Satanic Verses: “BEGGING TO BE BLACK” ’, her ‘blunt working title’
that gestures to Rushdie and the controversies on identity, politics, and
literature that are inevitably attached to The Satanic Verses.
These discussions in Berlin open Krog’s trilogy to questions about
the moral self, western humanism, and decolonization in a western
posthuman frame.25 Deleuzian ethics are not formulated in human-
ist terms in the dialectics of recognition and lack, and nor are they
anthropocentric. Subjectivity is understood as multiple and dis-
persed, and distributed though inter-individual assemblages of self
and other; at the centre of this assemblage is abstract, non-organic
life, and a virtual realm of becoming apart from the actual realm
of embodied historical events. This introduces, as the profes-
sor explains, a framework where things continue to ‘become’ the
other: plants and animals, inside and outside, organic and inorganic
cannot really be held apart in binary opposition. This dialogue turns
to what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘nomadic thinking’: an ongoing exchange

that is speculative and open, an imaginative transformation of space
and time that manifests in assemblages and concepts such as deter-
ritorialization.26 ‘Becoming’ black rehearses ‘becoming other’ in
Deleuzian terms.27 In his Deleuzian reading of Coetzee’s novel, pro-
vocative in that it is a relatively positive interpretation of what is often
read as a bleak post-apartheid fiction, Paul Patton interprets David
Lurie’s ‘line of flight’ as a transformation of his relation to himself,
and to other human and non-human creatures. This occurs by means
of becoming-animal, a rearrangement of proximities of human and
animal through a ‘becoming other’ that anticipates the emergence of
a new social order in post-apartheid society (2010, 132).
In the aftermath of the TRC an exhaustion of the western humanist
language of recognition is played out in and through its ur texts—as
conversations between the readers of Disgrace in Berlin circle back to
the novel to speculate on the moral and ethical responsibilities of the
writer and witness post apartheid. These conversations on testimony
and witness that preoccupy Krog’s trilogy and its proximate text, There
Was This Goat, question discourses of humanitarianism and the limits
of the sympathetic imagination that render testimony audible to the
‘troubled, amnesiac white South African psyche’ that is the narrated
autobiographical ‘I’ of these memoirs. This trilogy, that raises so many
questions about the appropriation and remediation of testimony from
the TRC, finally becomes open to the possibilities of nomadic think-
ing, non-western humanism and posthumanism that question the lib-
eral humanist view of the self, and its hierarchies of speciesism and
anthropocentrism that authorize the benevolent ‘enchanted witness’.
The intertextuality of South African literature and criticism post
apartheid, its dense auto-referentiality across ur texts, trilogies, and
‘conversations with myself’, and its conceptual language that goes
looking for the join—synapse, entanglement, seam, complicity,
becoming, assemblage—are a legacy of a present tense with testi-
mony. The cycle of testimony generated by the TRC late last century
forces creative non-fiction open to the limits of humanism and its
ethics of bearing witness to testimonial narrative. ‘Antjie’ recalls the
conclusion of the conversations in Berlin:
Both of us are quiet. This will be our last discussion. I will miss him, the
unobtrusive, secure way he allowed me to take risks, to dare; the curious
way in which European philosophy, Australian history and German cul-

ture could wash his presence over the African narrative I was trying to
construct . . .
‘Good luck with your country,’ I say, ‘which at least has said sorry.’
He hugs me. ‘And good luck with yours, which doesn’t know how.’ (269)
‘Sorry business’ in the philosopher’s country looks across to another

postcolonial literature that is tense with indigenous testimony, wit-
ness, and national shame. This is the subject of a later chapter on
thresholds of testimony, which inherits from this one critical think-
ing on cultured violence and its concerns with how narratives and
narrative analysis ‘listen’ or ‘remain deaf’ to testimony. In that chap-
ter too, indigenous testimonial narrative mobilizes transnational
networks of exchange on the currents of multidirectional memory.
Travelling with ur texts of the Truth Commission, as this chapter
does, journeys in the company of that flawed figure, the ‘troubled
amnesiac white South African psyche’, which takes us unerringly
to the faultlines of the politics of forgiveness and reconciliation, for
example its appropriations of testimony in the national interest, and
the privileges of ‘albocentrism’ that Zoë Wicomb identifies so effec-
tively.28 Ur texts linger when the desire to ‘move on’ after apartheid is
palpable, and recollections of the ‘transformative daily listening’ to
testimony that was crafted into sound bites by the journalist Antjie
Samuels fade. But this chapter deliberately sets out in the aftermath
of this testimonial cycle, to draw on the theory, concepts, and meth-
odology of what is now an extraordinary body of autobiographical
literary criticism. In his book on postcolonial autocriticism, David
Huddart points out that languages of interpretation do not take
shape once there are selves to shape them, but themselves frame the
taking shape of selves. And so concepts and practices such as ur texts
and ambiguities of witnessing, cultured violence and deaf listening,
native nostalgia, creative non-fiction, the postcolony, and entangle-
ment meet the challenge of ‘after apartheid’, as a body of autocriti-
cism produced in the wake of the TRC. It shapes this chapter, and
enables those that follow to pursue postcolonial readings that draw
together sites where what was once thought of as separate—identi-
ties, spaces, histories—come together or find points of intersection
in unexpected ways, returning to the concept of the human where we
do not necessarily expect to find it (Nuttall 2009, 11–12).
Notes
1. See, for example, the special issue of Safundi on the complexities of crea-
tive non-fiction in recent South African literature (2012), in particular
articles by Rita Barnard, Hedley Twidle, and Rob Nixon. See too Vilashini
Cooppan’s remarks on the limitations of mimetic literature (2012).
2. Dlamini draws on the distinction between reflective and restorative nos-
talgia developed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Boym
sees these as two ways of giving shape and meaning to a longing for the
past: restorative nostalgia focuses on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost
home, whereas reflective nostalgia turns to algia, both longing and loss, the
imperfect process of remembrance (Dlamini 2009, 17). For further discus-
sion on postcolonialism and nostalgic memory in particular, see Dennis
Walder’s Postcolonial Nostalgias (2011).
3. See Elleke Boehmer’s essay on At Risk in Mengel and Borzaga (2012).
4. This draws on the characterization of nodes and networks in Cooppan
(2013).
5. Nuttall is turning to Paul Gilroy here, and she points out that both Fanon
and Said precede him in calling for a humanism conceived specifically as
a response to the sufferings of racism (2009, 9).
6. A truth commission is a quasi-juridical body designed to establish the
truth about an era of political wrong in ways that promote peace, democ-
racy, and a culture of human rights in the country concerned (Mark
Sanders 2007, 2). As Sanders points out, the final report of the commis-
sion leaves limited space for testimonies, which are extracted as illus-
trative first-person attestations to the historical narrative, written in the
third person, that encloses them.
7. Some 10 per cent of the nearly 22,000 victim testimonies were aired in
public whilst the rest were gathered in the form of written statements; a
large proportion of the amnesty hearings applications were decided in
chambers rather than in public hearings (Posel and Simpson 2002, 3).
8. ‘ “Imagined” here is not to be confused with “imaginary,” but it indicates
that selves and communities are not strictly “natural” entities either.
Imagining here generates a sense of homogeneity, consistency and order
from unruly, heterogeneous experience; the construction of an identity
that is to some degree single, centred, bounded, and located in a regu-
lar, directed, temporal trajectory. At least so it has appeared in the West’
(Antze and Lambek 1996, xx).
9. Dori Laub (Felman and Laub 1992, 69) identifies the second person as
the witness who listens to the person who testifies. Those who heard,
watched, or read Truth Commission testimonies were called upon
to witness (in the performative sense) the testimonies, an act that is
transformative for both the first and second person (Coullie 2007, 140).
10. Anthea Garman’s interpretation of Krog’s biography in terms of

Bourdieu’s field theory is useful in identifying the composite subject
brought into being through memoir. ‘Antjie Krog already possessed
literary capital as a recognised Afrikaans poet, and the symbolic capi-
tal accrued as a journalist, Antjie Samuels, in radio broadcasts for the
SABC was then converted back to literature in Country of My Skull, and
in politics, through subsequent recognition of her as an authoritative
public intellectual’ (Garman 2007, 18).
11. For example Krog’s account of the ancestral Afrikaner household in the
second volume of the trilogy, A Change of Tongue, actively reflects on the
writing of autobiography and embeds her mother’s history of the Afrikaner
community in Kroonstad, drawing on sensory and nostalgic memory.
12. Jolly’s commentary on what Henry has to say is astute: ‘his point about
the ease with which the TRC ascribed a psyche to the nation, and its
concomitant envisaging of the nation as a body, is key to understanding
the deafness the TRC developed in relation to hearing testimony having
been produced by embodied individuals—a deafness which, as Henri
[sic] points out, has been replicated by many of the institutions tasked
with the responsibility of framing TRC testimony for the public at large,
domestically and globally’ (2010, 20).
13. Cooppan is drawing on the discussion of ‘testimonial culture’ in Sara
Ahmed’s book The Cultural Political of Emotion.
14. Extracts from There Was This Goat are included in Krog’s subsequent
series of essays, Conditional Tense (2013).
15. The Gugulethu Seven incident refers to the killing of seven young men
at Gugulethu in the Western Cape in March 1986. One of the most
prominent cases heard by the Truth Commission, it ‘ “showcased” like
few others the fatal mix in the townships of poverty, anger, unemploy-
ment, dreams of taking up arms, change and liberation—all fuelled
and manipulated by operations of the police and security forces’ (Krog,
Mpolweni, and Ratele 2009, 5). Following the TRC a number of the
Gugulethu mothers were prominent in campaigns for reconciliation
and reparation.
16. ‘Antjie’ herself invokes Mrs Ngewu’s testimony as exemplary in this
way—it is embedded in Begging to be Black, for example, as the subject
of her presentation to a conference in Istanbul.
17. ‘By analyzing Mrs Konile’s testimony through the notion of African
individuality within community, we have taken a rather radical step.
We are saying that within a post-colonial context a woman might appear
either incoherent because of severe suffering, or unintelligible because
of oppression—when, in fact, she is neither. Within Mrs Konile’s indig-
enous framework she is logical and resilient in her knowledge of her loss
and its devastating consequences on her life . . . However, the forum she
found herself in, and the way the official version of her narrative was
arrived at, made it very hard for her to convey the depth of this devas-
tation’ (63). See Michela Borzaga’s perceptive reading for an extended
discussion of alternative postcolonial and African approaches to trauma
theory and Mrs Konile’s resilience (2012).
18. One of the compelling subtexts of this research project are the reflec-
tions on the appropriateness of the requirements for ethical research
of the research institution that funds this project. See Tuhiwai Smith
(2012) for further discussion of these issues of research and ‘decolonis-
ing methodologies’.
19. As Jolly points out, the continuation of violence and poverty disturbs
attempts to contain history into neatly demarcated apartheid and lib-
eration eras.
20. For example Cynthia Ngewu: ‘why would they drag my son, was he a
dog?’, and Eunice Thembisa Miya: ‘What makes me cry now is that these
policeman they were treating people like animals, that’s what makes me
cry right now . . . But even a dog, you don’t kill it like that. You even
think that the owner of this dog loves it, even an ant a small ant you
think you have feelings even for an ant. But now our own children, they
were not even taken as ants . . .’ (Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele 2009, 10).
21. See Rak 2004, Smith and Watson 2010, and Couser 2012 on the subject
of memoir.
22. Smith and Watson (2010) discuss these multiple ‘I’s of life writing in
Reading Autobiography (72–9).
23. In her study of West African literatures Stephanie Newell remarks that
‘third-generation’ writers there present a powerful ethical model for
African identities that challenge and replace unitary notions of place,
space, culture, language, and self, but they do so without doing away
with the integrity of the human subject. This remains, Newell (2006,
2009) suggests, an untheorized dimension of West African writing.
Krog returns to this ‘ethnophilosophy’ of ‘interconnectedness towards-
wholeness’ in Conditional Tense.
24. The Australian philosopher is Paul Patton, and he is identified in the
acknowledgements. The conversation texts are used in a creative
non-fiction where the characterization of the discussant is in part sym-
bolic, and some details of the story are fictional (such as the journey to
Istanbul). For this reason I retain Krog’s characterization of him as ‘the
philosopher’ throughout this reading unless referring to his own book
Deleuzian Concepts.
25. Patton argues that Deleuzian thinking opens possibilities for ques-
tioning the colonial encounter and reimagining the conditions
of coexistence of different peoples in postcolonial societies (2010,

116–17).
26. Postcolonial critics, most notably Caren Kaplan, have engaged with
this idea of ‘nomadic thinking’ as an appropriation of postcolonial dis-
course. See Kaplan (1996) and, in response, Patton (2010, 20).
27. Zoë Wicomb (2005) explicitly resists Deleuzian deterritorialization and
minoritarian identity as an aestheticized and metropolitan language
that is a privilege of the colonized rather than the colonizer—an inter-
pretation that Krog’s Australian philosopher, Paul Patton, contests in
Deleuzian Concepts. Alternatively, and with a Fanonian turn, Wicomb
argues for the value of humanist notions of a core identity for African
strategies of resistance, albeit an identification that is constantly in a
process of readjustment in terms of self and other.
28. These criticisms are presented from a postcolonial perspective in

McGonegal (2009) and Huggan (2013b, 17–20).
9
Remediation
Rape Warfare and Humanitarian Storytelling
We might conjure some of the sites that, in recent memory, have gen-
erated the most pressing debates and intense questioning of human
rights . . . these wars and conflicts, for good or ill, have helped shape
and define the shifting grounds both of rights and of what it means
to be human.
(Balfour and Cadava 2004, 279)
Just by chance, in a hotel in Johannesburg en route to a conference

on the Truth Commission, I met an aid worker from World Vision,
a large NGO based in Goma, and heard a harrowing first-person
account of witnessing the suffering of women and children in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She described a degenera-
tion of civil society, and spoke of her own frustration that she was
not eloquent enough to write and do justice to the traumatic gen-
dered violence she witnessed. More generally, given those questions
in the previous chapter about how testimony travels in the wake of
the TRC, she raised the question of how networks of humanitar-
ian witnessing become engaged in the eastern DRC, in the inter-
ests of victims of rape warfare. Then this question about testimony
and witness, humanitarian activism and gendered warfare, became
very specific, and she spoke of a small group of African women and
children struggling to survive together near Lake Kivu, ‘just across
the border from where Fossey watched the gorillas’. The contrast is
striking: Dian Fossey and the gorillas remain legendary figures in

a global public sphere, and the proximity and long history of rape
warfare in the region remains obscured.
What follows in this chapter falls from this conversation, and
explores this proximity of absence and legendary presence to con-
sider the visibility of African people and creatures, vulnerable lives,
and the different claims of rights discourse, and animal and human
rights, in shaping a Congo ‘watch’ from afar. That these questions
about gendered suffering, humanitarianism, and globalization arise
in the wake of the TRC and in the transit hotel is no surprise for,
as James Clifford suggests in his thinking on the hotel and ‘travel-
ling cultures’, this is the place you move through, where encounters
are fleeting, arbitrary, and generative of reflections on conditions
for human connection, and on alliances cutting across class, race,
gender, and national locations (1997, 18). This chapter, working
through remediations of humanitarian testimony and memoir from
this region, considers how the shifting grounds of rights and what it
means to be human shape radical engagements with auto/biograph-
ical representations and the enduring legacies of colonial exploita-
tion in central Africa. It turns to an emerging field in postcolonial
studies: postcolonialism and ecocriticism, and their shared concern
with racism and speciesism (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, Mount and
O’Brien 2013).
Humanitarian Storytelling
At Kivu people and primates are together in a contact zone frac-
tured by overlapping and contrary regimes. These adjacent sites are
the legacy of colonization, decolonization, and globalization: the
nation states of the DRC (formerly Zaire), Rwanda, and Uganda,
produced in the aftermath of Belgian, German, and British colo-
nialisms; game parks and tourist enclaves; humanitarian zones
where NGOs prevail and refugee camps proliferate; areas where
warlords organize militia; ethnoscapes where different tribal iden-
tities retain currency amidst the volatile regional diasporas of
Hutu and Tutsi; and security zones where mercenaries and private
military companies maintain order on behalf of transnational cor-
porations.1 Across all of this is the Virunga ecological habitat of the
Rape Warfare and Humanitarian Storytelling • 109
mountain gorilla. Amidst this are communities where survivors

of rape warfare gather as collectives of shared trauma. Since the
rebellion of 1998 several hundred thousand women and children
have been the victims of rape in the DRC, and the eastern regions
of the Kivu province are severely traumatized. In Kivu now rape
warfare is a structural violence: systematic, ongoing, and punitive.
Most often the perpetrators are from the militias that occupy the
borders of Rwanda and the DRC in the aftermath of the Rwandan
genocide of 1994, and they rape with impunity.2
That a Canadian aid worker stationed in Goma and an Australian
academic en route to a conference on testimony and reconciliation
in Cape Town find common cause in the subject of humanitar-
ian storytelling should not surprise. We both work in institutions
that play a major role in the dissemination of testimony in a global
public sphere. But at this point we are drawn to consider the limits
and constraints of human rights discourse. World Vision, an NGO
that pursues a Christian relief, development, and advocacy mission,
maintains a substantial presence amidst the vast gathering of aid
agencies headquartered at Goma in the DRC, which has been a centre
of humanitarian work in central Africa in the wake of the Rwandan
genocide.3 Scholars in life narrative are also invested in trauma
story, and genres of testimony and witnessing. ‘Humanitarian sto-
rytelling’—James Dawes’s term for the life stories that are mediated
by humanitarian and human rights workers—uses the language of
human rights to draw attention to trauma, exploitation, and injus-
tice. These narratives give witness to atrocity, and are beset by ethi-
cal difficulties that are the subject of Dawes’s (2007) book: how does
bearing witness to suffering diminish and amplify the damage?
How are the stories of the survivor translated, edited, and repro-
duced to fit the officially sanctioned human rights vocabulary of
aid institutions? There is a further question of concern here: how
do discourses of humanitarian storytelling engage with thinking on
the limits of the human, and what falls from this? These are all ques-
tions embedded in the longue durée of postcolonial life narrative,
and they become acute on the subject of rape warfare. Questions
about agency in circumstances of extreme suffering are, we know,
in the bloodlines of testimonial narrative, which were renewed in
more recent debates in South Africa about cultured violence, ‘deaf
listening’, and the testimony of women at the TRC. We can return,
for example, to the case of Mrs Konile in the previous chapter, or to

colonial testimonial in Part 1 of this book, and the discussion there
of the possibility that subaltern women such as Mary Prince and
Saartjie Baartman gained a limited control available to them not
through discourses of emancipation but through negotiating terms
of self-exploitation. This is very different to agency understood as
self-determination. It is, nevertheless, where we locate traces and
testimony of women’s voices and contest ‘deaf listening’.
Humanitarian storytelling has the power to create spectators of
suffering who engage empathically with terrible events. It generates
compassion and benevolence, and elicits donor support. At the same
time, it can be called to account for the part it plays in representing
communities and people as inhabitants of a ‘developing world’, and
as subjects of ‘distant suffering’ offered for western benevolence and
spectatorship, and there is now an extended scholarship about this
(for example Boltanski 1999, Schaffer and Smith 2004, Chouliariki
2006, Hesford 2011). What arose in that brief encounter in the
Johannesburg hotel was a more specific concern that narratives of
endemic rape warfare remain unrecognized despite the encoding of
rape as a human rights violation in the wake of the Bosnian crisis
late in the last century. This raises more precise questions, about how
specific genres of life narrative thrive and falter. Is the limited agency
of humanitarian storytelling in the case of the women of Kivu entan-
gled with the pre-eminence of Fossey and her gorillas in global col-
lective memory? How do human and animal rights claims travel in
the ideoscapes and mediascapes that carry testimony of precarious
life? Are the transcultural networks of rights discourse and the trau-
matized subjects they empower connected in a competitive economy
of affect where violent and traumatized narratives of suffering and
loss accrue different value, currency, and exchange? At Kivu, gen-
dered violence and rape warfare call into question how specific lives
are recognized as subjects fit for compassion.
The Greatest Silence

As it happens, a feminist intervention in humanitarian storytelling
about the DRC coincided with that conversation in Johannesburg: Lisa
F. Jackson’s documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,
which engages specifically with unspeakable stories of gendered

violence that traumatize African women. It actively elicits women’s
testimony as victims of rape as a human rights abuse, it solicits the
accounts of men in the militias that are perpetrators of rape warfare,
and it engages with the activists who campaign on behalf of the vic-
tims in the DRC. Jackson’s documentary is critically acclaimed and
widely circulated: it has been screened in prime time on the HBO
network in the USA, it features in human rights film festivals glob-
ally, and it has been widely circulated and recognized in the DRC.
It was, for example, shown in the Congolese National Assembly
in Kinshasa, and throughout January 2009 the film was aired on
Congolese national television in three different languages (Reed
2009). It calls for an end to impunity to rape.
Jackson’s film circulates locally, regionally, and globally as a pow-
erful condemnation of gendered warfare in the DRC. It places the
women’s testimonies in a communal context of healing and resist-
ance that emphasizes the therapeutic effects of giving testimony in
processes of individual and collective healing. It begins to make some
response to those questions that initiate this enquiry: how networks
of humanitarian storytelling might become engaged on the issue of
rape warfare in the DRC. In The Greatest Silence we might well see
and hear that small group of women struggling to survive on the
borderlands of Rwanda and the DRC. In Jackson’s film, women and
children who are victims of gendered violence give testimony, and
they openly risk the cultural stigma that attaches to the rape victim.
The contact zone of overlapping and contrary regimes and commer-
cial exploitation across Kivu is made real as the lived experience of
these women. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the film has made a
substantial impact on understandings of rape warfare in Africa more
broadly (by establishing rape as acts of violence not desire), and it is
used in feminist-inspired support networks in central Africa.4 At a
site where the cultural resources available to gather the testimony of
victims of rape warfare are impoverished, The Greatest Silence has
extended the limits of who can speak, what can be spoken, and how
it is to be heard.
Here, the women and children who survive rape warfare are vivid,
articulate, and memorable. What specific knowledges, technologies,
and aesthetics extend recognition and engage the viewer as witness
in these testimonial transactions? Jackson draws on a tradition of
feminist documentary filmmaking on the subject of rape warfare, a

specific concern of the Women Make Movies collective that distrib-
utes The Greatest Silence as part of its International Human Rights
Collection of films by and about women. This feminist initiative has
sponsored a series of documentary films that focus on representa-
tions of rape warfare as a human rights violation, beginning with the
atrocities that led to the identification of rape warfare as a war crime:
the events in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Rape warfare
documentary risks a variety of feminist critiques: on the commodi-
fication of truth-telling discourses and the exotic (Hesford 2011), the
limitations of human rights discourse (Grewal 2005), and the crea-
tion of discursive space by and for third-world woman by first-world
witnesses (Mohanty 2003, Parry 2004, Hunt 2013). Feminist knowl-
edges create the ideoscapes for this documentary. In considering the
risks and possibilities of transnational and transcultural rhetorical
acts of witnessing, Wendy Hesford argues that testimonies by vic-
tims of rape warfare in particular produce acute problems in the pro-
duction and dissemination of trauma story: ‘I . . . use the term crisis
of witnessing to refer to the risks of representing trauma and violence,
to ruptures in identification, and to the impossibility of empathetic
merging between witness and testifier’ (2011, 99). Aesthetically, ethi-
cally, and politically, rape warfare challenges established media-
scapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes of documentary film and
humanitarian storytelling.
Technoscapes
The digital camera allows an intimate entry into the community of
these women. In The Greatest Silence their faces fill the screen. Their
eyes—‘the apotheosis of the quick, the most alive and sensitive parts
of the body’—gaze into the lens; voices ‘have textures, as though per-
ceived tactilely and visually’ (MacDougall 1998, 52), and these women
take the opportunity to speak of terrible experiences of violation and
physical suffering. The digicam is vital to this intimacy and access:
it becomes a prosthetic device that extends Jackson’s own embodied
presence at the scene of testimony and witnessing; body and cam-
era are ‘kindred instruments’ (MacDougall 1998, 29). Carried on
Jackson’s shoulder, the camera both captures and replays testimony:
the Congolese women witness their embodiment in the film. In this

way, the mise en scène incorporates a complex and multilayered scene
of testimonial transactions in the first, second, and third person,
implicating the subject, viewer, and filmmaker together. These com-
plex auto/biographical dynamics are extended as Jackson includes
her testimony as a survivor of pack rape in the USA. This implic-
itly authorizes her to give empathic witness to the testimonies of
Congolese women, and it draws on feminist social activism to empha-
size the shared gendered vulnerability of African and western women
as victims of pack rape. The digicam extends a long association of
new technologies and humanitarian intervention in the Congo. The
Kodak camera was essential to the atrocity photographs of mutilated
African people circulated in humanitarian campaigns by the Congo
Reform Association early last century, identified by Sharon Sliwinski
as one of the earliest examples of the belief that liberation from suf-
fering is in the hands of distant spectators (81).5
Yet that digital camera, that technology that renders the testimony
of these women audible, visual, and available for dissemination, terri-
fies the traumatized children. When Jackson approaches, the digicam
aloft on her shoulder resembles the weapons carried by the militia and
Congolese armed forces, and it triggers traumatic memories. In the
eyes of these children of Kivu, victims, perpetrators, and benefactors
are neither readily identifiable nor stable identities. At this point—a
transient yet eloquent moment when the very presence of the cam-
era calls the framing of the testimonial narrative into question—we
witness complex and contradictory social relations, and the limita-
tions of humanitarian storytelling, which struggles to recognize the
entanglement of the different subjects that coexist as survivors at Kivu
now. In Jackson’s documentary perpetrators remain unspeakable and
faceless. Captured in dehumanizing frames of reference, these men
mark the limits of who can speak and be heard in the political and
aesthetic frames of the documentary. Militia emerge from the forests
of Kivu and confess direct to camera to multiple and brutal acts of
rape. These men are camouflaged and unnamed, and they speak with-
out repentance, guilt, or compassion. Here the documentary draws
on a long history of western representations of the Congo that engage
in Africanist tropes of primitivism and monstrosity, which reap-
pears in these figures of masculinity depraved beyond recognition.
These perpetrators remain illegible, invisible; they are bestialized and
unmourned in the politics and aesthetics of the documentary. The

dehumanizing ethics and aesthetics of this representation ensure they
make no demands for an ethical response from the spectator, even
though they deliberately speak not only as perpetrators but also as
intimate others, connected to the communities of women as fathers,
husbands, and sons.
These brutish, faceless others lurching out of the forests of Kivu
suggest that ‘something was possibly outside, which made the very
sense of the inside possible, recognizable . . . Something exceeds the
frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something
occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of
things’ (Butler 2009, 9) The challenge for humanitarian storytelling
on rape warfare is to imagine the humane without recourse to the
species boundary that separates the human and its others, and to rec-
ognize the entanglement of human and non-human creatures and
‘things’. The perpetrator as inhuman other raises fundamental ques-
tions about whose lives become real through testimonial transac-
tions, and how might this reality be remade.6 Butler’s questions about
what makes for a grievable life open directly into concerns about the
recognition of subjects of violence and the speakability of trauma
in humanitarian storytelling. They call into question the binary
thinking that relegates the perpetrator to unspeakability and face-
less monstrosity. The ‘established understanding’ we are called upon
to reimagine by Butler is a thinking that questions speciesism, and
the established modes of recognition that fall from that. This is the
search for more expansive conceptions of the human and human-
ism that is the heritage of postcolonial thinking, with its enduring
attention to the making of the human and its privileges in colonial
modernity.
Mahmood Mamdani argues that the true moral dilemma of the
Rwandan genocide and its aftermath is the intimacy of the affair.
Neither the identity of the perpetrator not that of the victim is as
transparent as we might think, and beneficiaries are few (2001, 267).
As a result he questions campaigns for punitive justice in favour of
forms of transitional justice that work at local levels to reconcile
both victims and perpetrators as survivors. For example, in Rwanda
the community ‘gacaca’—local truth and reconciliation tribunals—
elicit testimony and work towards social justice and reconciliation
by bringing tormented individuals and perpetrators face to face.7 In
an extraordinary omission Mamdani makes no mention of gendered

violence and rape warfare, and Jackson’s campaign for an end of
impunity to rape in the DRC is a powerful and specific response to
women’s testimony on the subject of rape warfare that demands an
ethical response to the testimonies of both victim and perpetrator,
as entangled subjects. As Nancy Rose Hunt argues in her considera-
tion of the complexity of evidence about ruination in the Congo—an
argument about the limitations of humanitarian spectatorship pro-
voked by viewing a documentary on sexual violence in the DRC that
includes the words and images of raped women—visual evidence in
particular needs to be problematized and disaggregated (2013, 43).
Thresholds of Difference
Questions about the traditions that have made some traumatic histo-
ries and memories visible and speakable as human rights violations
are not new. The Congo circulates in western narrative as a notori-
ous space, an imaginative geography where the limits of the human
are subject to negotiation. The brutal history of Belgian colonial
exploitation in central Africa drives Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart
of Darkness (1899), producing a mythical, aestheticized location that
haunts subsequent representations of central Africa and engage-
ments with the lived experiences of its people. The novelist Caryl
Phillips has commented that modern descriptions of famines, war,
and genocide are eerily prefigured by Conrad, and Heart of Darkness
abounds with passages that seem terrifyingly contemporary in their
descriptive accuracy (2003, 3). Chinua Achebe’s powerful critique of
Conrad’s work as an ‘Africanist’ text recognizes both its condemna-
tion of colonialism and its powerful projection of primitivism onto
African space and peoples (1975). What is less commonly recognized
is Conrad’s critique of humanitarianism. Marianna Torgovnick’s
feminist reading of Heart of Darkness points out that the fallen
Kurtz is the author of a humanitarian treatise, an eloquent report
written for the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage
Customs’ (1990). In fact, it is this humanism and liberalism that
draws Conrad’s embedded narrator Marlow to Kurtz with a sense
of common cause. In the marginalia of this report Marlow finds
Kurtz’s scrawl: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (Conrad 2007, 182). As
Torgovnick observes, this marginalia insidiously doubles and paro-

dies the loftier language written into Kurtz’s humanitarian text (150).
This extends the well-established critique of Africanist discourse in
Conrad’s novella by drawing attention to the enfolded presence of
the savage and the brute at the edge of the page. Here, at this thresh-
old, the category of the human is unstable, and the speciesism that
secures the humanist subject is subject to change. That Conrad’s
novella opens a way to thinking about the place of the animal other
and the entanglement of ‘human’ and ‘brute’ is part of its ‘eerie’
ongoing relevance.
Anxiety about what it means to be human, discourses of the ani-
mal other, and a radical rethinking of the species boundary recur
in the aftermath of colonialism. Violence renders the humanist
subject unstable, and, it follows, the recognition of subjects fit for
compassion. Judith Butler’s work on the interpretive frames that
shape responsiveness to others emphasizes that cultural contours for
thinking about the human set limits on what losses can be recog-
nized and mourned. Butler’s writing on ‘precarious life’ establishes
mourning as a sign of where the borderlines of the human can be
drawn, or (it follows) as a point where frames of reference might be
called into question to extend the limits of recognition. To recognize
those subjected to violence, she suggests, ‘it is not a matter of a simple
entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrec-
tion at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of fundamental
questions: What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be
remade?’ (2004, 33). These questions about what makes for a grievable
life open directly onto concerns about the recognition of subjects of
violence and the speakability of trauma in humanitarian storytelling.
How do auto/biographical narratives trigger recognition of grievable
life? Can they extend the limits of recognition, and our established
understanding of things?
We bring excess baggage in any engagement with the Congo, which
exists in the western imaginary as a space of brutality and excess
that generates anxious and fearful speculation on what it means to
be human. At the same time, the forests of the Virunga mountains
are familiar as a place of transcendence where cross-species engage-
ment has extended recognition to embrace non-human others. Both
of these ideoscapes shape apprehension of the geographical, histori-
cal, and social realities of Kivu now. The reminder that victims of
rape warfare struggle to survive there ‘just across the border from
where Fossey watched the gorillas’ is a gift of that conversation in
Johannesburg, and it entails thinking about what life narrative might
make by way of response. How does Fossey’s auto/biography relate
to the ongoing presence of mourning and violence in central Africa
now? How does it contribute to contemporary feminist and postcolo-
nial engagements with ‘distant suffering’ at this unique contact zone
where species meet?
Gorilla Girl
Ongoing remediation of life narrative renders both Fossey and the
mountain gorillas associated with her familiar subjects of biographi-
cal representation. The ‘gorilla girl’ celebrity persona survives long
after the violent death of Fossey and the gorillas she originally rec-
ognized as creatures of unique and individual significance. Girl and
gorilla are revived through ongoing auto/biographical adaptation
and remediation in memoir, documentary, autobiography, biopic,
and biography; the animal and the human become ‘celebrity sub-
jects’ as Graham Huggan suggests in his recent study of Fossey’s
‘celebrification’ (2013a). By pursuing how these various genres of
life narrative arise and circulate, how they are produced and con-
sumed, regenerated, and remediated, and how they accrue value as
truth, we can engage with these questions about the recognition of
subjects and subjectivities through rights discourse in narrated lives,
and consider how animal rights and human rights claims coincide,
and on occasion contest, in humanitarian discourse. The gorilla
girl corpus is a compelling narrative of cross-species engagement: it
expands our recognition of humans and animals as companion spe-
cies, and it extends the scope of humanitarian compassion across the
species boundary. Yet concerned claims that animal rights prevail
over human rights in representations of the region in humanitarian
media abound—most commonly in observations by journalists that
their accounts of the genocide in Rwanda and its violent aftermath
in the DRC now must include reports on the fate of the mountain
gorillas to raise interest and compassion in the global public sphere
(Melvern 2006, Dawes 2007). The implication that an empathic
engagement with this endangered species overshadows the pursuit
of human rights and social justice by and on behalf of African people

suggests that the relationship between the force of the Fossey legend
and the recognition of central African women’s testimony is not just
proximity—nearness in place—but propinquity: a deeper kinship
that arises from their presence together in this location, historically a
shared space of gendered and creaturely vulnerability.
Wai Chee Dimock takes ‘remediation’—conventionally under-
stood as the distilling, extracting, and relaunching of old media in
the new—and extends it into a broader application, suggesting that
remediation grasps how genres are constantly subject to ‘cumulative
reuse, an alluvial process, sedimentary as well as migratory’ (2007,
1380). Dimock’s approach to the ‘reproductive’ history of genres and
media in terms of ‘kinship networks’ suggests a methodology for
tracking the transits of life narrative in terms of ongoing adaptation.
By mapping how the Fossey story migrates, mutates, and is subject
to osmosis through remediation in this chapter, I mean to explore
further the ebb and flow of trauma story from the Congo region, and
suggest what this can bring to those ethical entanglements in rep-
resentations of gendered violence and rape warfare. Here, in these
borderscapes, humanitarian storytelling has been reconfigured by
the powerful presence of ‘other’ lives: the gorillas that challenge the
species boundary and offer the possibility of living imaginatively in
another creature’s world.8
Dian Fossey arrived to establish a research station near Lake
Kivu in Zaire in 1967. This was already hallowed ground in the
history of representations of civilization and nature, and the asso-
ciation of human and animal worlds. The primates featured in the
Akeley African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History
in New York were taken from here in the early 1900s, and the set-
ting of the diorama of the gorilla group at the museum features Lake
Kivu and the Virunga mountains.9 Carl Akeley died in the forests of
Kivu, and when Fossey set up her camp at the meadow near Akeley’s
remains, she cherished the association. In her memoir Gorillas in the
Mist (first published in 1983) she points out that Sanwekwe, the indig-
enous tracker who enabled her own first encounter with the Virunga
gorillas, tracked for Akeley. Later Sanwekwe had worked for George
Schaller, whose memoir of his time living at the same Kivu site, The
Year of the Gorilla, inspired Fossey. The association of technology,
conservation, and science in explorations of the species boundary are
embedded in this location, and the presence of Akeley’s remains is a

harbinger of Fossey’s own fate.
Yet in ways that are important for thinking on testimony and gen-
dered violence in the DRC, her history is very different from these
male precursors. Fossey’s career is critically located at a series of
shifts in disciplines of science, technologies of popular culture, and
discourses of conservation, and these trigger a reframing of the spe-
cies boundary that opens questions of whose lives ‘count’. At first
glance, the gorilla girl persona appears to be a compliant creature,
created to inform and entertain the new mass media audiences of
the 1970s through a photogenic and gendered narrative that engages
with debates about the ‘origins of man’ in popular science. Donna
Haraway’s classic work of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship,
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science (1989), maps Fossey’s place in the emerging science of prima-
tology and its reinvention of nature in the third world for first-world
audiences.10 Changing knowledge about the origins of the human
and its relations to the animal were mediated by the new technol-
ogy and aesthetics that pioneered modern genres of wildlife docu-
mentary for television audiences in North America. The National
Geographic Society supported a host of primate projects under the
auspices of the primatologist Louis Leakey. The trio of researchers
selected by Leakey and sent into the field in Tanzania, Zaire, and
Indonesia—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas—first
appeared in a series of five National Geographic public television
documentaries and magazine articles in the 1970s, and this fran-
chise produced images of the ‘trimates’ (as the trio were sometimes
known) and chimps, gorillas, and orang-utans that are now embed-
ded in popular cultural memory.11
The infrastructure of Fossey’s memoir is a classic postcolonial
narrative: the first contact between human and non-human primate,
here a transcendent moment of cross-species touch, and a gendered,
embodied experience that transcends speciesism to reconfigure the
species boundary. At its heart is contact with the ‘other’—in the
Fossey story, a space occupied by the Virunga mountain gorillas.
This translates contact narrative in ontological border zones, where
primates occupy a privileged relation to nature and culture. Two
transformed beings are created here. The first is gorilla girl. Fossey
enters the wilderness and imitates primate behaviour: she crawls,
practises vocalizing, and enters the gendered hierarchy of the pri-

mate group. In a sexualized and gendered display, she is available to
the touch of the male primate. In turn, the gorilla offers the gift of
recognition in a climax of the cross-species recognition: the touch
of hands is pivotal in the choreography of contact. A second being
that is reborn through cross-species contact are the gorillas: they are
individualized and given proper names; they are classified in patri-
archal heterosexual family groups, and civilized as noble, loyal, and
intelligent.12 For Fossey, the massive silverbacks are the ultimate
patriarchs, ‘peaceful disciplinarians within their own family group
structures’ (2001, 70). One of the legacies of the silverback she names
Beethoven and his family unit is, for Fossey, an example of civilized
behaviour for human society (105). Here gorillas become recogniza-
ble as biographical subjects: they are rendered in the gendered, sexed
terms of western individualism. The behaviour of later generations
of these gorillas is analysed psychologically, as bearers of a Freudian
unconscious. To this extent the Fossey story brings gorillas across a
species boundary into ‘civilization’ through compassionate recogni-
tion, where they become bearers of the hallmarks of western indi-
vidualism. Memoir facilitates this extraordinary auto/biographical
creation. It is, as the Encyclopedia of Life Writing suggests, a genre
separate from autobiography, which is preoccupied with the physi-
cality of a materially located place in history and culture (Buss 2001,
595). Memoir ‘haunts’ autobiography discourse because of its inher-
ent instability as a process and product (Rak 2004, 321)—here that
‘instability’ challenges the species boundary that secures the ‘auto’
of biography.
Cultivating Curiosity
New perspectives for pursuing the legendary presence of Dian Fossey
emerge in feminist and postcolonial readings of the memoir. Donna
Haraway introduces this shift, just as her earlier Primate Visions
(1989) first grasped the role of the trimates in the articulation of sci-
ence, technology, and gender in postwar primatology. A reformula-
tion of Fossey’s experiences is implied in a long footnote in Haraway’s
When Species Meet (2008). Here she returns to Fossey’s memoir in
a spirit of ‘cultivating curiosity’ to suggest that the ‘subject-forming
entanglement’ that produces gorilla girl is a harbinger of human and

animal co-presence as ‘companion species.’13 This alerts us to the
ongoing importance of Fossey’s memoir in shaping feminist percep-
tions of embodied knowledge and affect that reconfigure the species
boundary. Gorillas in the Mist introduces ‘active conservation’ sub-
jectively in terms of a profound rebirth into wildlife preservation as
an embodied knowledge.14 The memoir signals this from the very
beginning when the autobiographical narrator recalls her first visit to
meet Louis and Mary Leakey at the excavation sites in Olduvai Gorge
in Tanzania in 1963. On first acquaintance and in her exultation at
‘being free under African skies’, Fossey runs down a steep slope,
breaks her ankle, and sudden pain ‘induced me to vomit unceremo-
niously all over the treasured fossil. As if this wasn’t humiliating
enough, I had to be unceremoniously hauled out of the gorge, pig-
gyback style, by disgusted members of the Leakeys’ staff’ (2001, 2).
This abjection of the ‘clumsy tourist’ is the first stage of a progressive
transformation as she proceeds to her first encounter with gorillas
shortly afterwards. What distinguishes Fossey’s memoir is the pow-
erful embodied proximity of the other: ‘Sound preceded sight. Odor
preceded sound in the form of an overwhelming musky-barnyard,
humanlike scent . . . Immediately I was struck by the physical mag-
nificence of the huge jet-black bodies blended against the green pal-
ette wash of the thick forest foliage’ (3). In her memoir, the visual and
ontological presence of gorilla is all-consuming, filling the autobio-
graphical frame with an overwhelming physical presence.
Gorillas in the Mist is a radical life narrative, using memoir to con-
test speciesism and renegotiate the terms of relational biography. Its
prefatory pages, for example, set out genealogies, but these are the
family lines of the gorillas, not the autobiographer (Fossey tells us
very little about her life before Karisoke). Portfolios of photographs
included in the memoir are National Geographic close-ups of the
gorillas, and few feature Fossey with them. The camera lingers on
the faces of the gorillas, and these images are essential to their rec-
ognition as individuals: ‘Certain faces must be admitted into public
view, must be seen and heard for some keener sense of the value of
life, all life, to take hold’ (Butler 2004, xviii). In the documentaries,
close-up images of Fossey are rare; it is the gorilla not the girl who
looks directly into the camera lens. ‘It was like being reborn’ (2001,
17), she tells us, and in memoir Fossey narrates this transformation
into a new subjectivity, which transforms both human and animal as

biographical subjects.15
Violence and suffering are crucial to the affect of this narrative: the
gorillas are an endangered species. In this way, an important and
apocalyptic component of first contact narrative is enjoined: these
creatures are in the process of dying away, the mountain gorilla
‘might possibly be doomed to extinction in the same century in
which it had been discovered’ (xviii). From the very beginnings of
Fossey’s memoir, then, the gorillas are the subjects of mourning. In
this way the memoir returns us to Butler, producing a point of radi-
cal departure precisely on the recognition of subjects of violence,
and the extension of mourning to include non-human primates. The
memoir is imbued with traumatic suffering, with grief and loss, and
it introduces tropes of burial and commemoration to the gorilla girl
story. It is Fossey who establishes individually labelled burial sites
for each of the primates, a sacrilege to the many Catholic Rwandans.
The incorporation of the grave site into gorilla girl mythography pre-
ceded Fossey’s violent death at Karisoke in 1985, and it is accentu-
ated when she too is buried alongside Digit, the gorilla whose violent
death and dismemberment by poachers was reported widely in the
American press several years before. These graves are now powerful
symbols which further draw the gorillas into frames of recognition,
where they are commemorated biographically as beloved individual
subjects.
Rebecca Bishop has recently argued the autobiographical writ-
ings of the trimates present an account of the lived experience of
embodied subjectivity through an entry into the terrain of the
other that informs debates in contemporary feminist epistemol-
ogy and posthumanism: Butler’s ‘bodily performativity’, Elizabeth
Grosz’s perceptions of human bodies constituted in proximity and
flow, and Rosa Braidotti’s arguments on the bodily roots of subjec-
tivity (Bishop 2008, 134). In When Species Meet, and the preceding
Primate Visions, the influence of Fossey is apparent as Haraway
focuses on the performative experience of interspecies communi-
cation to place animals and humans together as companion species
in processes of mutually constitutive ‘becoming’: ‘To know com-
panion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect,
is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what is
precisely are at stake’ (2008, 19). This grasps the transformation
of animal and human subjects in mutual recognition perceptively.

However, what needs to be included in feminist theorizing of the
agency of gorilla girl at this point is Butler’s insight that the work
of mourning and violence in determining what makes for a griev-
able life can also challenge established ontologies, such as the spe-
cies boundary and the meaning of what it is to be human. This
generates the extraordinary affective force of the gorilla girl narra-
tive: a powerful empathic engagement across the species boundary
is haunted by violent death. Animal and human subjects are inter-
subjectively constituted in the Fossey story, and both are victims
of indiscriminate slaughter in a region where their experiences of
violence and suffering sustain apocalyptic accounts of the degen-
eration of humanity in the Congo.
To all appearances this contact narrative is performative.
However, a convergence of knowledges, technologies, and aes-
thetics is fundamental to how we recognize gorilla girl now,
through the remediation of the memoir. Technological innovation
produced new possibilities for representations of cross-species
engagement that draw upon an aesthetics of recognition to con-
found perceptions of the species boundary. This is a precursor of
the intimacy that is an affordance of the digicam in The Greatest
Silence. New technology—lightweight synchronous sound cam-
eras and film stocks of unprecedented sensitivity—opened up
possibilities for capturing the intimate images of cross-species
contact featuring Fossey and the gorillas. Close-up shots of pri-
mate faces, eyes, and hands were iconic features of wildlife docu-
mentary featuring gorilla girl; these embodiments of identity and
individuality are the essence of self in western ideology and the
psychology of the individual. The face in particular is associ-
ated with interiority, and the possibility of drawing near to the
human face in close-ups that bring the viewer into unusual physi-
cal intimacy with the subject is a unique and distinctive qual-
ity of documentary film: ‘Without the human face, much of what
matters to us in films would vanish’ (MacDougall 1998, 51). To
register the faces of individual primates this way draws them
into a humanizing frame of reference, where they acquire attrib-
utes of intelligence and comprehension, and where they become
subject to recognition in ways that reconfigure what is human,
what is precarious, what is injurable. All of this is a precursor to
Jackson’s documentary, where new technology facilitates access

to suffering beings, drawing on the visual aesthetics observed by
MacDougall.16 However, gorilla girl memoir and documentary
challenges anthropocentric approaches to precarious life, and
extends humanitarian activism across the species boundary.
From Memoir to Biopic

Remediations of the gorilla girl narrative in the wake of the memoir
recur in landscapes where a powerful embodiment of cross-species
contact is embedded in an affective experience of mourning. Fossey
was murdered in her quarters at Karisoke in 1985, shortly after the
publication of her memoir. A rapid celebrification occurs at this
point. First, Fossey’s violent death, like Digit’s, produced interna-
tional media attention and a widespread mourning that came to
focus on a new and potent site of symbolic post-mortem cross-species
‘touch’: gorilla and girl are buried alongside each other in the gorilla
graveyard at Karisoke, and both mourned in obituaries. Second,
in a rapid and radical process of adaptation, Fossey’s celebrity was
both transferred and enhanced by the casting of the American actor
Sigourney Weaver as Fossey in the biopic based on the memoir,
filmed in Rwanda amongst gorillas observed by Fossey, and released
in 1988. Michael Apted’s film Gorillas in the Mist is a remediation of
the memoir that adapts the Fossey story variously: it selects from the
accumulation of gorilla girl narrative that has preceded it; it incor-
porates via re-enactment versions of the National Geographic docu-
mentaries with particular emphasis on the cross-species first contact;
it selects from the memoir and takes the title forward; it includes
new fictional material; and it concludes with an African intervention
that produces a symbolic connection of human and animal remains
at Fossey’s grave in Rwanda, and that gestures to the presence and
agency of African people at Kivu. This is essential to the ongoing
work of adaptation: the integration of the new social political reali-
ties into the framework of the biography.17
Most significantly, Apted’s biopic incorporates specific and self-
reflexive representations of new technologies and knowledges in
documentary filming at Karisoke. This opens up the mise en scène of
the memoir to include technology and its role in the celebrification
of Fossey and the gorillas. Apted’s biopic emphasizes the presence

of camera and its operator, and (controversially) the strategic and
deliberate framing of the moment of contact. In his recent mem-
oir, the National Geographic cameraman who filmed extensively at
Karisoke, Bob Campbell, claims that he initiated and choreographed
key moments of Fossey’s performance for effect (2000). This is a
reminder of the mediation and commercialization of what appears
to be a profound and natural encounter motivated by its human and
animal subjects. In Fossey’s memoir first contact is represented as a
spontaneous act initiatied by the gorilla. Gorillas in the Mist involved
Campbell as a consultant in the course of production, and it pre-
sents the ‘contact’ narrative from his perspective. Campbell (played
by Bryan Brown) is included in the scenes featuring Fossey and the
gorillas, and the new ‘lightweight’ synchronous sound camera is
omnipresent. Apted’s film presents the interaction of Fossey and the
gorillas as a carefully staged display. In this way, Apted’s adaptation
of the memoir appropriates Fossey’s account, introducing an element
of reflexivity to insert the technologies and aesthetics of wildlife doc-
umentary into the framing of its subjects, both girl and gorillas, and
it deliberately gestures to the positioning of the viewer as witness.18
The casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey in the biopic
accelerated the Fossey legend, affecting a convergence of two star
signs. Weaver’s image becomes a reincarnation, effectively displacing
Fossey visually in gorilla girl imagery (on covers of some later edi-
tions of the memoir, for example), and enabling renewed narrative—
ironically Fossey’s death and the unique affective force of her version
of interspecies contact secures her preeminence over the surviving
members of Leakey’s trio, Goodall and Galdikas.19 The corpus of
gorilla girl material is dense with primate and human imagery, bod-
ies and performance, as Weaver is incorporated into the frame at this
point. Apted’s ‘first contact’ narrative presents Weaver who imitates
Fossey who is in turn imitating primate behaviour, vocalizations, and
gestures. Gorilla girl is a celebrity composite, an assemblage of life
narratives produced by a series of remediations over several decades,
its imagery sedimented in popular memory by ongoing biographical
and autobiographical representations that both celebrate and mourn
this powerful extension of the humanist subject of life narrative. That
biographical representation can facilitate a questioning of anthropo-
centrism in this way is a powerful legacy of the gorilla girl corpus.
These incarnations and images are now generic, unhinged

from their original memoir, documentaries, and still photo-
graphs, and subjected to constant adaptation across various
media in a series of spaces organized and managed through
Fossey’s celebrity. The Gorilla Girl persona proliferates in post-
ers, still photographs, book covers (including Haraway’s Primate
Visions), the Apted film, half a dozen print biographies, pho-
tobiography, YouTube clips, websites, a Dian Fossey Visa card,
and other products now marketed (officially) through the e-store
associated with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. The
Fossey brand is the hub of heterogeneous campaigns, products,
and associations mediated through a celebrity icon. In this nar-
rative field both human and non-human primates coexist as
celebrities: ‘Dian’, ‘Digit’, ‘Beethoven’, and ‘Brahms’ were born
as celebrity icons and biographical subjects together, in a charis-
matic primal narrative that now traverses a series of mediations
and confers individual ‘self hood’ upon the primates recognized
in the documentaries. This is the gift of biographical represen-
tation. Generations of familiar/familial named gorillas—Digit,
Titus, Kuryama—are an important rhetorical strategy in cam-
paigns organized around the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Primate
celebrity is critical to the bonds of pleasure and identification
that the audience makes with gorilla girl, to campaigns for ani-
mal rights featuring non-human primates more generally, and
it shapes a powerful mode of empathic engagement for global
access to the Kivu region. Fossey’s practice of ‘active conserva-
tion’, which refused to negotiate gorilla welfare in terms of the
demands of commerce and industry and the new nation state,
has been superseded by this highly effective campaign of what
she would term ‘theoretical conservation’, where the fate of the
Virunga gorillas energizes global mediascapes and ideoscapes of
wildlife conservation. Predictably, given that grief and loss are
embedded in gorilla girl iconography, this humanitarian narra-
tive is empowered in the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, and
it taps into two markets that drive the global tourism industry
vital to the Rwandan national economy: ecotourism and dark/
disaster tourism.20
Biographics
It is Dian Fossey’s vulnerability as a gendered subject, and the
question of where and how her experiences of gendered violence
become speakable in life narrative, that return gorilla girl to Kivu,
and to the conversation that sets this chapter in train. As Foucault
suggests:
silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the dis-
cretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit
of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary,
than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in
relation to them. (1973, 27)
A narrative of gendered violence that remains unspoken within

gorilla girl lore surfaces variously as biographical representations of
Dian Fossey proliferate and extend the controversial and unstable
life of Fossey as an auto/biographical subject.
Farley Mowat, the Canadian nature writer and author of the
first substantial biography of Fossey, is generally recognized as her
most reliable biographer. Yet Mowat’s Woman in the Mists (1987) is
by no means a scholarly biography. Mowat remarks that Fossey left
not only her memoir but also an extensive personal archive of cor-
respondence and copies of her replies, her own writings published
and unpublished, a comprehensive file of what was written about her,
daily journals, and extensive observations (xiii). Mowat quotes from
these unpublished materials indiscriminately and without reference.
Subsequently Fossey has been the subject of numerous biographi-
cal projects in various genres.21 Like celebrity biography in general,
these accounts draw on an array of authorized and unauthorized
sources to bring into view the eroticized, suffering, sexual body that
is repressed in gorilla girl framings of Fossey’s experience. It is in
these biographies, not memoir or wildlife documentary, that trau-
matic experience of grief and loss are expanded beyond a grieving
for non-human primates into gendered suffering and violence; at
this point the embodiment of gorilla girl and its relation to feminist
thinking on rape warfare takes a new turn.
From the very outset, the biographical and autobiographical
accounts of Fossey’s life at Kivu are contradictory and fragmentary,
and it is symptomatic that it is the issue of rape and gendered violence
at the hands of the Congolese militia that remain untold in authorita-

tive accounts, unrepresented in wildlife documentary, and yet vivid
as rumour, scandal, and African depravity in biography. Fossey’s ref-
erence to the militia at Kivu in her memoir is cursory and heroic,
although she later cryptically remarks that she ‘still bore the scars of
my exodus from Kabara in Zaire’ (2001, 126). Mowat emphasizes that
Fossey’s accounts in letters and affadavits about her expulsion from
Kivu written in 1966 make no mention of sexual abuse; he entirely
discounts the rape narrative as a racist and salacious myth (1987, 47).
On the other hand, Harold Hayes offers a plausible account for the
circulation of an account of this trauma in oral narrative: different
versions of the traumatic experience were told to friends and col-
leagues over the years (1991, 163–4). Georgianne Nienaber’s version
in Gorilla Dreams (2006) draws on Fossey’s diaries and ‘emotional
confessions’ allegedly made to others to claim Congolese militia bru-
talized and caged Fossey, urinated upon her, and raped her. Fossey
herself becomes a caged animal, dehumanized and presented for
public view. Dale Peterson’s recent authoritative biography of Jane
Goodall also asserts that Fossey was sexually abused by the militia.22
Elsewhere the account becomes even more traumatic, including sug-
gestions of cannibalism.23
Ultimately, then, tracking the transits of life narrative through
remediation brings Dian Fossey and the indigenous women of Kivu
together as we consider how accounts of gendered violence in the
Congo become available to public discussion via auto/biographical
acts and humanitarian documentary, and how silence and refusal
endure as tactics whereby women gain a limited control through
negotiating the terms of exploitation. The possibility that Fossey
herself was a victim of rape warfare is a reminder that in 1967, as
now, women are subjected to violent sexual assault, that militia who
act with impunity have now traumatized generations of women
at this rape site, and that this suffering frequently remains unspo-
ken, unheard, and unseen. It indicates too that the remediation of
Fossey’s life narrative occurs in carefully regulated ideoscapes and
mediascapes. The gorilla girl story is subject to adaptation and appro-
priation, it draws on powerful affective forces of mourning and loss
to challenge speciesism and expand recognition of precarious life by
drawing endangered species into the frame, but it is not readily avail-
able to a narrative of gendered violence—not only does the gorilla
girl narrative fail to recognize the presence or suffering of African

women, but also, possibly, it occludes the violation of Fossey herself.
This possibility is engaged in paratexts, in biographical speculation,
but not in autobiographical memoir, biopic, or wildlife documentary.
Fossey’s celebrity as gorilla girl is, to be sure, a space of privilege, and
yet the coexistence of the Fossey legend and the constrained produc-
tion and dissemination of humanitarian storytelling of rape warfare
are both symptomatic of the gendered construction of narratives that
regulate identification and empathic engagement with women’s lived
experiences in the Congo region. These questions about the lim-
its of the speakable, and what can be said about gendered violence
in particular, return to the conversation in the hotel that set this
chapter in motion. The Fossey story, which circles around mourn-
ing, violence, and loss, suggests how the limits of recognition and
speakability can be contested and reconfigured in humanitarian
storytelling to include the lives (and deaths) of animals as ‘grievable
life’. Experiences of gendered violence, however, remain unspeak-
able. Philosophical and ethical questions about how narrated lives
are mobilized in humanitarian storytelling, and which lives become
‘grievable’ on the pages of memoir and through the lens of the
Kodak, the synchronous sound camera, and the digicam, connect to
how living things become subject to humanitarian recognition and
campaigns for social activism through auto/biographical represen-
tation. Nancy Rose Hunt observes that in the humanitarian cam-
paigns led by the British publicist E.D. Morel and the Congo Reform
Association in the 1890s and 1900s cannibalism and mutilation were
more sayable and photographable than rape, which remained unfit
for repetition among humanitarians like Roger Casement. Seizing
hold of repetitions, she suggests, produces questions about what has
not been reproduced (2013, 55).
In the eastern DRC now women, men, and children struggle to
survive in conditions of abject poverty, just across the border from
where Dian Fossey watched the gorillas. Together the life narratives
of these living beings circle around issues of gendered violence and
rape warfare, and the precarious life of endangered species, gener-
ating new thinking about the work of mourning and violence and
the limits of humanitarian recognition. The shifting grounds of
human rights, humanitarianism, and what it means to be human
are a legacy of colonial modernity. Remediation identifies kinship
networks—proximities, transactions, propinquities—across testi-

mony, memoir, and biopic. Here, in this chapter, migrations of life
narrative draw together Dian Fossey’s radical memoir, which ques-
tions the thresholds of human and animal lives, and the unspeakable
suffering of rape warfare and its insidious violence. For postcolo-
nialism questioning the humanisms that are an inheritance of the
European Enlightenment is essential to de/colonizing the subject.
From the very beginnings of life narrative in colonial modernity, what
it means to be human and the agency of humanitarian activism are
open to question. Both traditional and ‘new’ humanisms thrive and
contest in contemporary auto/biographical representations, where
‘posting’ colonialism and humanism are closely related projects that
insist on the proximate lives of animals, humans, and things.
Notes
1. This is the Africa of James Ferguson’s Global Shadows.
2. Over a million Hutu crossed into Congo in mid-1994 as refugees, which
‘literally brought the trauma of postgenocide Rwanda to the region of
Kivu. The impact was volcanic, and its effects have yet to ebb’ (Mamdani
2001, 24).
3. Mamdani remarks on the devastating effects of the armed refugee camps
on civilian life in Kivu, which led to the dollarization of the economy,
and the militarization of ordinary life: ‘To talk to civil society leaders in
Kivu about the experience of hosting a million-plus refugees resourced
through international NGOs was to listen to a litany of troubles—
criminality, ill health, increased prices, lowered production, mounting
insecurity—all traced to that single experience’ (2001, 256).
4. These anecdotal insights into the uses of Jackson’s film in woman-
centred support networks emerged in discussions about the film at the
‘Beyond Reconciliation’ conference at the University of Cape Town, 2–6
December 2009. For an example of how Jackson’s film has embedded in
the popular press in Africa an understanding of war rape as not about
sex, but about power, terror, and domination, see Liwanga (2009).
5. There is extensive discussion of the role of discourses of animality and
the hate media in the Rwandan genocide in Mamdani (2001), Melvern
(2006), and Thompson (2007).
6. For a discussion that problematizes the boundary between victim and
perpetrator so essential to human rights campaigns, see Schaffer and
Smith (2004), and Payne (2008).
7. For a discussion of Rwandan digital testimony that draws on indigenous

traditions, see Broderick (2010).
8. This is paraphrased from David Attenborough’s documentary Gorillas
Revisited, where he returns to Rwanda to examine the fate of the
mountain gorillas in the wake of genocide and civil war. There is,
Attenborough goes on to say, more meaning and mutual understanding
with the mountain gorilla ‘than with any other animal I know. We see
the world the same way.’
9. In his memoir In Brightest Africa, Carl Akeley describes his first
encounter with the mountain gorillas, which he perceived as both
unknown and yet uniquely associated with the origins of man. Akeley
improved the technology of the motion picture camera for his fieldwork
with wildlife, he worked to perfect his skills as a taxidermist to capture
the gorillas for display, he shot the gorillas himself, and he began the
campaign to establish a gorilla reserve at Kivu.
10. This turn to gendered, experiential knowledge in post-war primatology
is highly contentious as scientific practice, and debates about the influ-
ence of feminism on the development of primatology in North America
in the 1970s continue. Fossey above all attracts critique from the scien-
tific community for the apparent anthropomorphism of her fieldwork,
although her methods imitating the actions and vocalizations of the
animals were accepted practice as the discipline emerged in the 1960s.
As Amanda Rees suggests, habituation and individualization were meth-
odological techniques that were essential to studies of non-human pri-
mates, and yet these left researchers open to allegations of inappropriate
interference and intervention that alters ‘natural’ behaviour, and of fail-
ing to maintain appropriate boundaries between researcher and subjects
(2009). By the end of the decade the emerging discipline had generated
an institutional infrastructure of journals and conferences, where pro-
tocols for observing yet not influencing the behaviour of non-human
primates were debated at length. Fossey was not alone in identifying the
primates as research subjects, rather than objects—as beings who might
be appropriate bearers of unique and individual subjectivity and history,
and subjects worthy of empathic identification across the species bound-
ary in fieldwork. However, it was Fossey along with Birute Galdikas and
Jane Goodall who became popular celebrities and iconic figures in the
popularization of scientific research, through, in the first instance, the
National Geographic franchise that owned the rights to the powerful
imagery of primate and ‘trimate’ encounters featuring gorillas, chimpan-
zees, and orang-utans. The trimates—Fossey, Galdikas, and Goodall—
argued Fedigan, ‘broke ranks’ with the discipline and challenged what
counts as science by pioneering the association of primatology with
conservation, legitimizing mission science as an accepted aspect of pri-

matology (2001, 63).
11. Leakey deliberately selected young uncredentialled women—Fossey

was painfully aware that she had none of the ‘ologies’ (ethology, zoology,
biology, anthropology) required for conventional scientific research
(Mowat 1987, 22). Although her research at Karisoke would later lead
to a doctorate from Cambridge University, Fossey’s scientific status and
her approach to the primates were a constant source of controversy. For
Leakey, these young women were open to the experiential and affective
impact that would produce new and intimate insights into the origins of
human social life. They rapidly accrued commercial value in the mass
media, yet this was at some cost to their reputation as research scien-
tists. On the National Geographic project more generally, see Lutz and
Collins (1993).
12. Observations that suggest degeneracy or primitivism, such as

coprophagy (the subject of fascinating postcolonial analyses of Fossey’s
work by Armbruster 1996 and Lathers 2006) or brutality (such as infan-
ticide and cannibalism) amongst the gorillas, are addressed deliberately
and rationalized in Fossey’s memoir Gorillas in the Mist.
13. ‘When I wrote Primate Visions, I think I failed the obligation of curi-
osity in much the same way I suggest Derrida did. I was so intent on
the consequences of the Western philosophical, literary and political
heritage for writing about animals—especially other primates in the
so-called third world in a period of rapid decolonization and gender
rearrangements—that I all but missed the radical practice of many of
the biologists and anthropologists, women and men both, who helped
me with the book, that is, their relentless curiosity about the animals
and their tying themselves into knots to find ways to engage with these
diverse animals as rigorous scientific practice and not a romantic fan-
tasy . . . Had I known in 1980 how to cultivate the curiosity I wanted
from Derrida, I would have spent much more time at risk at field sites
with the scientists and the monkeys and apes, not in the facile illusion
that such ethnographic fieldwork would give the truth about people or
animals where interviews and documentary analysis mislead, but as a
subject-forming entanglement that requires response one cannot know
in advance. I knew I cared about the actual animals then, but I knew
neither how to look back nor that I lacked the habit’ (1989, 313).
14. Fossey sets out two approaches to wildlife conservation. The first she
calls ‘active conservation’, a ‘stringent’ preservation of natural habitat by
the enforcement of rigid legislation against human encroachment into
parks and other game sanctuaries (2001, xvii). This is the method Fossey
practised at Karisoke, and it was highly controversial. She funded and
trained local people as rangers, initiated patrols to eradicate poachers

from the Virunga reserves, and urged punitive action by local authori-
ties. The absolute right of the gorillas to the reserve lands was asserted
over and above the rights, interests, and traditions of local and indig-
enous people. Early in her memoir Fossey observes that Rwanda in the
late 1960s was one of the most highly populated regions on earth. She
would, however, entertain no compromise between the welfare of the
gorillas, as she perceived it, and the emerging industries of the newly
independent nation: tourism, pyrethrum plantations, and expanded
agriculture. Negotiation with institutions and agencies such as the
Office for Tourism and National Parks was the agenda of what Fossey
called ‘theoretical conservation’, an instrumental approach that could
not save the mountain gorillas from extinction.
15. The diagesis of the memoir necessarily climaxes in the momentous touch
of recognition across difference: ‘The first occasion when I felt I might
have crossed an intangible barrier between human and ape occurred
about ten months after beginning the research at Karisoke,’ Fossey tells
us: ‘Peanuts, Group 8’s youngest male . . . turned to stare directly at me.
The expression in his eyes was unfathomable. Spellbound, I returned
his gaze . . . Jubilant, I returned to camp and cabled Dr. Leakey I’VE
FINALLY BEEN ACCEPTED BY A GORILLA’ (2001, 141). Two years
later, Peanuts becomes the first gorilla to initiate the gift of ‘touch’.
1 6. See also Graham Huggan’s discussion of simian face and eye and myth-
icizing processes in photographic representation in Nature’s Saviours
(2013a, 117).
17. In the concluding frame of Apted’s film, the African tracker and guide
Sembagare effects a symbolic reunion of human and non-human pri-
mate as he rearranges the markers of each individual grave to pro-
duce a single site of commemoration. By this stage in the politics of
African decolonization and independence, the film is required to not
only enhance the familiar and pleasurable element of the gorilla girl
story; it must also make more substantial ideological gestures to alert
the viewer to the changed historical and political realities of Karisoke.
So it is that an African character produces this final symbolic gesture
of memorialization and, by implication, gives indigenous consent to
the seductive reformulation of gendered and racialized identity in
gorilla girl mythography. The trope of the African guide as a sign of
cross-generational transmission is familiar. As we have seen, Fossey was
encouraged by the presence of precursors: Akeley’s remains at her first
Kivu site, the memoir that recorded Schaller’s earlier occupation, and
the presence of Sanwekwe, the guide who took the three generations
of American researchers to the Virunga gorillas. The Apted film is a
reminder of the gendered and racialized presence of African people in

the gorilla girl mythography, and it extends the trope to function in the
work of commemoration that drives the remediation of the Fossey story
at this point.
18. The distinction between adaptation and appropriation here draws on
Julie Sanders: ‘appropriation carries out the same sustained engagement
as adaptation but frequently adopts a posture of critique, even assault’
(2006, 4).
19. Weaver was an inspired choice: she brought into the Fossey legend her
established celebrity identity as Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, the strong
female lead of Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise. Subliminally at least, asso-
ciations of the Alien narrative—a plot that focuses on liminal spaces
outside of human civilization and post-human life forms in the fantasy
sci-fi genre—reinforces Weaver’s appearance as Fossey. This becomes
problematic in later documentary television, as Graham Huggan sug-
gests (2013a, 130–1).
20. For example, in a blurb from the travel pages of the San Francisco
Chronicle in 2006, we see how the Fossey story is seamlessly incorpo-
rated into these post-genocide landscapes where human remains and
‘ecologically sensitive’ wildlife occupy a single frame: ‘Even the violent
past is accessible. The Rwandan tourist office suggests that visitors see
at least one of the hundreds of genocide memorials scattered through-
out the country. The Kigali Memorial Centre, for instance, is on any
city tour. It is a burial ground for some 250,000 victims of the geno-
cide, and also a museum. But the primary draw for tourists is still the
green northwest, the region that surrounds the volcanoes and the Parc
National des Volcans. In this area are a half-dozen newly built or ren-
ovated hotels, including at least two high-end ecotourist lodges. Tour
companies offer volcano trekking, bird-watching and trips to Dian
Fossey’s grave; artisan cooperatives sell carvings and baskets and hand-
painted T-shirts. A beekeeping association even touts hand-packaged,
gorilla-safe Virungas honey—made from ecologically sensitive beehives
on the edge of the park. And, of course, there are the gorillas themselves’
(Hanes 2006).
21. For example, photobiography (Mathews 1998), biographies for

pre-adolescent readers (Nadin 2002, Mara 2004), journalistic biography
(Hayes 1991), and a life told through letters (de la Bédoyère 2005).
22. ‘Jane learned also on September 5 that Dian Fossey (along with her two
chickens, Lucy and Desi) had been forcibly evacuated from her camp at
the Virunga volcanoes. She had been taken down to park headquarters
at Rumangabo, imprisoned, and “earmarked”, as she later phrased it, for
the personal attentions of an important military general. She was put on
display in a cage, urinated and spat upon, and probably raped’ (Peterson
2008, 424).
23. Fossey ‘did tell Biruté Galdikas and Louis Leakey that she had been
held in a cage and repeatedly raped, spat on and urinated on, and that
later she was put in a cage with some white men all of whom were mur-
dered. Fifty kilometres from where Fossey was held eighteen white
people were eaten alive’ (Jahme 2000, 66). In a review of Jahme’s book
this becomes: ‘Dian Fossey was kidnapped, raped repeatedly and uri-
nated upon before being locked in a cage with 18 dead men’ (O’Connell
2010, 1).
10
Thresholds of Testimony
Indigeneity, Nation, and Narration
. . . her book was the first to open this country up to . . . Hey, this is
what they were doin, takin the kids and everything, so they had to
identify themselves as something else than what they really were. She
identified as an Indian because they were frightened of identifying as
Aboriginal because they might be taken. This country doesn’t know
nothing about our people, and that’s why that girl had to do that.
Janine Little Nyoongah, ‘Talking with Ruby Langford Ginibi’
Dissemination
It is an inconvenient truth that one of the most widely read and
translated texts of contemporary postcolonial life writing is an indig-
enous testimonial narrative that has provoked ongoing controversy
about its rendering of Aboriginal dispossession amongst indigenous
readers and critics. In 1987 the publication of Sally Morgan’s auto-
biographical account of indigeneity and belonging, My Place, chal-
lenged ways of thinking about ethnicity and race, with its powerful
subjective account of belonging to country as an indigenous cultural
memory transferred across generations.1 It was also a harbinger of a
cycle of indigenous testimony that has transformed contemporary
postcolonial life narrative in Canadian and Australian settler litera-
tures: the child removal story. Using the Black Words database of
Australian indigenous literature we can now track the history of this
book, including its migrations offshore (in translation and in English)
Thresholds of Testimony • 137
and the emergence of a substantial body of criticism with collections

of essays and numerous articles published in Australia and overseas.
Black Words charts the routes of indigenous life writing in this chap-
ter, from indigenous country to North America, Europe, and South
Asia. My Place continues to circulate, alive in diverse networks of
‘multidirectional memory’ beyond the nation where, as Michael
Rothberg suggests, one discourse of memory can enable others to cre-
ate new forms of solidarity and visions of justice (2009, 7). Inaudible
in the Black Words record are conversations about My Place that have
occurred in conferences, seminars, tutorials, and reading groups in
these other worlds. Like Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull it migrates
and inspires testimonial transactions remote from its origins. To
date there have been 38 editions of My Place: Australian, American,
British, and Indian; there are adapted editions for young read-
ers and the visually impaired, and translations into Dutch, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Malay, Catalan, Indonesian, Slovenian,
German, Turkish, Italian, and Chinese.2 David Damrosch questions
why some works have the capacity to interest strangers and move
in transnational circuits of reading as a ‘worldly’ book, and others
do not (2009, 6), and the movements of My Place shape this chapter
with this question in mind.3 As a ‘worldly’ book, the affective life
and translation zone of My Place is extensive and dispersed across
testimonial cultures generated in the wake of child removal, slavery,
the Holocaust, and caste-based violence, and the book rhetorically
elicits these affiliations between indigenous dispossession and geno-
cidal events elsewhere. It energizes and enables emergent testimonial
cultures far afield.
In this chapter these transactions trigger proximate readings that
explore indigenous literature and its testimonial cultures in contem-
porary settler literatures, and beyond, where the dissemination of
indigenous life narrative introduces unexpected connections to the
dispossessed in Europe and South Asia. It takes up Jodi Byrd’s argu-
ment that indigenous critical practice is open to the possibilities of
comparative studies. Indigenous literature, she suggests, moves as an
active presence ‘in multiple synchronic formulations’ (2011, xvii). Byrd
acknowledges that ‘transit’ is provocative, more commonly suited to
diaspora studies than work on indigeneity, but she means to empha-
size how indigeneity engages with debates about sovereignty and citi-
zenship and the prior claims of indigenous/First Nations peoples.4
For Byrd, like others concerned with indigenous critical theory, the
nation invites disaggregation. Indigenous writing troubles the limited
and provisional citizenship and belonging that becomes available to
indigenous peoples in nation and narration. Transits of indigenous
testimonial narrative in and beyond the nation indicate the strug-
gles for self-determination and decolonization by indigenous peo-
ples from the very beginnings of colonization. This is a rewriting and
rerighting of history, argues Linda Tuhiwai Smith: ‘not simply about
giving an oral account or a genealogical naming of the land and the
events which raged over it, but a very powerful need to give testimony
to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented
and dying’ (2012, 30). This history nurtured in testimony (subjective,
emotional, and communal) is not the same thing as the discipline of
history, ‘and so our accounts collide, crash into each other’.5
Testimonial narratives draw on frameworks of cultural memory
that elicit and nurture specific kinds of cultural recall. Memory is a
cultural phenomenon, as well as an individual and social one, and the
acts of recall that are elicited in testimonial cultures are performative
and polemical acts in pursuit of social justice.6 Mieke Bal argues that
it is perhaps the most important work of cultural memory to inte-
grate the traumatizing events of the past into the present; however,
there is no necessary relation between the intensity and injustice of
social suffering and the agency of testimonial cultures to elicit rec-
ognition and pursue social justice (for example the chapters on rape
warfare and asylum seekers consider why testimony falters and fails).
By tracking indigenous testimonial narrative in the Black Words
database we can map the ebb and flow of indigenous story within and
beyond the nation, reading in the contours of its history the work of
testimony and witness, and contemporary reckonings with the lega-
cies of assimilation and dispersal in discourses of truth and recon-
ciliation across settler cultures. Child removal is a powerful site of
memory for indigenous peoples in the recent past that has impacted
profoundly on non-indigenous individual and cultural memory in
Canada and Australia, two geographically remote yet historically
proximate settler nation states. When My Place was first published
in 1987 what we now recognize as the cycle of Stolen Generations
testimony remained unwitnessed, although testimonial narratives
of child removal circulated widely within indigenous communities.
Morgan’s book is a precursor of what was to come.
A Cathartic Book
One wonders, Marcia Langton muses, what the appeal of My Place and
its account of ‘finding’ Aboriginality was to such a large Australian
readership late last century, speculating ‘perhaps Morgan assuages
the guilt of the whites, especially white women who were complicit
in the assimilation program and the deception into which they were
forced?’ (2003, 116–17). Although this book was by no means the first
indigenous life narrative, as studies of Australian indigenous litera-
ture and literacy indicate, it remains the focus of debates about the
politics of ‘Aboriginality’ in life writing (Brewster 1996, Heiss 2003,
van Toorn 2006, Grossman 2013). Langton points out that Aboriginal
critiques of this bestseller remain largely unpublished and hence
inaccessible, but there have been many salon discussions which fur-
ther suggest the enormous response to the book by white Australia
has been the attraction of something forbidden—‘Aboriginality’ or
incest—and the investigation of that forbidden thing through fam-
ily history. ‘The book is a catharsis,’ she argues. ‘It gives release and
relief, not so much to Aboriginal people oppressed by psychotic rac-
ism, as to the whites who wittingly and unwittingly participated in
it’ (117). For many non-indigenous readers My Place inaugurated an
understanding of ‘Aboriginality’ not as a ‘fixed thing’ but as a ‘creation
from our histories’; an intersubjectivity of black and white emerges
in intercultural dialogue through actual lived experience or through
a mediated experience ‘such as a white person watching a program
about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book’ (118). That
this occurred in 1987, the eve of the Bicentenary, a controversial cel-
ebration of nation and narration marking the colonization inaugu-
rated at Sydney Cove in 1788, adds to the resonance of My Place.7
As Langton’s comments suggest, the ‘palatability’ of this bestseller
to white readers is controversial—it remains the major topic of the
Wikipedia entry on Morgan’s book.8 bell hooks questions the appe-
tite of readers for ‘new dishes to enhance the white palate’ and the
fear that ‘the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten’ (1992,
39). The indigenous critic Anita Heiss compares the popularity of
Canadian life narratives, Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) and
Ruby Slipperjack’s Honour the Sun (1987), with My Place and argues
that Campbell’s autobiography is preferable, more ‘confrontational’
(2003, 160). Ruby Langford (Ginibi’s) Don’t Take Your Love to Town
(1988) is similarly considered to be more radical, an openly politi-

cal and defiant life narrative that challenged readerly expectations
of a coherent, knowing, self-possessed narrating ‘I’, which chal-
lenged conventional associations of ‘emotion’ and the ‘subject’ in
auto/biographical narrative (Grossman 2013, 36). From the outset,
Morgan’s book provoked debate about its subjective construction
of Aboriginality as a process of discovery and recuperation. These
critical debates that circulate around My Place are historical, reflect-
ing not only on this particular text but also the ethics and politics
of reading indigenous life narrative in settler literatures. Indigenous
life narrative is, argues Michèle Grossman, a contact zone where
indigenous and non-indigenous identities are textually performed
and managed as ‘entangled subjects and subjectivities’ that are vari-
ously problematical, productive, and discontinuous (2013, xxi). My
Place challenged the laws of genre and the readerly expectations they
produce: a bestseller that didn’t fit the conventions of classic autobi-
ography, that draws on genres of popular fiction, and that implies an
indigenous spirituality that, for some, gestured to ‘New Age astrol-
ogy’ and mysticism.9 It bore the brunt of historians’ disquiet with
the turn to the personal: testimony and memory (Attwood 2008).
For literary critics the idea of this book as an autobiography manqué
endures. For example Bart Moore-Gilbert argues there is little doubt
that the narrator of My Place aspires to be the canonical sovereign
subject of western autobiography (2009, 3). There is now an archive of
critical readings that record this divergence of academic and popular
taste: My Place is both a bestseller—a ‘good’ read that is ‘palatable’—
and the focus of an extended critical controversy about the politics
and ethics of reading indigenous life narrative. Debates about the
status of indigenous autobiography and fiction continue to be played
out around this particular text—it is entirely predictable, for exam-
ple, that the authenticity of the book has been contested and it has
become the focus of ‘suspicious reading’ (Smith and Watson 2012).
This has occurred in memoir authored by the Drake-Brockman fam-
ily, and in historical accounts that allege there has been a ‘fabrication’
of Aboriginal history in recent Australian scholarship.10
A decade after its publication a different way of reading My Place
and understanding its positioning of white readers became avail-
able, in discourses of testimony and witness that respond to indig-
enous child removal. To read the book as a testimonial narrative
reconfigures thinking about readership and the interpolation of the

reader—those issues raised by indigenous critics such as Langton
and Heiss—in terms of the ethics and politics of witness. In making
a case for My Place as a testimonial narrative both Kennedy (1997)
and Schaffer and Smith suggest the publication of Bringing Them
Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s
(HREOC) report on Stolen Generations in 1997, created discursive
frameworks for this reinterpretation. The report drew on an enquiry
into indigenous child removal in Australia, which elicited and cir-
culated harrowing testimonies about indigenous dispossession and,
it controversially suggested, of genocide. First-person indigenous
testimony established the truth and affective force of the Stolen
Generations story, and it is indicative that the apology to the Stolen
Generations offered by the Australian prime minister in 2008 is a rhe-
torical response to a specific testimony as a gesture of reconciliation.
Reading My Place in association with this testimonial cycle recon-
textualizes earlier readings. Sally, the first-person autobiographical
narrator, is not an autobiographer manquée but an embedded wit-
ness, who struggles to interpret the signs and silences that surround
her and obscure her family history. Sally is an amanuensis, gathering
the transcribed oral testimonies of her great uncle Arthur Corunna,
her mother Gladys Milroy, and her grandmother Daisy Corunna. It
is as witness that Sally speaks the final words of the text: ‘ “Oh, Nan”,
I cried with sudden certainty, “I heard it, too. In my heart, I heard
it.” ’ (358). This synaesthesia of the ‘listening heart’ is symptomatic
of truth and reconciliation discourse; for example the Bringing Them
Home report asked Australians to respond from the heart.
The indigenous oral testimonies embedded in My Place are
‘tactical’—Penny van Toorn’s term for the contingency of indigenous
testimony, which is made and deployed in cultural territories they
cannot control (1999). Arthur, Gladys, and Daisy sustain silences,
and Daisy most of all, for she has lost two children, both possibly
fathered incestuously by the pastoralist Howden Drake-Brockman
who owned Corunna Downs, located in their indigenous country.
What had earlier been interpreted derisively as elements of popu-
lar generic fiction are reframed in this reading of My Place as testi-
monial, where the ‘mystery’ of origins and belonging is a traumatic
account of child removal, a policy to effect indigenous dispossession
and dispersal across generations that is experienced by Gladys and
Daisy personally as shameful, a guilty secret. It is this history that

explains apparently eccentric behaviours in the suburban household
that the first-person narrator Sally recalls as childhood memory.
Stolen Generations testimony translates personal trauma into nation
and narration, reframing family history in the context of state inter-
vention, colonization, and assimilation across generations. In the
space between the commemoration of the Australian Bicentenary
of 1987 and the centenary of federation in 2001, iconic moments in
the celebration of the settler nation, Stolen Generations testimony
became the focus of truth and reconciliation campaigns that shaped
a new witnessing public and widespread recognition of complicity in
these enduring legacies of settler colonialism.
Thresholds of Testimony
The book history of My Place indicates testimonial narrative ‘accrues’
value. As Bain Attwood suggests, the idea of narrative accrual indi-
cates how stories are both prompted and shaped by earlier ones,
under conditions where there is an appropriate social and cultural
milieu (2001, 196). Testimonial cycles are both resilient and fragile,
hostage to changing currencies in campaigns for human rights and
social justice, and to the volatility of compassionate humanitarian
emotions that move a witnessing public. In the entry on testimony
in The Encyclopedia of Life Writing Bella Brodzki remarks that tes-
timony to a greater extent than any other kind of autobiographi-
cal narrative emerges out of a political context, in response to a
particular set of political circumstances and rhetorical conditions
(2001, 870). Testimony is a fragile and volatile performative rela-
tion between those who testify and those who give witness, and the
failure to respond to testimony ethically; compassion and aversion,
Lauren Berlant reminds us, coexist, recto to verso (2004, 10) and this
association suggests the volatility of testimonial narrative. Political
circumstances and rhetorical conditions continuously reshape the
discursive networks and jurisdictions of testimonial narrative, which
becomes an agent for recognition and social justice in particular ide-
ological and political circumstances that shape its audibility and an
appropriate ethical responsiveness. This coalescence of testimonial
forms and the obligations of witnessing constitute the dynamism
and agency of testimonial transactions in anglophone life writing

from Equiano onwards, where testimony accrues value and crosses a
discursive threshold to become a transformative speech act that con-
nects human rights and narrated lives, touches hearts and changes
minds, and demands an affective and political response. In these cir-
cumstances, testimonial narrative assumes a force and a life of its
own, and this has occurred in both Australia and Canada, as child
removal testimony commands witness.
As Ahmed and Stacy emphasize, testimonial cultures do not
reflect some already existent truth, politics, or ethics, they create the
conditions for their existence and reception by constituting different
configurations of self, space, and community (2001, 5). Testimonial
cycles are mobile and fragile force fields, contested and finite, as
we saw in the discussion of the ‘aftermath’ of the TRC in South
Africa, or, historically, the vicissitudes of abolitionist activism and
benevolence that shape the currency of slave narrative, both in the
eighteenth century and in our own. Testimony elicits certain acts
of memory and forms of testimony and denies others. For example
Graham Huggan argues indigenous people ‘run the risk of being
stolen all over again’ (2007, 101) as reconciliation discourse assimi-
lates Stolen Generations testimony into nation and narration.11
Testimony contains and manages subaltern speech even as it cre-
ates conditions for audibility and recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli
argues that we should pause and ask what we are disseminating as
late liberal ideology works through ‘the cunning of recognition’ that
talks of reconciliation and yet continues to marginalize restitution,
compensation, and indigenous sovereignty: ‘I ask how national pag-
eants of shameful repentance and celebrations of a new recognition
of subaltern worth remain inflected by the conditional (as long as
they are not repugnant; that is, as long as they are not, at heart, not-
us and as long as real economic resources are not at stake)’ (2002, 17).
The lived experiences of indigenous and First Nations peoples in
Australia and Canada continue to be affected by extraordinarily high
rates of poverty, youth suicide, imprisonment, domestic violence, and
family breakdown. How can the symbolic work of reconciliation and
its restorative justice effect radical reform and change in these social
and lived conditions?12 When does it reproduce ‘cultured violence’?
Testimony is, as we have seen throughout this book, never ‘free’
speech. Its currency is always subject to negotiation. Nevertheless
indigenous peoples continue to invest in the emotional and cultural

work of reconciliation. For example the Indian Residential Schools
Settlement Agreement in Canada includes both compensation pay-
ments and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In a
commentary on the relative value of these practices of monetary and
symbolic exchange the Canadian Aboriginal Healing Foundation
recognizes ‘immediate needs’ and at the same time asserts the ‘last-
ing value’ of memorials, remembrance, and commemoration, and the
creation of a ‘collective memory’ that displaces the selective memory
of the normative Euro-Canadian ‘bystander’, with its fables of a ‘twi-
light of knowing’ and ‘sorry silence’.13 Together these ‘restore a spirit’,
and work towards decolonization, as Tuhiwai Smith suggests (2012).
In 2010 there was a striking visual representation of the transac-
tions of child removal testimony, when, as part of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in Canada, Cathy
Busby’s installation WE ARE SORRY presented the text of the apol-
ogy of the Australian prime minister to the Stolen Generations in
Australia and of the apology to the First Nations on the issue of the
residential schools in Canada, both offered in 2008, at the Winnipeg
Art Gallery. This mirrored a similar synchronic display in the public
spaces of the Laneways Commissions project in Melbourne in 2009,
where it was projected onto the exterior of a power substation.14 This
graphic statement of the proximity of testimonial cultures across
two settler nations in the recent past maps ideoscapes and eth-
noscapes that connect testimonial narrative beyond the nation. In
South Africa, Australia, and Canada discourses of truth and recon-
ciliation have shaped a powerful infrastructure for the production
and dissemination of testimony to engage with the specific legacies
of settler colonialism, where invasion is ‘both an event and a struc-
ture’ (Patrick Wolfe 1999, 2; Veracini 2010, 10). Reading the contigu-
ous testimonial cultures of truth and reconciliation across settler
cultures—South Africa in c hapter 8, and Canada and Australia in
this—draws attention to settler colonial imaginaries and their nar-
rative forms.
In both Australia and Canada indigenous and First Nations tes-
timonial on child removal accrued late last century. This proximity
is historical: rooted in British colonial policy to effect assimilation
of indigenous peoples. It draws on the humanitarian and philan-
thropic campaigns that, after the abolition of slavery in 1832, turned
their benevolent regard to the protection and civilization of the

‘native’ in the colonies—a reminder of the proximity of slavery
and indigenous dispossession in the colonies and metropolis. This
led to the formation of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1836.
Immediately prior to this, in 1835, the House of Commons Select
Committee on Aborigines began hearing evidence about the treat-
ment of native peoples across the empire and its report in 1837 was
a damning judgement on the effects of settler colonization and
the extermination of Aboriginal peoples. It accepted, for example,
founding violence that has been contested since: ‘Many deeds of
murder and violence have undoubtedly been committed’ against
the Australian Aborigines; it was highly critical of the ‘bloody part’
that the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company had
played in quarrels with the Indians; and it heard testimony on the
persecution of native South Africans (Heartfield 2011, 16–18). Recent
‘history wars’ still contest this evidence of bloody dispossession.15
The 1837 report laid the framework for Aboriginal social policy and
reform as a ‘civilizing mission’ grounded in benevolence, and this
persisted substantially unchanged until the second half of the twen-
tieth century.
State intervention into parenting and child welfare policy was a
‘soft tool’ used to facilitate assimilation and compliance: ‘the abo-
riginal peoples . . . had their children removed from them so that
the dominant [settler] culture could pursue its objective of carrying
“civilization and humanity, peace and good government, and above
all knowledge of the true God, to the uttermost ends of the earth” ’
(Armitage 1995, 6). This practice of child removal in order to change
a people and culture was classified as genocide by the United Nations
in 1948, although in both Australia and Canada it was not until the
late 1990s that widespread recognition of the systematic removal of
indigenous children from their families occurred, yet ‘the evidence
on this issue has always been before us’ and the question ‘how could
you not know’ recurs (Haebich 2000, 563). Indigenous and First
Nations resistance to this policy and testimony to its traumatic effect
is as old as the policy of child removal itself. Numerous petitions pro-
test against the conditions in residential schools, and in Australia too
there is extensive evidence of resistance to removal. However, this
testimony remained inaudible and invisible, held within indigenous
communities and histories until the very recent past. Speculating on

the value of the TRC in Canada now, Margery Fee argues that it:
deprives mainstream Canadians of the excuse that they were kept in the
dark. Thomas King says in The Truth About Stories, ‘Take it. It’s yours. Do
with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have
lived your lives differently if only you had heard this story. You have heard
it now’ (2012, 10).16
The Testimonial Event

To return to My Place, an iconic life narrative that registers these
changes in ways of reading indigenous testimony, a relocation of read-
ing occurs as it is reframed in the generic terms of Stolen Generations
narrative. This is the logic of the silences, the constrained speech, and
postmemory—the story of a trauma transferred across generations
that becomes a new genre of indigenous childhood life narrative in
settler literatures late last century. More than this, to return to Marcia
Langton’s questions on the appeal of this book for white readers, it is
the performance of testimony and witness in My Place that is compel-
ling, and a powerful interpolation of the reader as witness to a previ-
ously unrecognized social suffering. My Place not only reveals a history
of child removal, it deploys the subjective and affective terms that make
ethical claims on the reader to bear witness. The first-person narrator,
Sally, is herself an empathic witness and amanuensis who elicits the
three embedded oral testimonies. My Place ends with Sally’s epiph-
any: she hears the truth of Daisy Corunna’s testimony (despite Daisy’s
insistence that silences endure and singular truth is elusive).17 As read-
ers we now understand that Nan’s suffering is not psychological and
personal, this trauma is cultural and historical, and these indigenous
stories about the past remain unwitnessed due to ‘deaf listening’, an
incapacity to understand social suffering. Daisy’s testimony is tacti-
cal; even in the presence of her granddaughter’s desire to know all,
she sustains silence and ambiguity. Earlier scenes of witness in post-
colonial life narrative recur in the allegations of fabrication that have
been made by the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle. He uses
a photograph of Daisy Corunna in a ‘suspicious reading’ that claims

her paternity was obviously Melanesian. Like the viewing of the scars
on Mary Prince’s body in her History, this suggests that the body does
not lie, and corporeal truth satisfies the burden of proof (in this case
substantiating the claims of the Drake-Brockman family that My Place
is a betrayal of their trust and benevolence).18
Reading across testimonial narratives in Australia and Canada indi-
cates an infrastructure that enabled testimony to child removal to coa-
lesce and accrue value, demanding the apologies offered in 2008 that
are now projected into public spaces in Winnipeg and Melbourne. We
can identify a number of features that generate the transformative force
of this testimonial cycle. First, ideoscapes of truth and reconciliation,
human rights activism, and ethnoscapes of indigenous campaigns that
assert the unique prior claims of first peoples are transnational move-
ments that contributed to its rhetorical force. Second, in both Australia
and Canada testimony to child removal gathered force across various
contexts and venues: judicial, political, cultural, literary, creating tes-
timony that incubated a powerful narrative of systemic indigenous
possession and founding violence. National enquiries and hearings
that solicited indigenous and First Nations testimony on child removal
were instrumental: the HREOC produced the Bringing Them Home
report (1997)19 and in Canada the Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples (RCAP) (1991–6) heard graphic testimonies of child removal
that is now the specific focus of the Indian Residential Schools TRC.20
Third, the production of authoritative academic histories of native
child removal that draw deeply on indigenous testimony and life his-
tory, as well as more traditional archives of historical evidence, have
been critical, and these appeared in Australia and Canada between
1996 and 2000 (Miller 1996, Milloy 1999, Haebich 2000). These his-
tories detail how the policy of child removal was implemented across
the various jurisdictions of colonies and, later, the provinces, states,
and territories of these settler nations. Although these histories draw
on testimonial narrative, they also provided irrefutable empirical data
and archival evidence. In Australia the term ‘stolen generations’ was
catalytic. This was born of the Link Up campaigns to reunite indig-
enous children with their birth families, which began decades before
the Bringing Them Home report, and Peter Read’s history of this in A
Rape of the Soul so Profound (2000a), is an example of the ‘memorial
discourse’ that coalesces around life narrative on child removal—like,
for example, the accounts of abduction of First Nations children gath-

ered in Stolen From Our Embrace, The Circle Game, and Victims of
Benevolence in Canada and Stolen Generations testimonies gathered
in Many Voices and The Stolen Children: Their Stories in Australia.21
Fourth, a narrative of child removal signals the presence of an authori-
tative testimonial cycle that demands witness to the ‘lost’ and ‘stolen’
generations of indigenous/First Nations children. These testimonies
are specific in place and time, indicating how the policies of assimi-
lation were effective because they were precisely keyed to local juris-
dictions and institutions. Yet collectively this testimonial literature
maps out a shared imaginative geography of the ‘total institution’,22
an architecture of incarceration that extends from Cootamundra
to Shubenacadie, which sustained state intervention, surveillance,
and control and undermined an indigenous sense of self to install a
reformed and disciplined sense of space, time, social relationships, and
the body that were to be absorbed into the self (Haebich 2000, 379).23
Iconic testimonial accounts have played an important role in dissemi-
nating this story through secondary and tertiary curricula. In Canada,
for example, the residential school novel My Name Is Seepeetza is a
fictionalized account based on Shirley Sterling’s experience, in the
compelling generic form of a secret journal written during one year at
Kalamak Indian residential school in British Columbia. In Australia,
Larissa Behrendt’s Home, Albert Holt’s Forcibly Removed, Glenyse
Ward’s Wandering Girl, and fictions such as Anita Heiss’s Who Am I?
The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 all feature Stolen Generations
testimonial narrative. My Place and Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara’s
autobiographical Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, her family story
of three girls absconding from Moore River Native Settlement and
walking back to the Pilbara in 1931, are widely used as teaching texts
with study notes readily available, and there are versions of My Place
adapted for young readers. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence was remedi-
ated into a film directed by Phillip Noyce (1996), a graphic presentation
of indigenous child removal that accelerated and extended the reach of
the Stolen Generations story.
The force of this postcolonial testimonial cycle generates new criti-
cism on testimony and witness.24 The Holocaust has been the ‘master
signifier’ that generates the canonical texts of trauma theory Felman
and Laub 1992, Herman 1992, (LaCapra 2001, for example) and its
literature. Appeals for more attention to ‘world memory’ and ‘global
time’ question whether a Euro-American ‘age of trauma’ is para-

digmatic for postcolonial genocides (Bennett and Kennedy 2003,
4; Craps 2013) and there is now a turn to issues of colonialism and
its legacies in memory studies (Rothberg 2013). New critical frame-
works that respond to indigenous and African testimony emphasize,
for example, the limitations of the performative spaces of testimony
that become available to subaltern and indigenous subjects, the ‘cun-
ning of recognition’, and the entanglement of testimony and witness
in settler literatures (Nuttall 2009, Grossman 2013). The recognition
of multiple truths in the South African TRC has changed ways of
thinking about truth in testimony. ‘Entanglement’ grasps a raciali-
zation of testimony and witness in postcolonial literatures, and the
interplay of textuality and authority in marginalia, a contact zone
that plays out on the page. The idea of ‘thresholds’ and ‘transactions’
of testimony in this chapter falls from this, emphasizing the contin-
gency of testimony, its limited agency, and its dependence on trans-
national emotional, rhetorical, and political contexts (for example
the ideoscapes of humanitarianism and its articulation in specific
human rights campaigns that focus on abolitionism, indigeneity,
rape warfare, children’s rights, and genocide). Recently concepts of
postcolonial witnessing and ‘mnemonic contact zones’ suggest that
the shared and contested pasts of postcolonial societies produce stra-
tegic practices of remembering and forgetting (Healy 2008, Rothberg
2009, 2013, Erll 2011, Craps 2013).
Sorry Business
Marcia Langton’s speculations about My Place and its capacity to
‘assuage the guilt of the whites’ (2003, 116–17) remain potent in think-
ing about how this narrative, and the Stolen Generations story more
generally, create the space of ‘the second person’. This appropriates
Felman and Laub’s term for the witness, the addressee and listener
who is ‘at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness
to himself’ (1992, 58), to question how this testimonial cycle creates a
witnessing public (Whitlock 2001). To accrue value, testimony must
have the national interest on its side; it must be available to nation
and narration. For example, in his Apology to the Stolen Generations
Prime Minister Rudd emphasizes the national interest: ‘the time has
now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history’.
In both Australia and Canada, as in South Africa post apartheid,
truth and reconciliation discourse draws testimony into processes of
national renewal. Bearing witness to testimony becomes a civic vir-
tue, an act of good citizenship: ‘These stories cry out to be heard . . .
they cry out for an apology’ (Rudd 2008). Testimonial cultures that
draw on reconciliation discourse create a settler subject who is a
beneficiary of indigenous dispossession, possibly a bystander, or a
perpetrator. Either way, Stolen Generations and residential school
testimonies trigger an ethical encounter that speaks to the entangle-
ment of indigenous and settler subjects, and the responsibility of the
exemplary witness to respond empathically. It is, says the Australian
author Drusilla Modjeska,
like an open wound through our history. It is a story that demands abso-
lutely that we attend to words like community, and responsibility. And
morality. And shame. And apology . . . until we find it in ourselves to step
forward as white Australians and face that shame, none of us can sleep easy
in this continent . . .’ (2000, 159–61)
Testimonial cultures create the conditions for their existence and

reception through discourses of testimony and witness. The eth-
ics of recognition and witness is a mode of self-fashioning, ‘a way
of producing affective bonds with other national citizens and, at the
same time, a way of reshaping a specifically national imaginary’ (K.
J. Butler 2013, 19). In the case of child removal testimony, a creation
of the settler subject as witness is produced. Robert Young begins
his Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction with the observation
that there are two kinds of white people: those who have never found
themselves in a situation where the majority of people are not white,
and those who have been the only white person in the room. The
self-fashioning that occurs in the second person who bears witness
to indigenous testimony might be compared to this: a subjective
awareness of becoming white, and of the complicity of settler sub-
jects as beneficiaries of founding violence. This is, to return to Marcia
Langton’s remarks, the cathartic force of the Stolen Generations
story. Sara Ahmed grasps the emotional and subjective force of
this: it is an identity claimed through shame, that brings ‘the nation’
into existence as a felt community: ‘Shame becomes crucial to the
process of reconciliation or the healing of past wounds’ (2004, 101).

A ‘proximity of national shame to indigenous pain’ (102) offers the
promise of reconciliation.
This self-fashioning in discourses of reconciliation inculcates the
capacity to bear witness. Paulette Regan calls this ‘unsettling the set-
tler within’—a project of decolonizing and reinventing the settler
citizen subject. In her autoethnographic memoir—a form of life nar-
rative that, according to the Encyclopedia of Life Writing, places the
self within a social context, inscribed in communal practices and
affiliations (Watson 2001, 85)—Regan suggests the settler is remade
through acts of public witnessing to Canadian TRC testimony:
. . . settlers who have hitherto relied upon colonial ways of knowing

Indians empathically in order to solve the Indian problem must instead
enter willingly into a more vulnerable, unsettling space of not knowing
as we listen to Indigenous testimonies and share our own. Reconciliation
conceptualised as an intercultural encounter involves creating a space for
critical dialogue—rooted in testimonial, ceremonial and commemorative
practices—between Indian residential school survivors and settlers who are
either directly or indirectly implicated in the school system itself as well as
other assimilationist policies. (2010, 41)
Decolonizing the subject requires, Regan argues, a remaking of

inherited traditions of bearing witness. She argues for a pedagogy
of ‘testimonial reading’ and ‘insurgent remembering’ that listens
differently to the testimonies of Indian survivors of residential
schools. This emotional and subjective recognition of ‘whiteness’ as
a previously unmarked identity recurs in autoethnographic mem-
oirs by public intellectuals; shame is, Ahmed reminds us, caught up
in self-recognition (2004, 105). In Australia this response has been
described as a ‘conscience industry’ (Carter 2004, 36) where certain
kinds of ethical self-reflection become emblematic of civic virtue.
Memoirs are a performative genre of life narrative, traditionally the
prerogative of the literate elite, and they rehearse the self-fashioning
of settler subjects in response to the surge of indigenous testimony in
the second person. Public intellectuals—mostly white, middle class,
university educated, and urban—become emblematic settler subjects
in the performance of an appropriate ethical and aesthetic response
to indigenous testimony. These memoirs characteristically present
whiteness subjectively, as a discovery, a coming into knowledge of a
privileged identity hitherto unacknowledged or unmarked, a reloca-

tion of the self in history. ‘Stepping forward as white Australians’
recurs in memoirs by Australian historians in particular, where they
become both the object and the subject of their discipline.25
Apology, shame, sorry: this reinvention of the settler self draws
on a cultural politics of emotion generated in and through transits
of indigenous testimony within the nation. Shame finds official
expression in formal apologies, and personal expression in ethical
self-fashioning. Stolen Generations and Indian residential school
testimony is surrounded by rituals and ceremonies of active pub-
lic witnessing and commemoration, responsibility, and contrition
that perform apology personally. In Australia the Sorry Book cam-
paigns, Sorry Day, bridge walks, emotional readings of Bringing
Them Home testimony in parliament, and the apology of February
2008 all express contrition. In Canada the TRC generates recon-
ciliation rituals and active remembrance that includes symbolic
objects (such as the Sacred Fire and Bentwood Box) and symbolic
walks as the TRC circulates and gathers testimony throughout
the nation. These practices of white civility are, as Lauren Berlant
argues, less a spontaneous outpouring of emotion than a social
and aesthetic technology of belonging—we learn to feel sorry in
this way. Discourses of truth and reconciliation shape a response
to indigenous testimony that constitutes citizens as an active wit-
nessing public. In this way indigenous testimonial is managed in
terms of an ethics of citizenship that is mobilized in the national
interest through specific rituals and ‘archives of feeling’.26
Outside Country
How does indigenous testimony move beyond the auspices of nation
and narration, and engage in other testimonial transactions? My
Place actively appeals to global rights movements such as anti-slavery,
and black civil rights. Part of the autobiographical narrator’s coming
into consciousness of indigeneity in My Place is an association with
the enslaved and the dispossessed elsewhere. We are, Nan says, just
like the Jews. David Damrosch argues that literary translation is a
concrete manifestation of cultural exchange, and translations endow
a text with new life and meaning by placing it in a different linguistic
and cultural setting—a defamiliarization: a literary work manifests

differently abroad (2003, 6). So what happens as My Place accrues
value elsewhere? Domestically child removal testimony and witness
is carefully managed through rituals of apology, as we have seen.
What kinds of affiliation arise and what forms of agency become
available as it migrates abroad?
Rothberg’s idea of ‘multidirectional memory’ opens space for
thinking on what Jodi Byrd refers to as the transits of indigenous
testimony into multiple, synchronic formations. A deterritorializa-
tion of testimony occurs in this translation zone, for example the
specific history of the Stolen Generations cycle falls away; however,
the idea that discourses of memory can enable others suggests how
some life narratives become ‘worldly’ books, travelling far from
their places of origin to become active in other testimonial cultures.
Whilst recognizing that traumatic histories are precisely located in
place and time, and their histories are incommensurable, Michael
Rothberg argues that they can become recontextualized and active
in ‘rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that
exceed territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and
identitarian reduction’ (2009, 7). This suggests that testimonial
cultures relocate and enable other affiliations. This is appealing if
we think of testimony as an agent, as I have throughout this book,
focusing on its changing value and currency through dissemina-
tion. Although the Holocaust remains Rothberg’s paradigmatic
object of concern, he recognizes that it coexists with histories of
colonization, racism, and slavery in a rich and complex field of his-
torical memory that ‘serves as a medium for the creation of new
communal and political identities’ (11) and new ‘lines of sight’
(2009, 19).27
For instance Vanessa Castejon’s approach to Australian indigene-
ity and her specific invocation of My Place from a European commu-
nity that is fractured by its own histories of conflict and dispossession
suggest how the Stolen Generations narrative migrates through
appropriation. ‘Because of who I am,’ she says, ‘this chapter is a med-
itation on the cultural transfers between Aboriginal Australia, the
Spanish Civil War and the French ghettos’:
In the mid 1990s, on the day I asked for a birth certificate to apply for a
grant to study Feminism in Australia for my PhD, I discovered I was born
Spanish and my parents had changed my nationality to French only when

I was 12. It was an identity shock. I was reading Sally Morgan’s My Place at
the time and this identification is the reason why I switched to Aboriginal
politics. (2010, 219)
A deterritorialization of indigenous memory occurs here. Later

Castejon goes on to describe how her family history of exile dur-
ing the Spanish Civil War connects to Aboriginal politics: ‘I real-
ized I had always known this link. ‘The “retroactive clues” began to
appear’ (220). Whether Castejon was literally reading My Place at the
time she learned of her own complex identity we cannot know, but
what becomes apparent here is how Morgan’s narrative authorizes
this turn to embodied knowledge of an autpbiographical ‘I’, always
known intuitively and transferred across generations. ‘I was invent-
ing a link between Aboriginal self determination and sovereignty
and my family’s anarchism’; ‘Perhaps in my quest for Aboriginality
I wanted to see if something could bring together all my own identi-
ties.’ Castejon’s ‘indigeneity made in Geneva’ is a strange transit of
Stolen Generations narrative—and yet its technologies of self and
identity, its desire to ‘link up’ with an anterior Spanish self, are ena-
bled by Morgan’s testimonial narrative. Later Castejon returns to
this narrative again to understand her identification with the French
ghetto, the home of ‘Les Indigenes de la République’. An appropria-
tion of Australian indigenous life narrative to code an unspeakable
European history also occurs in Oliver Haag’s turn to Jackie and Rita
Huggins’s Auntie Rita and Ruby Langford’s Don’t Take Your Love to
Town to lay claim to his own Romany heritage subjectively (2014).
This is, to return to Rothberg, an example of how one discourse of
memory can enable others, and how life narratives have a creative
role to play in these transfers.
In these transits My Place taps into archives of feeling that remain
unredeemed and unreconciled by the nation. Europe itself is disag-
gregated and made strange, as the trauma cultures that circulate in
the wake of its civil wars, genocides, partitions, and terrors connect to
indigenous archives of memory—as we have seen in c hapter 8, where
African ur texts migrate to Berlin and make contact with the lega-
cies of genocide there. This deterritorialization produces unexpected
filiations of European and indigenous histories and new filiations on
different scales of citizenship and belonging, kindled by the capacity
of indigenous testimony to move outside country and beyond the

nation, and to participate in remote yet associated testimonial cul-
tures abroad. These are scenes of reading where the ethical obligations
to nation, country, and indigeneity embedded in settler nation and
narration are reformulated. These are not amiable reflections of the
work we do as citizens of the nation in immediate proximity to coun-
try, and tenuously reconciled with it. This is genuinely and interest-
ingly a ‘foreign’ country, which generates very different aggregations
and filiations through appropriations of indigenous testimony.
Outcastes
Constituting memory as movement, suggests Vilashini Cooppan,
displaces the territorialization by which one event horizon becomes
the measure for all, and allows for a more diverse assemblage of hori-
zons and imaginaries (2013, 617). The passages of multidirectional
memory draw testimonial narrative beyond the nation—with its
monumentalizations, commissions, and rituals—into other assem-
blages above and below the nation. Indigenous testimony moves as
an active presence in ‘multiple synchronic formulations’, as Jodi Byrd
suggests (2011, xvii). Iconic life narratives such as My Place have the
capacity to move far beyond the horizons of nation and narration.
In fact affiliation with influential indigenous texts and authors ena-
bles testimonial cultures elsewhere. For example new assemblages of
indigenous and Dalit life narratives emerge in an active campaign to
establish Dalit life narrative as a testimonial culture and a vehicle for
human rights claims:
When Dalit writings feature in comparative and transnational studies it

bodes well for the Dalit cause and the future of Dalit writing. We are posi-
tioned at that point in history when the strategy of internationalizing Dalit
issues is on the political agenda of the Dalit people. This being the case a
transnational linkage between Australian Aboriginal writer Jackie Huggins
and Indian Dalit feminists, Bama and Kumud Pawde is indeed appropriate.
(Srinivasan 2012, 98–9)
Maria Preethi Srinivasan pursues connections with both Canadian

and Australian indigenous life narratives, and strategically so to
introduce Dalit life writing to transnational readerships.28 My Place

features in this affiliation, but unexpectedly, through aversion.
Srinivasan interviews Jackie Huggins, and remarks: ‘You seem to
have been nurtured a lot on bell hooks and Audre Lorde.’ Huggins’s
reply gestures to her rejection of My Place as an authentic indigenous
life narrative:
They were my two heroes because we never had any women running around,
except for Sally Morgan, but we won’t go there because she wasn’t really say-
ing anything to me, except that she was Indian, and that wasn’t really my
experience of course. (2012, 97)
Like excess baggage, the early indigenous critiques of My Place return

to haunt it. Along with Marcia Langton, Jackie Huggins was a trench-
ant critic, and her objections to Morgan’s ‘discovery’ of Aboriginality
through ‘retroactive clues’ are frequently cited (2003). They are dis-
seminated, for example, at the My Place Wikipedia site.29 Although
My Place thrives in literary/aesthetic domains in literary studies in
India, these are principally pedagogic contexts where critical read-
ings are designed as introductory study materials for classroom
activity and training in appreciative explication in a liberal humanist
frame.30 In fact My Place would respond well to Srinivasan’s com-
parative reading of Australian and Dalit testimonial literature: the
theme of grandmother/granddaughter tongues resonates, for exam-
ple, and the fact that the Milroy family ‘pass’ as Indians to mask their
Aboriginality in the suburbs of Perth is a provocative association that
deserves attention in Austral/Asian readings such as this. However,
it is the strategic value of Jackie Huggins’s endorsement as a leading
indigenous activist in epitexts such as Srinivasan’s article that deter-
mines this affiliation. This is why Huggins’s dismissive ‘we won’t go
there’ on the subject of My Place prevails.
The political agenda that Srinivasan refers to is the internationali-
zation of Dalit issues as human rights violations that disseminates
Dalit writing through association with established indigenous tes-
timonial cultures in Australia and Canada, eliciting the endorse-
ment of influential ‘gatekeepers’ such as Huggins. As Schaffer and
Smith remind us, since late last century life narratives have become
one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims
(2004). This shapes the transnational production, circulation, and
reception of Dalit life narrative now. In India this testimonial cul-

ture is a literary phenomenon of the last three decades, in differ-
ent languages—Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Telgu, Kannada,
Punjabi—and in multiple genres of life narrative: testimonial, mem-
oir, collective biography (Ganguly 2012). As an identity marker the
term ‘Dalit’ came into prominence in 1972, when a group of young
Marathi writer-activists founded the Dalit Panthers, an organiza-
tion in solidarity with the Black Panthers in the USA. Campaigns to
internationalize caste discrimination and violence as human rights
issues, and a distinct violation under human rights law, failed to
gain international recognition of United Nations agencies and NGOs
until the late 1990s, when Human Rights Watch (HRW) commis-
sioned a report on caste-based discrimination. The resulting report,
Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s ‘Untouchables’, mobi-
lized further stages of activism: the establishment of new organiza-
tional networks in India (the National Campaign on Dalit Human
Rights, NCDHR) in 1998 and the International Dalit Solidarity
Network (IDSN) in 2000, which worked to consolidate Dalit activ-
ism internationally. These organizations use web pages, manifestos,
and organized protests to consolidate and coordinate Dalit activism,
and to establish a rhetoric that associates caste and other forms of
discrimination to mobilize international rights activism.31
The accrual of Dalit life narrative as an emergent testimonial cul-
ture active in global circuits of exchange dovetails with this organiza-
tional and rhetorical activism. A surge of Dalit testimonial narrative is
affiliated with these campaigns for international recognition of caste
discrimination as a violation of human rights. An uptake by prestig-
ious publishers in Europe and the USA indicates the expanding ‘shelf
life’ of Dalit testimonial culture following the recognition of HRW
and the organizational consolidation of Dalit campaigns: Bama’s
Karukku (2000) and Sangati (2005) (both published by Oxford
University Press), Narendra Jadhav’s Outcaste: A Memoir (2003) and
Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Escape from India’s Caste
System (in a University of California Press ‘international bestseller
edition’ in 2007), Josiane and Jean-Luce Racine’s Viramma: Life of
an Untouchable (Verso, 1997), Sharankumar Limbale’s The Outcaste
(2003), and Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit
Autobiography (2001). One of the most widely cited, Omprakash
Valmiki’s Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, was published in Kolkata
(in Hindi) and in New York in 2003, a translation with an extensive

introduction by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, a well-known Canadian/
Indian postcolonial writer and critic: ‘I wanted to translate it the
moment I finished reading it’ (2003, x), she tells us. The peritexts of
this edition, as is so often the case, is a frontier that indicates how
Dalit life narrative is directed to a western market with a benevolent
interest in cultural difference and human rights. Like Srinivasan,
Mukherjee also uses the strategy of comparing Dalit with indigenous
Canadian and American writers who lay claim to the ‘authenticity of
experience’ (xxxiv). Peritexts such as this ‘create’ the compassionate
witness for testimonial narrative: Mukherjee emphasizes the visceral
impact of Joothan, ‘among the few books that had a profound effect
on my consciousness. It brought to the surface, as a scalpel penetrat-
ing deep into my flesh, the details of my childhood and conscious-
ness in a small town in India, where casteism and untouchability
were accepted’ (ix). At the same time, the narrative is strategic, and
part of a resistance literature:
Joothan is one among a body of Dalit writing that is unified by an ideology,

an agenda, and a literary aesthetic. It provides an apt introduction to this
newly emerging school of writing, which . . . sees itself as part of a social
movement for equality and justice. (x)
‘Dalit life is excrutiatingly painful, charred by experiences,’ writes

Valmiki. ‘Experiences that did not manage to find room in literary
creations. We have grown up in a social order that is extremely
cruel and inhuman. And compassionless toward Dalits. I have
wanted to put the narrative of my pain in writing for a long time’
(xiii). The title, Joothan, marks a recoding and appropriation of
words that ‘[make] room’ for Dalit literature. It means scraps,
the polluted remains of the meal that allow Valmiki’s family to
survive. Valmiki anticipates suspicious reading and the dissent-
ing voices of upper-caste readers that will deny his testimony
throughout Joothan, and interrogates the privilege of bearing wit-
ness. Dalit literary aesthetics defend the status of autobiographical
truth, the ‘suffered real’ (xliv), against critiques that this writing
is mere ‘reportage’ or propaganda for a cause. The accrual of Dalit
testimonial narrative and Dalit writing more generally as a trans-
national literature is accelerated by critical readings that interpret
Dalit writing as a distinctive literary formation, drawing atten-

tion to gender issues (Rege 2013), testimony and human rights
(Nayar 2006, 2009a, 2009b), autobiographical tradition (Kumar
2010), and the associations of political praxis and aesthetic strat-
egy (Ganguly 2012, Gajarwala 2013) as well as the transnational
emphasis in Srinivasan’s reading.
Dalit testimony does not accrue value in the national interest
given its trenchant critique of caste discrimination, and of those
who remain beneficiaries of caste distinction in India, and in South
Asia more generally. Eliciting a transnational readership in anglo-
phone curricula, developing affiliations and alliances with other
civil rights and social justice movements such as indigenous activ-
ism in Australia, Canada, and the USA is critical if Dalit testimo-
nial narrative is to negotiate thresholds of testimony that determine
its agency and reach. The publication of the collective autoethno-
graphic women’s testimony Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought
and Activism through Seven Lives in India simultaneously in New
Delhi and Minneapolis (in 2006) is also tactical, and a deliberate
strategy to engage in ‘transnational systems of knowledge produc-
tion’ by the Sangtin Writers Collective (xlvi). Their first collective
autobiographical narrative, Sangtin Yatra, triggered a backlash in
India, and in response they actively elicit an anglophone transna-
tional witnessing public.32 This coalition is transnational: eight
women employed by a large and influential government-sponsored
NGO at Sitapur District in Uttar Pradesh, and the participant editor
and academic at the University of Minnesota, Richa Nagar, who is
their conduit into western networks of feminist activism—an ide-
oscape that facilitates the movement of life narrative such as this.33
Here too peritext is tactical: the foreword to Playing with Fire is by
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, an eminent ‘gatekeeper’ whose classic
essay ‘Under Western Eyes’ is a critique of the production of the
monolithic, singular subject of the suffering ‘Third World Woman’
for western consumption. Mohanty’s peritext endorses Sangtin’s
‘collectively crafted autobiographical writing’ as a work of collec-
tive memory that draws on the embodiment of women across gen-
der, caste, religion, and class. Playing with Fire is widely read in
this way, as an intervention that displaces the third-world woman
as the suffering subject and ‘gives’ testimony with multiple voices,
narrators, and life stories that emerge across hybrid texts: diaries,
edited transcripts of conversations, and Nagar’s editorial commen-

tary. For example Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest that the
‘coalitional “I” ’ of the Sangtin collective dislocates western readers
as it ‘short-circuits’ the feel-good sentimentality of ‘rescue reading’
and requires readers ‘to confront the coalition’s resistance both to
the NGO professionals who reproduce a hierarchy of authority and
to conventional expectations of the coherent, unilateral “I” of testi-
mony’ (2012, 607). Aesthetically and politically the Sangtin collective
life narrative questions donor-driven NGO-based models of social
transformation and the ‘rescue reading’ of rights activism, and yet
the infrastructure of human rights and narrated lives as well as the
endorsement of influential US feminist critics such as Mohanty and
Smith and Watson remain essential to the dissemination of their
writing, and its promulgation of Dalit and feminist activism.
‘Soft’ Tools
The Sangtin writers reflect on their two audiences: villagers in
Sitapur who read and write for their newspaper Hamara Safar, and
the classes and seminar rooms of anglophone universities where
‘experts’ produce knowledge about their struggles. Sangtin works
across three fields and emphasizes the mutually constitutive rela-
tionship amongst them: the fields worked by the hands of the peas-
ants and labourers who are part of their struggle, the fields of NGOs
that work to empower women in economically marginalized places,
and the academic fields that produce critical discourses about these.
This is a reminder about scholarly accountability, the ‘lopsided’
production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledges about
marginalized communities and places, and the proximity of Sitapur
and Minneapolis in the transnational axis of Sangtin activism (2009,
437). Connecting academic and political praxis is an enduring issue
for postcolonial criticism. The Sangtin collective articulates (both in
the sense of ‘connecting’ and ‘speaking eloquently about’) the ‘fields’
of academic criticism and rural labour in Uttar Pradesh in terms of
‘structures of accountability’ (2009, 445):
the quality of any intellectual work cannot be evaluated solely on the basis
of a project (or research) design and its implementation. It should also be
assessed on the ability of all collaborators to participate fully in the pro-

cesses of making, revising, and deploying the coproduced knowledge, and
in developing rigorous structures of accountability that allow people from
all the fields—the farms, the disciplines, and the villages of ‘intervention’—
to evaluate the relevance of that knowledge in their own lives and ongoing
struggles.
Unsurprisingly, this chapter on indigenous testimony in settler

literatures returns to issues of ethics and accountability in literary
scholarship repeatedly. Its key text is a life narrative that is the subject
of indigenous critique, My Place, and it raises questions about the
cross-cultural reception of indigenous life writing: sorry business,
the ‘palatability’ of indigenous story, and the ‘conscience industry’.
The question that inspires Helen Hoy’s reading of Canadian indig-
enous writing, How Should I Read These? (2001), is fundamental for
postcolonial life writing. These issues of production, dissemination,
and consumption become acute when criticism turns to testimony
and witness, and all that we have learned about vulnerable subjects,
benevolence, and the ‘soft tools’ of colonization and dispossession
from child removal testimony. From the vantage point of the colo-
nized, Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, the term ‘research’ is inex-
tricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism (2012, 2).
The ongoing and vexed entanglement of settler and colonized
subjects complicates these questions of accountability and research
praxis. Tuhiwai Smith turns to Fanon on this point: the colonized were
brought into existence by the settler and the two are mutual construc-
tions of colonialism: ‘we know each other well’ (2012, 27). This ‘mutual
construction’ of proximate subjects, the colonizer and the colonized,
in colonial modernity is contested in indigenous critical theory, for
example in ongoing debates about representations of Aboriginality in
‘palatable’ texts and a turn to more collective and communal ways of
representing the self; it is also, as we saw in the chapter 8, contested
by alternative humanisms in West African writing. Indigenous life
writing resists nation and narration, and the limited recognition that
becomes available through testimonial transactions. The proximity of
the colonizer and the colonized in settler societies mediates the pres-
entation and recognition of Stolen Generations and residential school
testimonies as an exchange of gifts. Sam McKegney neatly incorpo-
rates this idea of testimony into his own project: ‘As an anonymous
survivor declares in Breaking Silence, ‘My story is a gift. If I give you a

gift and you accept that gift, then you don’t go and throw that gift in
the waste basket. You do something with it’ (161). This chapter is part
of my effort to ‘do something’ with this gift (16).
‘Gifting’ testimony suggests an exchange between equals, freely
given and received in benevolence and generosity, but, as we have
seen throughout this book, testimonial transactions are negotia-
tions of power and authority to narrate that are associated with
colonial invasion and exploitation. Orality and literacy are, Michèle
Grossman insists, a frontier in the larger field of conflict and power
relations between indigenous and western epistemologies and ontol-
ogies (2013, xxviii). Indigenous peoples are, we learn from residential
school testimony, victims of benevolence, and its manipulation of
coercion and consent. Although conventionally ‘gift’ and ‘commod-
ity’ are opposed in ways of thinking about economies of exchange,
John Frow has argued it may be more useful to think of them in
association (1997, 17). Marcel Mauss, for example, argues that in the
social life of things, commodities are constantly invested with moral
and ethical meanings and symbolic value. Equally, gifts always initi-
ate obligations, entailments, and expectations of return. Exchanges
that are intended to establish and maintain communal relations are
in the nature of gifts, and gift exchange is fundamental to social
cohesion—such as, for example, the role of testimony in discourses
of reconciliation and reparation that produce a renewal of nation
and narration.34 Testimonial narratives coexist as gifts and com-
modities in precisely this way. In the ledger of scholarly account-
ability, we have obligations to those who are ‘looking at us as we
read’, to create knowledge in our fields of research, about them. The
implied equality of the gift economy is not to be relied upon, and
the ‘gifting’ of indigenous testimony is always carefully managed by
epitexts and peritexts.
Raymond Williams’s work on alternative, oppositional, emergent,
and residual cultural formations and the maintenance of domination
suggests the changing material and discursive thresholds that shape
the cyclical energies of testimonial cultures and the social activ-
ism they inspire.35 Dalit life narrative is emergent, working through
transnational affiliation to accrue value and authority. In Canada
Indian residential school testimonies drive a TRC, and its motto: ‘For
the child taken, for the parent left behind’. When the TRC comes to
town, the University of British Columbia suspends classes for a day,

a gesture of respect: it is the time to listen to testimony about Indian
residential schools, to bear witness. The TRC will deprive mainstream
Canadians of the excuse that they were kept in the dark, Margery Fee
argues, but only if consciousness raising is followed by new policies
that support coming generations (2012, 10). In Australia now the tes-
timonial culture inspired by Stolen Generations is residual; it was,
as Kelly Jean Butler argues, a coalescence of testimony, witness, and
citizenship that peaked in resistance to the Howard federal govern-
ment.36 A surge of testimony and memoir records its trajectory, and
the belated apology of 2008 acknowledges indigenous suffering and
settler responsibility. What are the signs of an aftermath? There are
passing references in popular culture; for example The Sapphires
(2012), a highly acclaimed Australian film about an indigenous wom-
en’s singing group, suggests it is embedded, dormant perhaps, in
popular memory (Kennedy, 2013b). Recently Australian indigenous
life writing turns to nostalgic memory to recall indigenous child-
hoods in resilient domestic households, turning to countermemory
to supplement the traumatic childhood memory incubated in Stolen
Generations testimony (Leane 2011, Dylan Coleman 2012)—a strate-
gic response we might compare to Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia,
discussed in c hapter 8. National Sorry Day, which marks the tabling
of the Bringing Them Home report in parliament in 1998, continues
as an active remembrance that sustains discourses of reconciliation.
Now Stolen Generations discourses enable other acts of collective
witnessing of childhood trauma and loss that have led to formal apol-
ogies by the federal government: to ‘Forgotten Australians’, British
child migrants in enforced institutional care, and to victims of forced
adoption. An example of Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ in
process, memoirs now record the traumatic effects of child removal
in white Australia (Olsson 2013). This affiliation is historical: there
is a long association of slaves, ‘natives’, and the poor as subjects of
humanitarian activism and Christian benevolence in the colonies,
an activism that frequently focused on child welfare, and produced
state interventions into families and communities.
Most significantly, in 2007 a report into the welfare of children in
indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, ‘Little Children
are Sacred’, displaced both Stolen Generations and reconciliation in
public discourse. This report triggered an intervention that used the
rights of the child to authorize a forceful policing of indigenous com-

munities in the Northern Territory. This remains controversial: a
sign of the unpredictability of ‘child protection’ policy and legisla-
tion, and the co-option of the trope of the suffering child to legiti-
mate intervention as well as reconciliation. The figure of the child
is historically associated with humanitarian sentiment and rights
discourse, and it is readily appropriated into these diametrically
opposed campaigns to ‘manage’ indigeneity. In February 2008 indig-
enous Australians celebrated the Apology to the Stolen Generations
and protested against the intervention.37
Now Stolen Generations testimony migrates from indigenous coun-
try into affiliations well beyond the imaginary of the settler nation,
where it enables new assemblages across geographically remote yet
historically proximate oppressions of race, caste, and gender, and taps
into archives of feeling that remain unredeemed—in Europe and in
India, for example. The imaginative geographies mapped by this dis-
semination of indigenous testimonial culture open multidirectional
networks for postcolonial criticism of life writing. This is not an
empire we know, with familiar centres and peripheries. Its intercon-
nections and axes are both dispersed and entangled: Melbourne and
Winnipeg, Stolen Generations and ‘les Indigènes de la République’,
Auntie Rita and Sangati. In this way, Stolen Generations accrues value
and produces new affiliations with indigenous country, long after it
becomes residual in nation and narration.
Notes
1. ‘Country’ is a keyword of Aboriginal English, used in Australia to name
the distinctive claims to sovereignty, land, kinship, languages, and
traditional practices that are foundational to indigenous identity and
belonging. See JASAL 14: 3 (2014) for a collection of essays on ‘Country’
and its impact on theorizing settler literature.
2. For a digital map of these using the Black Words database, see Whitlock
(2013a).
3. For postcolonial criticism there is a tension between Damrosch’s
‘worldly book’ and Spivak’s concept of ‘worlding’ as the imposition of
a universalizing world view that draws indigenous peoples and cultures
into a global stage in terms of western epistemologies that render them
invisible and mute (1990, 1).
4. On the distinctive and prior claims that are unique to indigenous peo-
ples, see Moreton-Robinson (2008) and Povinelli (2011).
5. See Attwood (2008) for a critique of history-making in Stolen Generations
testimony.
6. On cultural memory, see Bal et al. (1999) and Erll (2011).
7. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith point out, My Place was one of two
indigenous life narratives supported and subsidized by the Bicentennial
Committee. The other was Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love
to Town, and their comparison of the different reception of these indi-
cates ‘the unstable political and aesthetic, moral and ethical terrains
that influenced critical reception and the willingness of non-Indigenous
readers to engage with the stories’ (2004, 93). As the epigraph to this
chapter suggests, whilst Ruby Langford Ginibi was keenly aware of the
differences between herself and Morgan, she thought indigenous cri-
tiques of the book ‘a bit unfair’ (1994).
8. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Place_(book)>. Accessed 15 December
2013.
9. This critique in Eric Michaels’s reading of My Place is perceptive in its
remarks on non-indigenous understandings of indigenous spiritual-
ity (1988). Marlo Morgan’s hoax indigenous narrative, Mutant Message
Down Under (1994), trades on these ‘New Age’ expectations.
10. Keith Windschuttle’s third volume in his series ‘The Fabrication of
Aboriginal History’ specifically addresses the Stolen Generations story
and claims that Morgan’s account is ‘fashionable melodrama’ (Tony
Thomas 2010, np). Judith Drake-Brockman’s memoir Wongi Wongi
also contests the representation of Daisy Corunna’s experience in My
Place, and its implication that her pastoralist father is also father to both
Daisy and Gladys. Note too that the Bringing Them Home Oral History
Project interviewed a number of officers who designed and implemented
policies that resulted in child removal contest the recommendations of
the report (Mellor and Haebich 2002, 139–59).
11. For discussion of the problems that discourses of reconciliation pre-
sent for postcolonial criticism in particular, see McGonegal (2009) and
Huggan (2013b, 15–19).
12. These questions are asked not only by Povinelli but also by Peter Sutton,
in The Politics of Suffering (2009).
13. For an extended analysis of this, see the set of Truth and Reconciliation
volumes produced by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in Canada
(Younging et al. 2011, Brant et al. 2011, Mathur et al. 2011).
14. WE ARE SORRY is featured at <http://www.cathybusby.ca/wearesorry_
winnipeg.php>. It travelled to Vancouver with the TRC in 2013 as part
of the Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools program
and was on display at the Koerner Library at the University of British

Columbia.
15. For a succinct overview of these ‘wars’ in Australia, see Macintyre and
Clark (2003).
16. Fee is quoting from Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native
Narrative (2003, 167).
17. It is useful to remember here the multiple and subjective concepts of
truth adopted by the South African TRC, which sought not just forensic
or factual truth but personal narratives, social truths, and restorative
truth.
18. Anita Heiss’s Am I Black Enough For You? (2012) is triggered by a racial
vilification court case in 2010, where she was a litigant against the jour-
nalist Andrew Bolt, who used a photograph of Heiss’s mother showing
her apparent mixed ancestry. Like Windschuttle, Bolt is a critic of Stolen
Generations’ claims.
19. Testimonial narratives associated with Bringing Them Home are online
at <http://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/stories-report> and
published in editions by Bird (1998) and Mellor and Haebich (2002).
20. Testimonies presented to RCAP are archived online at <http://www.
collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/20071115053257> and <http://
www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sgmm_e.html>. First Nations testi-
monial on child removal is gathered in editions by Haig-Brown (1993),
Assembly of First Nations (1994), Jaine (1995), Fournier and Crey (1998),
and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
21. Chrisjohn, Young, and Maraun (1997), Bird (1998), Fournier and Crey
(1998), Mellor and Haebich (2002).
22. See Assembly of First Nations (1994).
23. Haebich is drawing on Mark Finnane’s characterization of architec-
tures of incarceration. For residential schools as total institutions, see
Chrisjohn, Young, and Maraun (1997).
24. For example it is a case study in Schaffer and Smith’s Human Rights and
Narrated Lives (2004).
25. See for example Read (2000b), Clendinnen (2000), McKenna (2002).
26. For more extended recent developments of this argument, see Kennedy
(2011a, 2011b, 2013b) and K. J. Butler 2013.
27. For an example of these new lines of sight that associate indigenous and
Holocaust texts, see Eigenbrod (2012).
28. See Srinivasan (2008) for the First Nations/Dalit comparison, which is
glossed in the 2012 article.
29. It cannot be denied that among those who have read My Place are
(usually patronising) whites who believe that they are no longer racist
because they have read it. It makes Aboriginality intelligible to
non-Aboriginals, although there are different forms of Aboriginality

which need to be considered also; otherwise these remain exclusionary
and the danger is that only one ‘world view’ is espoused.
Precisely what irks me about My Place is its proposition that Aboriginality
can be understood by all non-Aboriginals. Aboriginality is not like
that. [Bain] Attwood states ‘like most other Aboriginal life histories,
it requires little if any translation’. To me that is My Place’s greatest
weakness—requiring little translation (to a white audience), therefore it
reeks of whitewashing in the ultimate sense. <http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/My_Place_(book)>. Accessed 15 December 2013.
30. See, for example, the critical study and collection of readings edited by
Mitra and Dhawan (2009). On Australian literature in India, see and
Deb (2006) and Sharrad (2010).
31. This thumbnail sketch of Dalit activism draws on Bob (2007).
32. The collective has been reformulated subsequently as SKMS, Sangtin
Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (see Sangtin Writers 2012).
33. See, for example, the discussion of the Afghan feminist collective RAWA
and its use of collaborative life narrative in Whitlock (2007).
34. See, for example, David Gaertner’s discussion of redress as gift that
turns to Bourdieu to theorize negotiations of value in gift exchange
(2012), and the gain and loss that occur in processes of reconciliation
and reparations to Japanese Canadians.
35. See Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977, 110) and Problems in
Materialism and Culture (1980, 37–42). See Benita Parry’s comments
on the legacies of Marxist criticism for postcolonialism, which refers
to Williams’s concepts (2004, 7–8), and Jenny Bourne Taylor’s entry
‘Dominant, residual, emergent’ in the Dictionary of Cultural and
Critical Theory.
36. Butler locates two symbolic events in which the nation ‘officially’

responded to the truth of indigenous testimony—Paul Keating’s Redfern
speech in 1992, and Kevin Rudd’s Apology in 2008—as key moments in
this public discourse of witnessing.
37. See, for example, Anita Heiss’s memoir, which comments on the
co-presence of reconciliation and intervention (2010, 323–6). On
the marketing of sentimental suffering through a child’s-eye nar-
rative viewpoint and the trope of the childhood lost in campaigns
for human rights, see Hughes-D’Aeth (2002), Smith (2012), and Van
Rijswijk (2014).
11
The Ends of Testimony
[T]‌estimony . . . cannot be simply referential but, to be truly histori-

cal, must be literary.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992, 108)1
Against this large, impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve

notions of humanism.
Edward Said (2000, 174)
Moving Testimony
This final chapter, on the ends of testimony, returns to the first, and
the beginnings of testimonial life narrative in colonial modernity: to
slave narrative and its scenes of subjection; humanitarianism and
human rights campaigns; and the question of who is brought within
the fold of the human through humanitarian activism in contem-
porary fiction and non-fiction prose. In Spectres of the Atlantic Ian
Baucom argues that the long twentieth century returns and responds
to the long eighteenth, and hauntingly so, and this insight shapes this
chapter on the testimony of refugees and asylum seekers.2 Testimony
regulates the movements of refugees, it determines their citizenship
status, their freedom to cross national borders, and their incarcera-
tion in detention centres. Yet testimony from asylum seekers and
refugees rarely crosses the threshold of public discourse to engage
a witnessing public and engender compassion, mobilize shame, and
inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf. This chapter
The Ends of Testimony • 169
tracks the transactions of asylum seeker testimony across various

hosts, networks, genres, and venues, and into memoirs and fictions
that draw it into the public sphere. It turns to the borders of fiction
and non-fiction prose where refugee testimony seeks out new hosts.
It takes up Shoshana Felman’s observation that testimony must be
literary to engage the reader in the work of the belated witness, to
trigger ‘the imaginative capability of perceiving history—what is
happening to others—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of
insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate involvement’
(1992, 108). Bearing witness asserts that ‘this history concerns us all’
and it is, argues Felman, a capacity of literature to ‘bear’ testimony—
not just to duplicate or record events, but to make history available
to imaginative acts. This chapter follows refugee and asylum seeker
testimony as it moves into new assemblages of fiction and life narra-
tive that begin ‘not merely to record, but to rethink’ (95) how these
distant strangers come to be rendered ‘human’.
Recently critics have come to speak of ‘moving testimony’ (Sarkar
and Walker 2010, 5; Kennedy 2013b). This grasps the affective work
of texts on the move in search of witnessing publics. As we have seen
throughout this book, testimonial transactions connect directly to
the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, whose
lives count as lives, and what makes for a ‘grievable life’. Testimony
moves as a social and political force in the public sphere that com-
mands recognition and ethical response from both institutions and
individuals, but there must be an appropriate political, cultural, and
social milieu for testimonial agency to occur, for testimonial transac-
tions to gain purchase and generate appropriate response. To thrive
testimony must find recognition from others who will register and
witness its truth. Testimony and witnessing ‘move’ in the uncertain
currencies of what Sara Ahmed calls an ‘economy of affect’, and
if testimony fails to find its witness in this uncertain exchange it
remains immobilized: testimony is a speech act that demands rec-
ognition and response in terms of social action and social justice.
Ahmed emphasizes the social and cultural work of emotions on
the move: emotions circulate through social and cultural practices,
producing the very surfaces and boundaries that enable recognition
and response. Feelings may stick to some objects, and slide over oth-
ers. To think of asylum seekers and their testimony in these terms
of ‘affective economies’ is a reminder that the figure of the asylum
seeker is located precisely on a boundary where human life is sub-

ject to negotiation; where humanization and dehumanization occur
ceaselessly (2004, 140).
The dehumanization of refugees and asylum seekers binds
national imaginaries in terms of some bodies that belong, and other
bodies that become contaminated and abjected: ‘things’. To return
again to the economy of affect, hate is economic. It does not reside
in a given subject or object, rather it circulates between signifiers in
relationships of difference and displacement (Ahmed 2004, 44). The
dehumanization of the asylum seeker and its construction as a fig-
ure of hate is an ongoing process, where it becomes a contamination
through a constant creation of narratives of crisis in national security,
which feature iconic figures and images—numbers of boats, rapa-
cious people smugglers, children at risk, loss of life at sea. A repeated
stigmatizing of asylum seekers as figures of abjection occurs in the
colonial present: the asylum seeker stalks the nation and haunts its
capacity to secure its borders, its integrity, its identity. This differen-
tiation is incessant, and it is never over, ‘it awaits others who have
not yet arrived’ (47). Here, where life is at its most precarious and
humanity is at risk, it follows that so too is testimony—hence the
title of this chapter, ‘the ends of testimony’. The circulation of refu-
gee and asylum seeker life narrative remains as constrained and pro-
scribed as the silent and illicit movement of these bodies themselves.
Testimony is immobilized: it fails to find and motivate witness; its
currency is circumscribed. This is not just passive disregard or over-
sight: refugees and asylum seekers are abject bodies that trigger not
empathy and compassionate witness but the obverse: aversion and
disgust. Here testimonial narrative occurs in the ‘event’: the most
ephemeral and mercurial life story, a ‘breathless rush’ of narrative
that is tenuous and opportunistic, where testimonies catalyse witness
briefly (Moretti 2005). In this chapter this containment and exhaus-
tion of testimonial transactions and their remediation as fiction is
the centre of attention.
Rerouting the Postcolonial

What does postcolonalism have to say about this? David Farrier
argues that the refugee has been a ‘scandal’ for postcolonial discourse,
marking its limitations and indicating the directions for its advance
(2011, 5). Derek Gregory’s ‘colonial present’ (which draws on Fanon
and Said in its thinking on colonial modernity) has been instru-
mental in setting the new directions that open the field to the ‘archi-
tectures of enmity’ associated with the ‘war on terror’, reorienting
postcolonial critique from the Eurocentrism of its ‘first wave’ critical
insights late last century to an American-centred ‘second wave’ turn
to the modalities of new imperialisms (Huggan 2013b, 171). Here refu-
gees become figures of significance as new subalterns in postcolonial
studies.3
Three critics instrumental in shaping postcolonial criticism—
Robert Young, Simon Gikandi, and Peter Hulme—turn to the refugee
to reconfigure the field in autocritiques that consider the presence of
refugees personally. Robert Young addresses his Postcolonialism: A
Very Short Introduction to its ‘hero’, an Afghan refugee in the Jalozai
camp beyond Peshawar:
You would not articulate your experiences for the benefit of others you
would never meet, you would not translate your life into a story or a rep-
resentation for others. Yet you are the not-so-silent hero of this book: it is
written for you. Even if you will never read these words, they are written for
you. (2003, 13)
This highly rhetorical address is symptomatic of a version of postco-

lonialism that attracts censure as a style of moral crusade. However,
Young’s tribute is a turning point for postcolonial criticism, open-
ing the carceral archipelago of refugee camps and detention cen-
tres and the routes of refugee migrations as sites for postcolonial
enquiry.
In an essay that begins a collection on redirections in postcolo-
nial criticism ‘for the new millennium’ Simon Gikandi (2010) raises
issues of exile and modernity that have preoccupied postcolonial
criticism. His essay defies Young’s easy access to the Jalozai camp and
its inhabitants as a new conceptual terrain. Gikandi is the informed
spectator, ‘a connoisseur of modern cultural goods’ who is at ease
in Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg, New York, and London, yet he is
troubled by the sight of the refugees who are fellow passengers on
transcontinental flights across the Atlantic, for they pierce his com-
fort zone.
But refugees frighten me because they are signs of a dislocated locality, a

mote in the eye of cosmopolitanism, of that postcolonial identity which
derives its legitimacy from the mastery of the culture of modern Europe.
Where do these people, the rejects of failed states, fit into our fascination
with identities constituted across boundaries? . . . what does it mean to think
of the refugee, rather than the intellectual, as the quintessential figure of life
across or outside boundaries? (Young 2010, 23)
The refugees Gikandi encounters are the outcasts of civil wars in cen-
tral and eastern Africa—Somali, Ethiopian, and Sudanese p eople—
and former residents of the massive refugee camps at Kakoma
or Lokichoggio in Kenya; they are en route to new lives in North
America. These are ‘strangers caught in the cracks of the failed state’,
and, argues Gikandi, given postcolonial theory attempts to account for
subjects produced in the interstices of the European metropolis and
the former colonies, ‘there is perhaps no more pressing question now
than the development of a vocabulary for explaining the experiences
and writings of lives lived across boundaries, outside nation, beyond
ethne’ (2010, 23). For both Young and Gikandi the question of how
refugees become audible and visible is axiomatic for postcolonialism.
What does it mean to think of the refugee, rather than the intel-
lectual, as the quintessential outsider? Gikandi’s questions are
insightful and they bear witness, subjectively and in terms that recall
Ahmed’s ‘economy of affect’: ‘But refugees frighten me . . . ’. Refugees
are not just a fugitive presence, they are strangers that actively
produce strong emotions: fear, abjection. ‘We might note that fear
does something,’ argues Ahmed, ‘it re-establishes distance between
bodies whose difference is read off the surface, as a reading that pro-
duces the surface . . . Fear involves relationships of proximity . . . Such
proximity involves the repetition of stereotypes’ (2004, 63). Ahmed
is drawing on Fanon in her thinking on the affective politics of fear,
and in his autobiographical account of being an object of fear as a
negro man in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon insists that fear works
through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its sub-
jects, as well as its objects: ‘My body was given back to me sprawled
out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning on that white winter day.
The Negro is an animal . . .’ (Fanon cited in Ahmed 2004, 63). The
affective economy that attaches fear to the bodies of refugees is his-
torical. Now refugee populations are increasingly comprised of Arab,
African, and South Asian people and the exodus from postcolonial
violence and civil war in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, east Africa,
Syria, and Sri Lanka. Refugees generate a distinct category of ‘the
fearsome’ in the present, and the politics of fear are narrated in terms
of crisis, as ‘border anxieties’. The alleged threat posed by refugees to
the integrity of the nation and its people, the biopolitical association
of refugees and contamination, all set them apart from the realm of
the cosmopolitan subject that is privileged and within the comfort
zone of postcolonialism—a subjectivity that Gikandi adopts in writ-
ing this essay, and that he speculates on elsewhere in his accounts
of his own journey from Kenya to the United States.4 The particular
place of refugees and asylum seekers is not only a matter of silence
and invisibility, there is a more active currency at work in the econ-
omy of affect: fear ‘sticks’ to these bodies. In the global terror estab-
lished in the recent past the association between refugees and asylum
seekers and the malevolent presence of ‘terror’ is insidious and well
established.
How might postcolonialism develop a vocabulary that has some-
thing to say about this? The idea of ‘border anxieties’ and their
unstable definitions of the human is taken up in a third and final
essay by Peter Hulme, who (like Young and Gikandi) argues for
the importance of refugees for new directions in postcolonialism
(2005). This essay also features as a lead chapter in a collection on
future horizons for postcolonial studies, and it begins with borders
and borderlands: a controversial photograph of a refugee taken by
the Spanish photographer Javier Bauluz late in 2000 and exhibited
in his ‘Spain: Southern Border’ exhibition. This takes Hulme back
to postcolonial vocabularies on borders and boundaries. The photo-
graph shows a couple relaxing on the beach at Zahara, on the shores
of the Mediterranean in southern Spain. They are apparently indif-
ferent (or actively averse) to the body of an illegal immigrant, washed
up onto the beach nearby.5 Those who survive perilous crossings tes-
tify on behalf of many who did not, and the presence of the corpse
and the refusal to bear witness to its presence (both captured here
in this photograph) marks the dehumanization of the refugee, and
their consignment to the category originally conceived for slaves: the
‘socially dead’ (Butler 2009, 42). The literal deaths of those seeking
asylum in containers and leaking boats who remain unmourned is,
remarks Ahmed, the most violent sign of the fear that attaches to
refugees (2004, 80). The presence of the refugee on the beach here is,
for Hulme, a sign of the need to rethink the frontier, the boundary,
the periphery, and the contact zone—those key concepts of postco-
lonial studies. This beach is, after all, the boundary between the first
and third worlds, Africa and Europe, which is mapped onto the bod-
ies of refugees and asylum seekers. Bauluz’s photograph captures and
frames the aversion that exists recto to verso with compassion: the
proximity of the privileged, who refuse to engage and turn away, to
the abjected body of the refugee. This too is a graphic scene of rec-
ognition, one where the corpse speaks of the presence of refugees,
and a failure of compassionate witness. ‘Not or no longer seeing—
vanishing, disappearing, looking the other way—is the ubiquitous
other side of the history of human rights,’ Thomas Laqueur observes.
‘ “We did not know” was, and is, the way we did not see’ (2009, 41).
The core vocabulary of postcolonialism is drawn to contact zones
where different subjects meet. However refugees are strange com-
pany, a ‘mote in the eye’ of the sensibilities incubated in the networks
of postcolonial exchange that Gikandi travels as a cosmopolitan sub-
ject in a postcolonial elite. This is an issue of proximity: Gikandi and
the refugees exit Africa and cross the Atlantic as passengers together;
however, they seem to share no common discourse or values. To the
contrary. Refugees lack sovereignty and autonomy; they journey
legally and illegally as deterritorialized subjects in global networks;
they are ‘global’ but not necessarily ‘cosmopolitan’; and the cultural
flows that occur around and through them challenge the postcolo-
nial discourse that authorizes the intellectual diaspora inhabited
by Young, Gikandi, and Hulme. Historicizing the refugee and the
politics of recognition that confer or deny audibility and visibility to
them as ‘human’ beings is essential for a postcolonial vocabulary that
addresses the presence of refugees and their constitutive place in our
own citizenship and belonging. The need to reformulate postcolo-
nial thinking about boundaries, frontiers, and contact zones as these
are now embodied by refugees recurs across these three self-reflexive
essays. A vocabulary that contributes to this thinking on the colonial
present arises earlier in postcolonial ‘autocritique’: in Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks, which inspires Ahmed’s thinking on fear
and stereotypes, for example, and in the autobiographical accounts
of the nakba by Edward Said. For Fanon and Said, postcolonial the-
ory and life writing speak to their location as subjects in history.
Autocritography
Autobiographical moments abound in postcolonial criticism, and
‘autocriticism’—critique generated by autobiographical experience—
plays an important role in the formulation of postcolonial theory
(Huddart 2007, 122). Edward Said’s autobiography Out of Place
is a memoir of childhood and youth that begins with his birth in
Jerusalem in 1935 and ends with the completion of his doctorate in
the USA in 1962. In his memoir Said recalls a trip to Jerusalem and
Cairo in November 1998. Fifty years earlier, by the early spring of
1948, he tells us, ‘my entire extended family had been swept out of the
place, and has remained in exile ever since’ (1999, xiv). The realities
of partition were immediately and intimately felt, and Said’s mem-
oirs personalize this dispossession. In childhood memory he recalls
the new distinction that divided his family in 1948. The 12-year-old
Edward and his father and sister were ‘protected’ from the politics of
Palestine by ‘talismanic U.S. passports’ that enabled them to slip by
customs and immigration officials. Their mother, on the other hand,
held a Palestine passport, and as a result her border crossings were
at risk and under surveillance, ‘grave looks and cautious accents’,
‘explanations, short sermons, even warnings’ and, Said recalls, ‘the
meaning of her anomalous existence as represented by an embarrass-
ing document was never explained to me as being a consequence of
a shattering collective experience of dispossession’ (1999, 118). Said’s
first experiences of Palestine as ‘history and cause’ are this intimate
experience of dispossession, which divides his family and threatens
to separate them at every border crossing. This memory later fuels his
anger and consternation at the suffering of refugees, ‘those Others’,
who were left ‘without a country or a place to return to, unprotected
by any national authority or institutions’ (1999, 119). Refugees embody
derritorialization, the ‘raw, brutal core’ of Palestinian suffering that
alerts the young Said to Palestine as ‘history and cause’ (1999, 119).
This is autobiographical experience that will find its expression in
postcolonial theory. It illustrates intimately and memorably the con-
tingency of identity, and its connection to power and authority: for
Said the border is not a thing but, rather, a materialization of author-
ity (Chambers 2008, 6).
Said’s childhood memories of the Levant as a cosmopolitan and
multicultural network of towns, villages, and cities inhabited by his
extended family contrasts sharply with the patrolled ‘securitized’

zones policed by borders, checkpoints, and walls that divide the
area now. Reading Said’s childhood memoir alongside other con-
temporary Palestinian memoirs suggests how the performative
dimensions of imaginative geographies, constructions that fold
distance into difference through a series of spatializations (Gregory
2004, 17), are intimately experienced. Raja Shehadeh’s memoir
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007) is a
narrative that draws on a long tradition of peripatetic subjectivity
to record a series of walks that track the ‘vanishing landscape’ of
the Ramallah hills and resist the ongoing settler colonization that
contains and constrains the movements of Palestinians across the
West Bank.6 Palestinian temporality and embodiment are under
siege here and Shehadeh writes out of grief and anger—as does
Said. Both use memoir to sustain the presence of Palestinian people
despite the ongoing expansion of settler occupation. Suad Amiry’s
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2005) also offers
a richly detailed spatial and political grasp of everyday life under
occupation on the West Bank, and it complements Shehadeh in its
focus on the gendered experiences of crowded and chaotic networks
of neighbourhoods and domestic life in the city of Ramallah, and
the constant surveillance of security forces there. These are serial
life narratives—the experience of living under occupation narrated
through a series of walks by Shehadeh, and what began as late night
emails to intimate friends during the Israeli occupation of 2001–2 by
Amiry. They grasp the quotidian experience of inhabiting colonized
spaces that are regulated spatially and temporally by changing bor-
ders, unpredictable curfews and checkpoints, identity papers and
permits, and arbitrary detention.7 These experiences produce the
torsion of place, space, identity, and time that Said conceptualizes as
‘imaginative geographies’.
The loss of Palestine, the establishment of Israel, and the subse-
quent political developments are, Said points out, ‘in my memoir
only allusively, even though their fugitive presence can be seen here
and there’ (1999, xv). But they make their presence felt conceptually
in his writing on orientalism and the idea of imaginative geogra-
phies: constructions that create partitions and enclosures that des-
ignate and separate ‘the same’ and ‘the other’ to make geographical
distinctions that are entirely arbitrary, ‘designating in one’s mind
a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond

“ours” which is “theirs” ’ (1994b, 54). ‘Imaginative geographies’ are
performative: they produce the effects that they name. This concept
brings to postcolonialism a way of thinking about borders in terms
of multiple and incommensurate histories and what Said called
‘contrapuntal’ reading, which tracks archives of writing across
temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways.
Said’s own dislocation and exile produces a postcolonial vocabulary
that works across boundaries with a sense of their performative and
arbitrary power to bring to light people who only exist as ‘shadowy
absences at the edges of European consciousness’ (Ashcroft and
Ahluwalia 2008, 93).
Two different Palestinian subjectivities are born in Out of Place as
a legacy of the nakba: the refugee and the exile. These are proximate
subjects, and in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ Said sees them in this
way. He contrasts the romanticized and aestheticized figure of the
exile and the spectral presence of refugees:
To reflect on exiled Muslims from India, or Haitians in America, or

Bikinians in Oceania, or Palestinians throughout the Arab world means
that you must leave the modest refuge provided by subjectivity and resort
instead to the abstractions of mass politics . . . Are they not manifestly and
almost by design irrecoverable? (2000, 175)
It is, Caren Kaplan insists in her extended analysis of Said’s writ-

ing on exile and the tradition of celebrating the exilic in modernist
literature, only by historicizing refugee experience that this invis-
ible category, these abstractions, can be recovered from the margins
of criticism and literature (1996, 121). Said has been regarded as the
embodiment of the privileged literary ‘exile’, and he draws on the
figure of the exiled Jewish intellectual, embodied in Erich Auerbach
and Theodor Adorno, to celebrate its pleasures and its possibilities
for contrapuntal thinking and nomadic vision. Nevertheless both his
memoir and essays lay groundwork for thinking beyond cosmopoli-
tan exiles and about refugees as ‘undocumented people . . . without
a tellable history’: ‘you must therefore map territories of experience
beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself. You must first
set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable
masses for whom UN agencies have been created’ (2000, 175).8 The
exile is a romantic figure, readily accommodated in an aestheticized

world of creativity and loss. On the other hand, refugees are both
‘without documents’ and ‘undocumentable’; these are spectral pres-
ences ‘disappearing off the map of literature and culture’ (Kaplan
1996, 121) that trouble Gikandi so.
Speechless Emissaries
Autocriticism amplifies Said’s thinking on borders and boundaries,
frontiers and margins, and how these might ‘map territories of expe-
rience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile’. ‘Imaginative
geographies’ grasps the elaborate constructions of self and other,
space and geography, time and history that are legacies of colonial
modernity. ‘[S]‌pace’, argues Said,
acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process,

whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into
meaning for us here. The same process occurs when we deal with time . . .
there is no use in pretending that all we know about time and space, or rather
history and geography, is more than anything else imaginative. (1994b, 55)
This accumulation of time, sedimentation of histories, and perfor-

mances of space produce a postcolonial vocabulary for speaking
about refugees and asylum seekers and their presence at frontiers and
contact zones in the colonial present. This renders audible and vis-
ible the strangers who are Gikandi’s fellow passengers, the silent fig-
ures Young sees at the Jalozai camp, and the corpse on the beach that
haunts Hulme. That this critical vocabulary should emerge in the
writings of a postcolonial critic who recalls the fate of Palestinians
in the wake of the nakba as childhood memory should not surprise.
‘Imaginative geography’, with its grasp of the torsions of space,
time, and identity speaks to the ‘ends of testimony’, for the experi-
ences of these most liminal and deterritorialized people, refugees
and asylum seekers, are unspeakable, unimaginable, and off the map.
There is an irony here: the recognition of legitimate claims of fear and
persecution is fundamental to the determination of refugee status
as this was established in the Convention of 1951, and these claims
and the determination of status are made in and through testimony.
However, personal narratives by asylum seekers are rare, even in

recent times when life narrative has been such a powerful vehicle
for advancing human rights claims. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
map the association of human rights discourse and narrated lives by
returning to that postwar infrastructure of agencies, declarations,
and covenants associated with the United Nations, most particularly
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in
1948. This association of testimonial narrative and rights discourse
creates a transnational space for the production and dissemination
of testimony that demands recognition and accountability of indi-
viduals, states, and international organizations. An infrastructure
of ‘humanitarian storytelling’ exercises the power of ‘mobilizing
shame’ by exposing human rights violations, and attaching a human
face to suffering. But this infrastructure has been a poor host for ref-
ugee testimony. Refugees bring to light uncertainties about who can
be understood and felt to be human that set the limits of humanitar-
ian storytelling and its capacity to reach ‘distant’ others.
Liisa Malkki’s epithet ‘silent emissaries’ captures poignantly
the impotence of ‘humanitarian storytelling’ to facilitate the testi-
mony of refugees and asylum seekers, and to mobilize shame and
compassion on their behalf. On the basis of her anthropological
fieldwork in the refugee camps of Tanzania, Malkki draws a sharp
contrast between testimonial ‘voice’—‘the ability to establish nar-
rative authority over one’s own circumstances and future, and an
ability to claim an audience’ (1996, 393)—and the discourses of audi-
bility and visibility made available through humanitarian witness.
‘Voice’ establishes the authority, political agency, and communal
memory that energizes the testimony Malkki hears in the refugee
camps of Tanzania, where refugee status is a profoundly meaningful
historical identity that shapes the collective as a people. However,
the infrastructure of humanitarian storytelling dehistoricizes and
depoliticizes refugees as objects of care and control. These ‘silent
emissaries’ of the humanitarian imaginary are visualized as a spec-
tacle of ‘bare humanity’, an anonymous corporeality that remains
faceless and nameless: a ‘bare, naked or minimal humanity is set
up’ (1996, 390), which is the passive and suffering object of humani-
tarian intervention. Malkki’s conclusions on how the figure of
the refugee becomes ‘knowable’ to a transnational public through
the mobilization of humanitarian discourse raise questions about
humanitarian intervention on behalf of refugees. Can we envisage

‘a radically “historicizing humanism” that insists on acknowledg-
ing not only human suffering but also narrative authority, historical
agency, and political memory’? (1996, 398).9
For if humanism can only constitute itself on the bodies of dehistoricised,

archetypal refugees and other similarly self-styled victims—if clinical and
philanthropic modes of humanitarianism are the only options—then citi-
zenship in this human community remains curiously, indecently, outside of
history. (1996, 398)
Calls for a ‘historical humanism’ that recognizes the long associa-

tion of western humanism and colonization abound in postcolonial
theory—in Fanon, Mbembe, Chakrabarty, and Said. In his Preface to
The Wretched of the Earth Jean-Paul Sartre emphasizes this contra-
diction of colonialism: it frequently appeals to a humanism that pro-
claims a universal human condition and draws humanity together,
and to a racism that makes colonized people into slaves and mon-
sters: ‘Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same
time: the contradiction is explosive’ (1968, 20). Testimonial narrative
returns to this contradiction repeatedly, for it articulates the concep-
tual limits of humanity in colonialism’s cultures, and the ongoing
creation of the non/subhuman at the boundaries of the human. This
space of the unimaginable and unthinkable is the place of the ‘thing’,
the unnamed object that is, for Fanon, the transformed and dehu-
manized being produced by the violence of colonization (Haddour
2006, xvi).
Under these circumstances, as in chapter 8 on South African life
narrative, postcolonial criticism goes ‘looking for the join’: for ways
that the work of testimony is ‘enjoined’ in other discursive frames
(Bhabha 2010, 26). Refugee testimony is on the move, travelling on
routes that are as contingent as the passages of refugees themselves,
crossing boundaries and entering into new assemblages of fiction and
non-fiction that address these questions of the ethics and aesthetics
of recognition that recur across the longue durée of postcolonial life
narrative. Testimony is opportunistic; it seeks those forms that can
bear witness to these subjects who are turned into slaves and mon-
sters, ‘the socially dead’. It makes new transactions with fiction, and
demands that literature ‘bear testimony’, and engage in imaginative
acts that compel the reader to bear witness to what is happening to

others with insight, ‘in one’s own body’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 108).
As it moves refugee testimonial marks the cultural boundaries and
distinctions that frame testimony: between literature and law, truth
and lies, fiction and non-fiction. In what remains of this chapter two
innovative texts that ‘host’ refugee testimony track these migrations
of testimony into non/fiction: Edwidge Danticat’s literary memoir
Brother, I’m Dying, and Dave Eggers’s autobiographical fiction What
Is the What. These remediations of refugee testimony bear witness
to refugees and asylum seekers, and explore ways that literature can
historicize their experience and enable their ‘voice’ as Malkki under-
stands this in terms of narrative authority, political agency, and
communal memory. These are humanitarian engagements, which
reformulate testimonial transactions to engage with the aversion that
renders refugees as objects of fear. This literature engages critically
with discourses of humanitarian activism and its ethics of recogni-
tion and, for postcolonialism, it raises questions about the ‘ends’ of
testimonial narrative at a time when refugees mark a violent return
of the colonial past and its imaginative geographies in the present.
Geographies of Violence
In his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ Said draws attention to the plight of
Haitians in America, questioning how their history and experiences
might be ‘recoverable’ (2000). Edwidge Danticat’s literary memoir
Brother, I’m Dying (2007) responds to this, in a history of her family
that is also a collective history of Haiti in the twentieth century as this
is recalled in the span of generational memory and family history—
the story of two brothers: Joseph, who remains in Port-au-Prince, and
Danticat’s father André, who migrates to New York city.10 Towards
the end of the memoir there is a graphic account of her uncle’s deten-
tion as an asylum seeker. In October 2004 Joseph Dantica arrived at
Miami International Airport on the American Airlines flight from
Port-au-Prince in Haiti. This 81-year-old pastor is dishevelled and
disoriented. His church and home had been invaded by rebel gangs,
UN peacekeepers, and Haitian riot police just two days before, and
he has lost all of his belongings and his papers. As gang leaders deter-
mine Dantica must have been complicit with the UN peacekeepers,
he is warned he will be killed if he returns home, and he is forced to

leave under cover of darkness and disguised as a woman, shamed and
exiled from the community he loves. Fortunately Dantica has plans
to travel to his family in the USA already: he has his ticket to Miami,
and a 30-day visa. However, at the Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) checkpoint at Miami International Airport, Dantica makes a
fateful error of judgement: he presents his passport and valid tourist
visa, but in response to the question of how long he will be staying in
the United States, Dantica says he wants to apply for sanctuary, for
temporary asylum. Why didn’t he simply use the visa as he had doz-
ens of time before? ‘[H]‌ad he acted based on someone’s advice? On
something he’d heard on the radio, read in the newspapers? Did he
think that given all that had happened to him, the authorities—those
with the power both to lend a hand and to cut one off—would have
to believe him?’ (2007, 215). ‘I can only assume,’ the autobiographical
narrator, his niece Edwidge writes, ‘that when he was asked how long
he would be staying in the United States, he knew that he would be
staying past the 30 days his visa allowed him and he wanted to tell
the truth’ (2007, 215).11
The ‘processing’ of asylum seekers requires that they testify to per-
secution repeatedly, and for their freedom, to customs and border
protection officials, lawyers, interpreters, medical staff. Legal recog-
nition of their status depends on their performance at interview in
terms of a narrative coded and recognizable to the conventions of the
United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees—that
is to say a person who has a well-founded fear of persecution for rea-
sons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social
group, or political opinion. Asylum seekers must master the codes
and conventions of the acceptable narrative in the performance of
their testimony, they are required to match their subjective life expe-
riences to the objective parameters of asylum policy to achieve cred-
ibility within the asylum determination procedure (Hebing 2009,
207). The gap between those who have passed the credibility test and
those who have not is vast. After his answer to that critical question at
the initial CBP checkpoint, Dantica is transferred to a parallel space, a
‘limbo’ zone, adjacent to the domesticity of the baggage carousels and
arrivals hall where his friends wait to meet him and his niece lives
just 15 minutes away, and yet a world apart in the imaginative geogra-
phies produced by border protection. In the airport satellite detention
centre he will undergo a series of interrogations, and an immigra-

tion alien file number, which he was never aware of, is retrieved from
Central Index System files and reattached to him. He testifies that
his life is in danger in Haiti. As a result of his CBP interview the
officer determines that Dantica does not have a legitimate reason for
entering the US and he is relocated in custody to Krome Detention
Centre, ‘a place that he, like all Haitians, knew meant nothing less
than humiliation and suffering’ (2007, 225). And so it is. Dantica faces
a further stage of processing: a ‘credible fear hearing’ into his claims
of persecution before an asylum officer at Krome. In the process
of this hearing Dantica suffers a seizure, and his mechanical voice
box, a legacy of his treatment for throat cancer many years earlier,
is dropped. Semi-conscious, voiceless, and saturated with vomit and
urine, Dantica is inspected by a medic who draws on his years of
experience at Krome to determine Dantica is rebellious and ‘faking’.
With ‘shackles on his feet’ he is later transported to the prison area of
the local hospital, where no lawyers or family members are allowed
to make unscheduled visits, and where he dies just five days after his
landing in Miami. This testimony is the work of memoir; there can
be no possibility of Dantica speaking in the first person. His niece
must speak on his behalf, must assemble this testimony from what
remains. To do this Brother, I’m Dying remediates testimony into
two different domains: the legal/political function of a human rights
document, and the literary/aesthetic domain of literary memoir. Both
of these extend recognition to this silent witness, and it is the liter-
ary/aesthetic transformation that expands his experience in the way
Felman suggests: literature hosts testimony to not just record events
but to make them available to imaginative acts of memory, and to
open up a space for belated witness.
To constitute a testimony in terms of the human rights document,
Danticat appropriates the ‘perverse archives’ that document the pro-
cessing of Joseph Dantica in the bureaucratic language of homeland
security.12 The memoir draws on the data generated by a variety
of reports: logbooks from the CBP, transcripts of interviews with
their digitized photographs, the Discretionary Authority Checklist
for Alien Applicants, Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook,
medical records from the hospital prison, and the Department of
Homeland Security Office final report. In this way the memoir itself
becomes a human rights document (Shemak 2011, 3), and through
a contrapuntal reading of these documents it carries on as witness

when Dantica himself cannot do so, when he is rendered mute and
unable to testify on his own behalf. These official archives allow the
memoir to cross that boundary coded in terms of the imaginative
geographies of CBP: the domesticated spatial and temporal zones
of citizenship and national belonging, and the space and time that
Danticat calls ‘limbo’: an adjacent yet estranged space of detention.
In a chapter called ‘No Greater Shame’ Danticat hears her uncle’s
voice for the last time in the recorded message required by the pro-
tocols of the ‘Contact Advisory of CBP Detention form’. Digitized
pictures of alien 27041999 are his last photographs; records of CBP
interviews are his final testimony; a Krome property inventory form
catalogues his final possessions; the CBP log records the coded and
precisely timed processing and transportation; and, finally, medical
records catalogue readings of vital signs until he died alone in the
prison ward. These records testify to the injustice that occurs, the
failure to recognize Dantica’s legitimate claims for sanctuary. They
also capture the imaginative geography of carceral space—that arbi-
trary and performative creation of space and time that produces the
effects it names.
This account of detention attaches a longer and collective history
to Dantica’s shame and abjection, and the memoir invokes both gen-
erational memory—incubated in the familial space and time of three
generations—and cultural memory. The metaphor ‘limbo’ space
and the reference to ‘shackles’ invoke a Caribbean cultural inher-
itance that bears witness to a long history of violent dispersal and
disinheritance across centuries. Limbo reincarnates the middle pas-
sage: the movements of the limbo dancer physically recall the way
the slaves contorted themselves in the cramped spaces of the slave
ships. Limbo is a collapse of time and space, a ‘gateway’ to a collective
experience of loss and severance from African tradition that recurs
in contemporary Caribbean writing: in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of
Relation and Caribbean Discourse, which is haunted by the Atlantic
abyss, and Wilson Harris’s ‘limbo gateway’, the ‘human chain’ that
connects the islands of the West Indies and west coast of Africa
(Shemak 2011, 19). The association of limbo with an imaginative
geography that is specific to colonization and a collective experience
of loss in the Caribbean transforms the process of witnessing that
occurs in Brother, I’m Dying. It is a hosting not only of this single and
intimately felt account of suffering and loss, which commemorates

Joseph Dantica, who suffers the shame of being ‘shackled’ with ‘soft
manacles’, but a remembrance and belated witness to a collective and
racial experience of loss. It is, to return to Said, a way of mapping
experience that recognizes its origins in colonial modernity, and the
imaginative geographies of the middle passage. At the same time it
draws on the associations of ‘limbo’ in Christian iconography: an
indeterminate space between the world of the living and the dead,
and a space of the recently deceased.
A resignification of the asylum seeker occurs here, an aesthetic
and literary relocation that establishes a different set of relations
for asylum seeker testimony in an historical and literary context
that draws on archives of cultural memory in the New World.
As it happens Danticat had visited Krome Detention Centre and
Haitian ‘boat people’ in detention there the year before, and this
lays down the routes of reference for what occurs subsequently. She
recalls seeing the burn marks on one asylum seeker: ‘His flesh was
seared white, with rows and rows of keloid scars . . . he was used
to showing his scars, he said. He had to show them to a number
of immigration judges to prove he deserved to stay’ (213). Here the
ages of the young men are determined by examining their teeth, an
‘agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were
pried open to determine worth and state of health’ (212). These ‘boat
people’ recall the horrors of the slave ships and the middle passage
voyage, which become precursors to these experiences of Haitian
refugees at the borders of the USA. This resignification of deten-
tion in terms of the violent geographies of slavery invokes Giorgio
Agamben’s more radical version of Said’s imaginative geographies,
which accentuates the coercive power and performative force in
spaces of exception such as Krome, the zones of exclusion and
abandonment where asylum seekers are detained and processed.
Drawing on Arendt’s insight that refugees are no longer members
of the nation state and as a result their human rights are no longer
secured, Agamben characterizes refugees as ‘homo sacer’: subjects
who have been stripped of political rights and reduced to ‘bare life’,
deprived of language and the political life that language makes pos-
sible (Gregory 2004, 63).
Joseph Dantica’s last testimony in Brother, I’m Dying is post mor-
tem, as the memoir turns more deliberately to the conventions of
slave narrative and its rituals of corporeal testimony where the body
speaks through its wounds. It is only after his death and in the pro-
cess of discussions about how and where his remains might be trans-
ferred, back to Port-au-Prince or onwards to New York, that Danticat
gains access to Dantica in a viewing of his body at a funeral home in
North Miami.
I positioned myself to see him. He was covered from his legs upto his hips
with what looked like blue tarp. His unshaven face had a thin layer of
white cream, which the manager explained was supposed to keep the skin
from retracting. There were squared marks with traces of glue spread out
across his chest, most likely from adhesive electrocardiogram leads. After
the autopsy, a line of gray rope had been used to sew the front of his body,
from his neck down to where the blue tarp ended. His tracheotomy hole was
sealed. His head was also sewn down the middle, from ear to ear, but with
thinner, nearly transparent thread.
My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen.
(2007, 249–50)
Finally Dantica’s body testifies eloquently, then, to his experi-

ences as an asylum seeker. What occurs here is familiar in tradi-
tions of slave narrative: a return to the conventions of corporeal
testimony, where the wounded body becomes a testimonial effect,
a ‘terrible spectacle’. Saidiya Hartman questions the ethics of
scenes such as this, when we are called upon to witness suffering
and abjection of the black body: what does the exposure of the
violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of
the institution? Does the pain of the other merely provide us with
the opportunity for self-reflection? At issue here, she reminds us,
is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between
witness and spectator (1997, 4). Corporeal testimony, where scar
tissue testifies to terror and suffering, speaks of the ultimate vio-
lation when it presents to us the sight of the corpse of the asylum
seeker—as in Danticat’s memoir, and in Bauluz’s photograph that
triggers Hulme’s thinking on boundaries and frontiers in postco-
lonial criticism. The crude sutures on Danticat’s body invoke the
turn to what Joseph Pugliese calls ‘testimony incarnate’ (2004,
33) by asylum seekers, where they resort to body language and
wound culture to write graffiti in blood, carve words on skin, and
speak with sutured lips.
Difficult ethical and aesthetic questions arise here, and they

are fundamental to the appropriation of slave narrative in con-
temporary memoir, and to those larger questions on remediation
of refugee testimony in memoir and fiction. ‘I positioned myself
to see him,’ Danticat tells us, and this is the point of view of the
narrative and its implied reader and belated witness; it invokes
the conventions of the benevolent addressee and witness to suf-
fering, but with a startling innovation. On the one hand this scene
of recognition is a legacy of abolitionism and its traditions of
humanitarianism that are embedded in the conventions of slave
narrative. But a radical shift occurs: this ‘I’ of the belated wit-
ness is a heavily pregnant woman, a niece looking on her uncle’s
body, and the narrator of this memoir, which bears witness to
an intimate connection to an asylum seeker: Brother, I’m Dying.
At this point Danticat invokes ‘embodied memory’, a span that
can be held for two or three generations at any one time to draw
together the corpse and the unborn through the body of the nar-
rator herself.
What purposes and motives can justify the violation of the norms
of privacy and ethical disclosure that occurs here? As I have argued
throughout this book, testimony repeatedly takes us to these bound-
aries between the human and the non-human, and it is haunted
by the presence of the non/in/subhuman other—which, in Brother,
I’m Dying, is expressed in this proximity of both the corpse and the
unborn child. Narratives of suffering frequently require us to con-
front experiences of dehumanization, and there is a long tradition of
bringing the dead into the world of the living in humanitarian dis-
course. ‘The corpse’, Julia Kristeva argues in her writing on abjection,
‘shows me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (2002,
231). So we begin to see what might license this viewing of Dantica’s
remains and authorize this scene of witness as a ‘bearing’ witness, as
Felman suggests: not merely to record Dantica’s last days in detention
and deploy the memoir as a human rights document, but a turn to
literature and its aesthetic devices to rethink this event imaginatively,
and to stage an intervention in representations of asylum seekers in
life writing. How can the testimony of these figures of hate and con-
tamination be heard? How do the abject become audible and visible?
Brother, I’m Dying makes some response to this question by taking
memoir to the ends of testimony. It is what Leigh Gilmore calls a
‘limit case’ (2001): a formal experimentation that not only carries

testimony forward, and hence provides further evidence of injustice,
but also a critical reshaping of what life writing is, and what it can
do; an appropriation that challenges existing emotional and political
responses to asylum seekers by turning to the cultural memory that
is incubated in the bloodlines of slave narrative.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanitarian-
ism drove a change in sensibilities towards an awareness of the
suffering of other things—both human and animal, the living and
the dead. It produced a number of responses that seem distinc-
tively contemporary to us now—such as appeals to this potency of
the dead in the humanitarian imaginary. The figure of the corpse
is embedded in testimony in the longue durée, and it resurfaces
in literary representations of refugees and asylum seekers now as
a symbolic and affective framework for contemporary testimo-
nial narrative, crossing into fictional remediations of testimony
‘to historicize the event of the dehistoricized’, as Bhabha remarks
in his discussion of how political and cultural agency can emerge
through a ‘discursive time-lag’ where those who were excluded,
excised and evicted are remembered (2010, 284). As the ‘socially
dead’, refugees and asylum seekers speak from the underworld,
they too travel the seas as commodities and cargo, aliens stripped
of all rights of citizenship, and haunted by the dead. The prox-
imity of anti-slavery campaigns and slave narrative in the late
eighteenth century and contemporary humanitarian activism
and a literature of witness on behalf of refugees and asylum seek-
ers is an inheritance of the past—it draws upon an imaginative
geography that is a legacy of colonial modernity and the historical
trauma of slavery.
Thomas Laqueur observes that the distinction between the human
and the animal, human beings and things, the living and the dead,
in the humanitarian imaginary is not secured in any essential way;
humanitarian narratives constitute, motivate, and authorize political
action and rights discourse, or fail to do so, only under certain condi-
tions. There is no guarantee that the moral imperatives of humani-
tarian activism will translate into a sympathetic moral imagination
or political action, for example (2009, 36). As testimony is remediated
now, this location of the refugee as the ‘socially dead’ draws testi-
monial narrative into composite non/fictions where social suffering
and the ethics of bearing witness return to the historical trauma of

slavery and the imaginative geographies of humanitarianism. But
the access to humanity on the basis of suffering and victimhood, a
humanity that is conferred through the privilege of a metropolitan
subject that retains the power of recognition in the testimonial con-
tract, reproduces the explosive contradiction that Sartre identifies
at the heart of colonialism. Compassion and sympathy, no less than
aversion, circulate in an economy of affect where the value of the cur-
rency remains the prerogative of the consumer of testimonial narra-
tive. How can readers be called to account for this unequal exchange?
The Not-so-silent Hero

Unexpectedly, at these ends, is a bestselling novel that ‘hosts’ refu-
gee testimony: What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino
Achak Deng (2006) by Dave Eggers.13 The narrating ‘I’ of this novel
is the refugee that inspired Simon Gikandi’s troubled speculations on
outcasts and identities constructed across boundaries, for Valentino
Achak Deng is a survivor of Pinyudo, Lokichoggio, and Kakoma,
and he draws Eggers’s novel into these vast refugee camps in Ethiopia
and Kenya in the first person. The voice of the refugee narrator in
the novel, the character ‘Valentino’, is the creation of a cross-cultural
assemblage of fiction and autobiography, author and autobiographi-
cal subject, which is a contemporary case study in the long history
of negotiation between witness and amanuensis in the production
of testimonial narrative. For some critics this testimonial voice is
so eloquent and persuasive that it eludes Said’s concerns about ori-
entalism entirely (Twitchell 2011, 624). But this is a caricature: orien-
talism does not police the boundaries of fiction and testimony with
charges of appropriation pending. Orientalism suggests that western
knowledge of non-western cultures and peoples cannot be separated
from the colonial structures of perception that produced that knowl-
edge. Interventions on behalf of refugees occur in a longue durée of
postcolonial life narrative where the legacy of humanitarianism is
an autobiographical voice that is articulated through collaboration
and appropriation, a giving and withholding of ‘voice’ that begins in
colonial encounters and remains audible in contemporary life narra-
tive. ‘Valentino’ is a character created for a metropolitan market that
values testimonial narrative, and the novel anticipates concerns about

a ‘ventriloquism’ of African suffering, and appropriation of African
testimony, even as it works to give voice to its ‘not so silent hero’.
What Is the What is preoccupied with belatedness, with the
exhaustion of testimony. It adopts an archetypal figure in the
humanitarian imaginary, the figure of the suffering child, as this
is formulated in terms of two tropes, the ‘Lost Boys’ and ‘Child
Soldier’ narratives that are immediately familiar for a metropoli-
tan reader (and this connects to the trope of the child in human
rights literature explored in c hapter 9). Valentino reflects ironically
on these generic expectations that make his African narrative ‘rec-
ognizable’ to its readership: the wild animals, the innocent child,
the long march of the boys across Sudan to the refugee camps in
Ethiopia and Kenya, the prospect of deliverance into a benevolent
American society. But in the metropolitan market for this story
compassion ‘fatigue’ has set in. The addressees that are invoked
in the course of Valentino’s testimonial—his captor ‘Michael’, the
ineffectual ‘Jason’, the patrons of the gym where he works—are
indifferent, unmoved by his account of the long walk of the Lost
Boys out of Sudan to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, and their pro-
gress through the refugee camps of Pinyudo, Lokichoggio, and
Kakuma. Valentino is addressing a public that is fickle and unreli-
able: he is bound to bear witness on behalf of those who did not
survive the ordeal of the Sudanese civil war; however, the indif-
ference of his audience places his testimony at risk. As venues for
testimonial narrative, the Lost Boys and the Child Soldier stories
have been remediated across a series of documentary films, social
media, and books, and the novel travels in the turbulent wake of
these proximate texts. Valentino reflects on the obligation to tell
a recognizable story coded in terms of a specific genre, a contract
that binds the autobiographical narrator and his reader:
. . . we did not all see the same things . . . But now, sponsors and newspaper
reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements, and the
Lost Boys have been consistent in their willingness to oblige. Survivors tell
the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking
as possible. My own story includes enough small embellishments that I can-
not criticize the accounts of others. (2006, 21)
Testimonial cycles have a limited shelf life. Here the belatedness

of the genre offers the readers of the novel postmodern pleasures
of reflexivity: the Lost Boys testimony is now a generic archetype
deployed ironically, and the evangelical faith and humanitarian-
ism that ground Valentino’s final passionate appeal for empathic
recognition—‘I covet your eyes, your ears’ (2006, 535)—is resisted
by his indifferent addressees throughout. In this way the novel both
elicits and questions compassionate witness, and it appeals to a cos-
mopolitan public that both desires and disdains the commodifica-
tion of distant suffering—this is, perhaps, one response to Gikandi’s
question on how cosmopolitanism might recognize refugees now. In
a further ironic twist that concludes the novel, Valentino gestures
to his own fictional presence as a character, who is not authorized
in terms of the autobiographical signature as this traditionally func-
tions as a guarantor of authenticity, and who is perpetually at risk of
becoming ‘less than human’:
Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories . . . because
to do anything else would be something less than human . . . I speak to you
because I cannot help it . . . How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would
be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (2006, 535)
As Sarah Brouillette argues, as a niche market in a global culture

industry, postcolonial literature is especially compromised by
commodification. ‘Venues’ of life narrative formulated in terms
of humanitarian activism—specific formulations of testimony
that accrue value and become generic, such as the Lost Boys story,
Child Soldier memoir, accounts of honour killing, indigenous
life story—become highly marketable as the ‘postcolonial exotic’.
This, as Chimamanda Adichie suggests, sells ‘a single story’ that
produces a ‘default position toward me, as an African . . . a kind
of patronizing well-meaning pity . . . In this single story there was
no possibility . . . of feelings more complex than pity, no possibil-
ity of connection as human equals’ (2009). The ‘single story’ is the
currency of humanitarian transactions, and its value is called into
question by those who are framed in terms of the ‘well-meaning
pity’ of neoliberal sentimentality.
Gifting Voice
The questions about humanitarian intervention and the presence of
refugees as ‘silent emissaries’ raised by Adiche and Malkki, among
others, return to questions of voice and ventriloquism that are
embedded in the longue durée of postcolonial life writing. The ends
of testimony that become the subject of Eggers’s novel are generic
and political: the limits of witness in testimonial narrative. What Is
the What is a fiction of a testimony, which reflects upon the impos-
sibilities of verifiable ‘truth’ and authenticity in its peritext:
Over the course of many years, Dave and I have collaborated to tell my story
by way of tape recording, by electronic mailings, by telephone conversations
and by many personal meetings and visitations . . . I told Dave what I knew
and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work
of art.
It should be known to the readers that I was very young when some of the
events in this book took place, and as a result we simply had to pronounce
What Is the What a novel. I could not, for example, recount some conversa-
tions that took place seventeen years ago. However it should be noted that all
the major events in the book are true. The book is historically accurate, and
the world I have known is not different from the one depicted within these
pages. We live in a time where even the most horrific events in this book
could occur . . . (2006, xiv)
Deng’s remarks are poignant: autobiographical narrative can never

reproduce conversations accurately, and childhood memory is nec-
essarily incomplete and unverified. But omission is a privilege of
the authorized metropolitan narrator, from the beginnings of west-
ern autobiography in Rousseau’s Confessions to Eggers’s own A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a self-conscious metafic-
tional memoir of boyhood that established him as a celebrity author.
Refugee testimony, on the other hand, negotiates the imperative to
bear witness to social suffering and the desire for the ‘single story’
in human rights campaigns mediated by humanitarian intervention.
What Is the What adopts the template of a lucrative cycle for African
refugee testimony: the ‘single story’ of the Lost Boys/Child Soldier
narratives (variants of the same genre) which has accrued value and
authority in the metropolitan market for postcolonial life narrative
and is now residual (to return to Raymond Williams’s categories

of cultural authority introduced in chapter 9). But the commercial
value of testimonial venues such as this means they are vulnerable
to imposture: as a ‘brand’ they can be faked for profit. Valentino
Achak Deng recognizes this in his peritext, and other child soldier
narratives—China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life and
Ishmael Baer’s Long Way Gone—have been called to account in terms
of a ‘metrics of authenticity’ that license allegations of hoax, or false
witnessing. These ‘metrics’ regulate the production and reception of
postcolonial life narrative in global markets of exchange (Smith and
Watson 2012, 596).
What Is the What is energized by this ‘present tense’ where African
refugee testimony cast in the Lost Boys genre has lost its power to
‘arrest’, where that essential power of testimony to compel its wit-
ness and move its public to shame has dissipated and allegations of
fraud arise. Yet as a fiction of testimony and, as we are reminded by
Valentino Achak Deng in the peritext, as a ‘work of art’, it remains
attached to the conventions and devices of humanitarian narrative
and its aspirations to inspire empathic witness and social justice: the
novel both reshapes and questions the ‘metrics of authenticity’ that
the conventions and rhetoric of witnessing seek to secure (Smith and
Watson 2012, 514). Fiction opens opportunities for a reformulation of
the conventional relationship between the amanuensis and witness
to produce its fictive first-person narrator, ‘Valentino’. Historically,
the amanuensis is both silent and intrusive, a marginal figure who
works to secure an appropriate voice for the witness. We see this in
Mary Prince’s History, and Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story, where
the witnessing subject must use stratagems to become an articulate
antagonist and circumvent this ear and hand that commit the testi-
mony to the page. Both Eggers and Deng work to make the formu-
lation of the narrating ‘I’ of this novel audible and visible, through
peritext and in epitext that address this remediation of testimony
as fiction (Eggers 2007). Theft and hoax haunt the production of
humanitarian storytelling—this is, as James Dawes remarks, a moral
anxiety that stalks the literature of human rights (2007, 187).
In What Is the What the negotiation between the amanuensis and
the witness is explicit: a gifting of voice. This returns to discussions
of testimonial transactions and gift exchange in indigenous life nar-
rative. ‘Gifting’ is an exchange negotiated through reciprocity, and it
is, as Marcel Mauss insists, a way of building relationships between

humans across cultures—an exchange negotiated at the conflicted
contact zones of the New World. Deng tells us that he gives Eggers
‘what I knew and what I could remember’ (2007, xiv)—freely and
at will. As I have argued earlier, ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ are associ-
ated in collaborative testimonial exchanges of this kind. On the one
hand, an obligation follows: Eggers is to create a ‘work of art’ that
carries this story so it ‘bears’ witness anew. On the other, this story
becomes his novel; it carries his name and authorship, it is his prop-
erty that is put to humanitarian purpose. The novel is a creative act
of adaptation that produces ‘Valentino’, the character and narrating
‘I’ that will carry readers at a peripatetic pace across southern Sudan
and into the refugee camps of east Africa. This is a response to the
exhaustion of testimony that recurs in the framing narrative of the
novel, with its self-reflexive awareness of the aversion and aliena-
tion of the cosmopolitan public that Eggers’s art must address. The
creation of ‘Valentino’ occurs in a testamentary space where the
mechanism of exchange is embedded in humanitarian narrative:
‘My desire to have this book written was born out of my faith and
beliefs in humanity,’ Deng tells us. ‘I am relieved that Dave and I
accomplished this task through illumination of my life as an exam-
ple of atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed
against its own people’ (2007, xiv). The biographical novel creates a
‘version’ of Deng’s voice that absorbs his rhythms of speech and out-
look during four years of research and oral interview. At the same
time there is an imaginative transformation of the scribe, described
by Eggers as a rigorous editing to effect ‘the erasure of my voice
to make sure that nothing, not even one adjective choice, sounded
like me’ (quoted in Kirschling 2007). This produces the middle-
brow novel that enables the heightened imaginative capability that
Felman associates with the literary witness:
Only with a bit of artistic licence could I imagine the thoughts in Valentino's
mind the first day he left home, fleeing from the militias, never to return.
Only in a novel could I imagine the look on the face of the man who rescued
Valentino when he became entangled in barbed wire one black night in the
middle of his journey to Ethiopia. Only in a novel could I apply what I had
seen in the various regions of southern Sudan to describe the land, the light,
the people. (Eggers 2007)
The Hospitality of Fiction

Eggers adapts fiction to carry the Lost Boys narrative beyond its
point of exhaustion. He returns to and renews the prototype to cre-
ate a voice for its refugee subject. This testimonial voice speaks from
the point of intersection that Agamben identifies as ‘bare life’: ‘life
exposed to death’ (Gregory 2010, 57). It transforms a trope of African
life narrative incarnated in Nelson Mandela’s iconic autobiography—
the ‘long walk to freedom’—into a passage through a deathworld of
suffering and loss. Valentino voices a haunting testimony to suffer-
ing and gross human rights violations, told in first-person child-
hood memory. The progression of the narrative through an ongoing
oscillation between Atlanta and the refugee camps of Ethiopia and
Kenya invites ‘contrapuntal reading’: Said’s practice of reading for
the entanglement of metropolitan and colonial histories in fiction.
The map in the peritext identifies the territory of Valentino’s jour-
ney from his childhood home at Marial Bai to the massive refugee
camps at Pinyudo and Lokichoggio. But Eggers’s fiction transforms
this map into a violent landscape of bare life, a deathworld where, to
return to Said, space and geography, time and history are ‘more than
any thing else imaginative’ (1994b, 55). Testimonial narrative moves
constantly to the boundaries of the human, to spaces where the in/
un/subhuman confront us with the limits of the human, and here the
fictional transformation of testimony charts this post-human world,
suggesting how fictional narrative can become available or, as Agnes
Woolley suggests, ‘hospitable’ in imagining and brokering ethical
responses to asylum seekers (2014, 10).
‘It was a strange land we passed through’ (Eggers 2006, 125)
Valentino tells us: the blue dog fattens as atrocities continue, the vul-
tures begin to feast while the boys are still alive, the boys resemble
inanimate and non-human things such as spoons and insects and,
when they die on the long march, their bodies ‘melt’ back into the
earth. In the spectral space and suspended time of this imaginative
geography Valentino can no longer differentiate between the living
and the dead, and he repeatedly encounters ‘faceless’, ‘ghost’ people.
This mythopoeic world of the embedded narrative is a radical depar-
ture from the truthtelling genres of testimonial narrative, and it con-
trasts sharply with the realistic and mimetic mode of the framing
narrative in Atlanta. This deathworld is Eggers’s art, the return on
the obligation that follows from Deng’s gift of testimony. The refugee
camps are ‘nowhere’ in this imaginative geography: ‘Kakuma was,
we were first told, the Kenyan word for nowhere. No matter what
the meaning of the word, the place was not a place. It was a kind
of purgatory’ (2006, 373). By day the camps are managed by United
Nations agencies and NGOs, and the children are refugees, the ‘Lost
Boys’ in humanitarian care. By night the camps are the terrain of the
Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, and the boys are ‘child soldiers’,
the ‘seeds’ of the future for an independent nation in southern Sudan.
They are then both child soldiers and lost boys, these identities are fic-
tions in time and space.14 The narrative voice of Valentino testifies to
the refugee camps subjectively, in a fictional first-person voice. This
is authorized by Valentino Achak Deng’s African childhood memory
and authored by Eggers, who shapes it ethically and aesthetically by
drawing on the vocabulary of the humanitarian imaginary, a herit-
age of testimonial narrative that turns to the dead to make an ethical
claim on the ‘remade world of the living’. The legacy of the longue
durée of postcolonial life narrative—an ethics of sentimental asso-
ciation between metropolitan subjects and the suffering of distant
strangers—shapes this humanitarian appropriation of African story.
In this chapter on the ends of testimony and literary witness a
postcolonial vocabulary for refugee testimony emerges in contra-
puntal reading that shuttles across the unscheduled routes and
imagined geographies of refugee testimony—Atlanta and Pinyudo
in Eggers’s novel, Miami and Port-au-Prince in Brother, I’m Dying.
It locates the routes of this testimony in cultural memory that draws
on the long histories of colonization and dispossession in the New
World. In Culture and Imperialism contrapuntal reading draws
colonial worlds into Said’s reading of canonical British fiction; it is
a reading with ‘awareness both of the metropolitan history that is
narrated and of those other histories against which (and together
with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (1994a, 51). Said’s post-
colonial vocabulary responds to the ‘roots and routes’ of testimo-
nial narrative. In an essay on the ‘volatile geographies’ of political
modernity Derek Gregory identifies sites and figures that occupy
spaces of bare life now, for example the modern carceral regime of
Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison—and in this chapter I have
added Krome, Lokichoggio, Pinyudo, and the other spaces of excep-
tion created for refugees and asylum seekers. The form and force of
deterritorialization in these ‘exceptional’ spaces, argues Gregory, are

imaginative geographies with a long history, they are coordinated in
terms of a colonial apparatus of power, and those contact zones of
colonial modernity that first produced the ‘perverse and paradoxical’
sites of constructed and constricted visibility where humanity and
non-humanity coexist and ‘pass through each other’ (Gregory 2010,
61). The routes of refugee testimony return to the limbo space of the
slave ships, and to corporeal testimony.
Borders are now patrolled with increasing vigilance; new regimes
of surveillance, policing, and spaces of detention identify and
exclude outsiders and illegal others. The fear and terror that haunted
colonial space in the past infiltrate and haunt the modern metropolis
in the presence of the refugee: ‘her mobility exposes the instability
of abstract distinctions and confines . . . her precariousness is ulti-
mately also ours’ (Chambers 2008, 7). Mapping the movements of
refugees in terms of imaginative geographies draws time and space,
history and geography together to insist on the ongoing presence of
the colonial past. Remediation of refugee testimony in memoir and
fiction bears witness to present and past, to the living and the dead.
These passages of testimony produce literary texts that take on the
legal/political functions of human rights documents as well as the
literary/aesthetic properties of both memoir and fiction, and they
draw on humanitarian sentiment to appeal not only to feeling but
also to reason, to policy, and to principle. The hospitality of fiction
creates openings for the adaptation and appropriation of refugee life
narrative at the ends of testimony. In humanitarian novels witness-
ing becomes trope, plot, and mise en scène; ‘witness’ is the novelist,
the character, and the reader (Ganguly 2014, 73). Here, at the seam
where testimony and metafiction are joined, postcolonial life writ-
ing ‘bears’ witness to those ‘slaves and monsters’ who are the most
brutally colonized.
Notes
1. Thanks to Jude Seaboyer for the germinal quotation from Felman that
triggers this chapter, and to Debjani Ganguly for sharing drafts of her
work on the witness.
2. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (and its 1967
Protocol) defines a refugee as ‘Any person who owing to a well founded
fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, mem-
bership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the
country of his/her nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is
unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country’. An
asylum seeker is a person who is seeking protection as a refugee and is
still waiting to have his/her claim assessed. See <www.refugeecouncil.
org.au>.
3. See, for example, Farrier and Tuitt, Morton, and Dhawan and Randeria
in Huggan (2013b).
4. As editor of the PMLA Simon Gikandi has written a number of columns
that reflect on his beginnings in the colonial libraries and his childhood
reading in Kenya. See, for example, ‘The Fantasy of the Library’ (2013).
5. The image is available online at <http://www.galeon.com/javierbauluz/
Inicio.html>. Accessed 1 October 2013. The image has been highly con-
troversial and it has inspired a number of essays. Bauluz was called upon
to explain how he captured the image (see, for example, Crosby 2006,
Pugliese 2009). For a dialogue on visual representations of refugees, see
Gilligan and Marley (2010), also Szörény (2006, 2009), and Sliwinski (2011).
6. For example both Rousseau’s Confessions and Richard Holmes’s essays
in Footsteps draw on a peripatetic subjectivity. See Kennedy (2012) for
a discussion of Palestinian Walks that extends this into a discussion of
the anthropocene and posthumanism, which also connects to thinking
about these landscapes in terms of dispossession and colonization. See
Moore-Gilbert (2013) for a reading of Palestinian women’s life writing in
terms of ‘baleful postcoloniality’.
7. Amiry famously and satirically testifies to this in terms of the story of
her dog, who is allowed entry to zones she is denied.
8. In his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ Said draws distinctions between exiles,
émigrés, refugees, and expatriates, remarking that ‘Refugees are a crea-
tion of the twentieth-century state. The word “refugee” has become a
political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people
requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries with
it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality’ (2000, 181). The implied
dehumanization of refugees here (‘herd’) and the relative exaltation of
the exile (‘spiritual’) grasps the some of the ‘uneasy and unresolved’
contradictions that concern Kaplan and Gikandi.
9. The challenges of establishing a postcolonial vocabulary adequate to
these ends of testimony become clear if we return to Young, Gikandi,
and Hulme with Malkki’s critique in mind, for each adopts the silent
emissary as a figure to think with at the outset: the refugee at Jalozai
camp, the fellow passengers who are silent strangers, and the corpse on
the beach. Working to historicize these figures is then established as a
problem for postcolonial response.
10. The title of the memoir invokes Genesis 20:13: ‘This is how you can show
your love to me/ Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.” ’ For
very different reasons the fate of ‘the biblical leper’ (20:5) hangs over
both brothers—Joseph as he becomes an asylum seeker, and André as
he suffers chronic illness.
11. The association of humanitarian peacekeepers and US military occu-
pation is a rich subtext of Dantica’s history and one of its insights into
Haitian experience in the twentieth century. See Agier (2010) and Scott
Watson (2011) for more extended discussion of humanitarianism as
securitization. See Williams (2010), Joanne Sharp (2013), and Morton
(2013) for postcolonial critiques of human rights, humanitarianism, and
neo-imperialism.
12. This reference to ‘perverse archives’ draws on Rosanne Kennedy’s turn
to records of the bureaucracy to create an indigenous cultural memory
of dehumanization and survival. See Kennedy (2011b).
13. On the distinctions between life narrative and fiction, see Smith and
Watson, who emphasize they are distinguished by their relationship to
and the claims they make about a referential world. ‘We might helpfully
think of what fiction represents as “a world” and what life writing refers
to as “the world” ’ (2010, 9–10).
14. The Lost Boys and Child Soldier narratives are closely related, as

‘Valentino’ himself explains in the novel. Child Soldier narrative is
a humanitarian discourse about child soldiers in African civil wars
that identifies the child as a vulnerable and innocent victim. The Lost
Boys variant is a subset of this genre, associated particularly with the
experiences of children in Sudan and their subsequent experiences as
refugees relocated to the United States. For a discussion of the Keitetsi
controversy, see Roberts (2013); on Beah and Eggers and the ‘metrics
of authenticity’, see Smith and Watson (2012); and for further extended
discussions of the Child Soldier narrative, see, and Schultheis (2008),
Coundouriotis (2010), Dolah and Karegeye (2010), Karlin and Matthew
(2010), Kearney (2010), Martins (2011), Rosen and Rosen (2012).
S A LVAG E
Finally, there is then a return to beginnings at these ends of testi-

mony. In her Introduction to the most recent edition of Mary Prince’s
History, Sara Salih describes Prince as an ‘asylum seeker’ (2004, xi),
and perceptively so. It suggests an interlocking of pasts, presents, and
futures across postcolonial life narrative. In London in 1831 Prince’s
status remained perverse. On English soil she can assert her legal
right to freedom and recognition as a free woman; however, if she
returns to Antigua she forfeits her freedom and is again enslaved
as the property of John Woods. Her situation speaks of those ‘tor-
sions’ of imaginative geography that recur in contemporary asylum
seeker life narrative: like Joseph Dantica, Prince’s freedom and iden-
tity are contingent. This imaginative geography is the space and time
of those who are reduced to ‘bare life’ where their status remains
dependent on a capacity to code experience in terms of ‘appropriate’
testimony. Similarly the recourse to the case of Saartjie Baartman in
habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Guantánamo detainees also sig-
nals a folding of colonial pasts into the present. Postcolonial thinking
in terms of ‘multiple durées’ made up of discontinuities, reversals,
inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one
another (Mbembe 2001, 14), grasps these intricate literary and cul-
tural histories.
At the ends of testimony assemblages of fictional and non-fictional
life narrative that host asylum seeker testimony in contemporary lit-
erature draw attention to repetition, to the ‘creative and interpretive
act of salvage’ (Hutcheon 2006, 8) that occurs through remediation,
adaptation, and appropriation. Traditions initiated through slave
202 • Salvage
narrative and abolitionism in the late eighteenth century return now

to speak of and for the socially dead: those subjected to forced migra-
tion. The art of testimony as salvage, redeemed from the wreckage
of postcolonial seas, draws Mary Prince close, and with her come
enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism,
and the ‘ends’ of testimony.
In The Empire Writes Back (1989), the book that became founda-
tional for ‘first wave’ postcolonial criticism in the 1990s, Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin argued for wider comparative
approaches to literature that pursue the study of the effects of coloni-
alism ‘in and between writing in english’ (1989, 23). This book returns
to that call for ‘borne-across ways of reading which themselves,
like the texts they purported to analyse, had successfully travelled
or been translated across cultural borders’ (Boehmer 2013, 308). It
moves across ‘writing in english’ to generate creative relations across
life narratives along the axes of time, place, and contiguity, for exam-
ple. This draws together Tench and Equiano, Moodie and Copway,
indigenous and Dalit life writing. It travels on the routes of widely
read and remediated life narratives such as My Place, Gorillas in the
Mist, and Country of My Skull. It is drawn to the boundaries of fiction
and non-fiction where new hybrid forms of life writing are produced,
such as Brother, I’m Dying and What Is the What. These readings
are symptomatic. Other associations, ur texts, and mutations serve
just as well for the purpose of generating the productive dissonance
that questions chronological and canonical criticism—the brilliant
insight of Salih’s association of Mary Prince and asylum seekers, for
example, which recalls Françoise Lionnet’s creative and interpre-
tive thinking on lines of literary affiliation following the bloodlines
of slave cultures (1995, 42). Recently Nelson Mandela’s biographer,
Elleke Boehmer, has argued for the importance of biographical
life narrative in ‘second wave’ postcolonial studies that expand the
genealogy of postcolonial influences and ideas, and are open to
the diversity of postcolonial subjectivities, agencies, texts, and tes-
timonies (2013, 313). Mandela, argues Boehmer, contributed force-
fully to the postcolonial redefinition of the human as proclaimed by
Fanon; however, he characteristically Africanized his definition of a
reshaped and more fully inclusive humanism. Like Vincent Carretta,
in his biography Equiano, the African, Boehmer is interested in how
her biographical subject championed a humanism defined from the
Salvage • 203
perspective of those whose humanity had been denied historically:

‘Radically, the African was at the centre of his concept of the human,
not the margin or outside against which the human was understood’
(2013, 321). These assertions of postcolonial humanism draw Mandela
and Equiano together, shifting partial and racialized concepts of
human identity in search of common ground and reciprocity. They
also locate life narratives as central to postcolonial studies now.
Testimonial life narrative is embedded in the history of
anti-colonial resistance. Who has the power and authority to narrate
as an autobiographical ‘I’? How do the lives of those dispossessed
in colonialism’s cultures become engaged in life writing? These raise
questions of authority, agency, authenticity, and power. On the one
hand there is nothing specifically postcolonial about these questions.
Given the specific claims to authenticity and truth that characterize
auto/biographical narrative, these are issues that preoccupy readers,
critics, and writers of auto/biographical narratives in general. But,
on the other hand, they are questions that have specific purchase
and resonance for postcolonial criticism and its concerns for the dis-
possessed and subaltern, for indigenous epistemologies, and for the
operations of ‘cultured violence’. Testimonial life narrative is a pow-
erful tool in campaigns for social justice. It demands recognition,
advocacy, responsibility, and accountability, and yet it is at the same
time a ‘soft weapon’—easily used in propaganda, readily commodi-
fied as ‘the postcolonial exotic’, a target for literary hoax, historically
connected to benevolence in colonialism’s cultures.
Testimonial life writing makes ethical demands on readers and
critics, reaching out to precarious lives, where narrative falters. Mary
Prince, the Gugulethu mothers, Valentino Achak Deng, Omprakash
Valmiki, Daisy Milloy, the victims of gendered violence in the
Congo. All of these speak personally and urgently of the limits of tes-
timony and witness in life writing, and of the proximities of human,
animal, and thing in the violent worlds of apartheid, rape warfare,
slavery, and dispossession. These narratives question the essential-
ist and romantic notions of selfhood and the individualism of the
sovereign self: the ‘auto-’ of autobiography that humanism gives to
itself (C. Wolfe 2003, 119). The ‘lives’ that populate postcolonial life
writing reach out towards more expansive animations of vibrant life.
How can the idea of the human reach beyond the modes of embodi-
ment and recognition that privilege certain lives as ‘grievable’ and
204 • Salvage
attached to ‘rights’? (Butler 2009, 22). In the epigraph that begins

this book, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the struggle to salvage
the Enlightenment idea of the human despite the conscription of
humanism and humanitarianism in the project of European imperi-
alism is a global heritage for postcolonial thinkers. This book traces
that inheritance through the longue durée of testimonial life narra-
tives that return to those questions raised by Fanon, about human
being, and its inhumanities, and the possibilities for social activ-
ism that draws on humanisms expansively and creatively. Graham
Huggan argues that postcolonialism does not seek a corrective to the
past so much as to trouble accepted versions of it, returning rest-
lessly to its ‘multiple secretions in the present’, both mobilizing and
questioning the vocabularies it inherits (2013b, 4). And so it is with
testimonial transactions, which return to the legacy of humanism
and continue to invest in its promise, even as they register the limits
of its currency and value.
B I B L I O G R A PH Y
Achebe, Chinua. 1975. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness’. Chancellor’s Lecture, 18 February. Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts.
Adichie, Chimamanda. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. Filmed July 2009. Up-
loaded 7 October 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg>
Accessed 14 July 2013.
Agier, Michel. 2010. ‘Humanity as an Identity and its Political Effects (A Note
on Camps and Humanitarian Government)’. Humanity 1 (1): pp. 29–45.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, Sara and Jackie Stacey. 2001. ‘Testimonial Cultures: An
Introduction’. Cultural Values 5 (1): pp. 1–7.
Akeley, Carl. 1935 [1923]. In Brightest Africa. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Al-Hassan Golley, Nawar. 2003. Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Amiry, Suad. 2005. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries.
London: Granta Books.
Anderson, Kay. 2007. Race and the Crisis of Humanism. London: Routledge.
Anderson, Linda. 2001. Autobiography. London: Routledge.
Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek. 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory. New York and London: Routledge.
Armbruster, Karla. 1996. ‘ “Surely, God, These Are My Kin”: The Dynamics
of Identity and Advocacy in the Life and Works of Dian Fossey’. In Animal
Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and
Matthew Senior. New York: Routledge, pp. 209–29.
Armitage, Andrew. 1995. Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation:
Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Ashby Wilson, Richard and Richard D. Brown eds. 2009. Humanitarianism
and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in
Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Ashcroft, Bill and Pal Ahluwalia. 2008. Edward Said. London: Routledge.
206 • Bibliography
Assembly of First Nations. 1994. Breaking the Silence. Ottawa: Assembly of

First Nations.
Attenborough, David. 2006. Gorillas Revisited, television documentary.
London: BBC.
Attwood, Bain. 1992. ‘Portrait of an Aboriginal as an Artist: Sally Morgan
and the Construction of Aboriginality’. Australian Historical Studies
25 (99): pp. 302–18.
Attwood, Bain. 2001. ‘ “Learning about the Truth”: The Stolen Generations’.
In Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New
Zealand, ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen
& Unwin.
Attwood, Bain. 2008. ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations
Narrative, “Distance”, and Public History’. Public Culture 20 (1): pp. 75–95.
Bailey, Anne C. 2005. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the
Silence and the Shame. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. 1999. Acts of Memory: Cultural
Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Balfour, Ian and Eduardo Cadava, eds. 2004. ‘And Justice For All? The
Claims of Human Rights’. SAQ 103: pp. 2–3.
Ballstadt, Carl et al. 1985. Susanna Moodie: Letters of a Lifetime. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Barnard, Rita. 2006. ‘Oprah’s Paton, or South Africa and the Globalisation
of Suffering’. Safundi 7 (3): pp. 1–21.
Barnard, Rita. 2012. ‘Ugly Feelings, Negative Dialectics: Reflections on
Postapartheid Shame’. Safundi 13 (1–2): pp. 151–70.
Barnett, Michael. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Baucom, Ian. 2005. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the
Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baxi, Upendra. 2007. Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Behrendt, Lisa. 2004. Home. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham
and London: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane and Rosanne Kennedy, eds. 2003. World Memoir: Personal
Trajectories in Global Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Berlant, Lauren. 2004. ‘Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)’. In
Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant.
New York and London: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi. 2010. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bird, Carmel, ed. 1998. The Stolen Children: Their Stories. Sydney: Random
House.
Bibliography • 207
Bishop, Rebecca. 2008. ‘Writing the Body Wild: Primatological Narrative

and Spaces of Animality’. Culture, Theory and Critique 49 (2): pp. 133–48.
Boehmer, Elleke and Stephen Morton, eds. 2010. Terror and the Postcolonial.
London: Blackwell.
Boehmer, Elleke. 2013. ‘Revisiting Resistance: Postcolonial Practice and the
Antecedents of Theory’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies,
ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 307–23.
Bob, Clifford. 2007. ‘ “Dalit Rights are Human Rights”: Caste Discrimination,
International Activism, and the Construction of a New Human Rights
Issue’. Human Rights Quarterly 29: pp. 167–93.
Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans.
Graham D. Burchell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bornstein, Erica and Peter Redfield, eds. 2011. Forces of Compassion:
Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe: School for
Advanced Research Press.
Borzaga, Michela. 2012 ‘Trauma in the Postcolony: Towards a New
Theoretical Approach’. In Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the
Contemporary South African Novel: Essays, ed. Ewald Mengel and Michela
Borzaga. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 65–92.
Bourne Taylor, Jenny. ‘Dominant, Residual, Emergent’. In Dictionary of
Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne. Blackwell Reference
online. <http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id= g97806
31207535_chunk_g97806312075357_ss1-23# citation>.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Brant Castellano, Marlene, Linda Archibald, and Mike DeGagné. 2011.
From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential
Schools. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Brewster, Anne. 1996. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Testimony. Sydney:
Sydney University Press.
Brockmeier, Jens and Donal A. Carbaugh. 2001. Narrative and
Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Studies in Narrative
1. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Broderick, Mick. 2010. ‘Mediating Genocide: Producing Digital Survivor
Testimony in Rwanda’. In Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives
of Suffering, ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. New York and
London: Routledge, pp. 215–44.
Brodzki, Bella. 2001. ‘Testimony’. Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Vol 2, ed.
Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 870–1.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary
Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, Duncan and Antjie Krog. 2011. ‘Creative Non-Fiction: A Con
versation’, Current Writing 23 (1): pp. 57–70.
Brydon, Diana. 2013. ‘Modes and Models of Postcolonial Cross-

Disciplinarity’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed.
Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 427–8.
Bugg, John. 2006. ‘The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s
Public Book Tour’, PMLA 121 (5): pp. 1424–42.
Buss, Helen. 2001. ‘Memoirs’. Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Vol. 2, ed.
Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 595–7.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London: Verso.
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2010. Who Sings the
Nation-State? Calcutta, India: Seagull Books.
Butler, Kelly Jean. 2013. Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony
and Memory in Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick and London:
Transaction Publishers.
Byrd, Jodi A. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Byrd, Jodi A. and Michael Rothberg. 2011. ‘Between Subalterneity and
Indigeneity’. Interventions 13 (1): pp. 1–12.
Campbell, Bob. 2000. The Taming of the Gorillas. London: Minerva.
Campbell, Maria. 1973. Halfbreed. Toronto: McClelland.
Carretta, Vincent. 2005. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made
Man. New York: Penguin Books.
Carter, David, ed. 2004. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s
Intellectual Life. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Castejon, Vanessa. 2010. ‘Identity and Identification: Aboriginality from the
Spanish Civil War to the French Ghettos’. In Passionate Histories: Myth,
Memory and Indigenous Australia, ed. Frances Peters-Little, Anne
Curthoys, and John Docker. Canberra: ANU E-Press, pp. 219–28.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted
Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cheah, Peng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human
Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2006. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage.
Chrisjohn, Roland, Sherri Young, with Michael Maraun. 1997. The Circle
Game. Penticton BC: Theytus Books Ltd.
Clendinnen, Inga. 2000. Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir. Melbourne: The Text
Publishing Company.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 1999. Disgrace. London: Vintage.

Coetzee, J. M. 2010. ‘Focus’. In Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,
and J. M. Coetzee, William Kentridge. London: Phaidon Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 2011. Scenes from Provincial Life. North Sydney: Vintage.
Coleman, Daniel. 2006. White Civility: The Literary Project of English
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Coleman, Daniel. 2009. ‘From Contented Civility to Contending
Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility’. International Journal
of Canadian Studies 38: pp. 220–41.
Coleman, Deirdre, ed. 1999. Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two
Women’s Narratives of the 1790s. London: Leicester University Press.
Coleman, Deirdre. 2004. ‘Inscrutable History or Incurable Romanticism: Inga
Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers’. HEAT 8: pp. 201–13.
Coleman, Deirdre. 2005. Romantic Colonisation and British Anti-Slavery.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coleman, Dylan. 2012. Mazin Grace. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Coleman, Patrick. 2008. ‘Introduction’. In Confessions by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, trans. Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Comaroff, Jean. 2005. ‘The End of History, Again? Pursuing the Past in
the Postcolony’. In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 125–44.
Conrad Joseph. 2007 [1902]. ‘Heart of Darkness’. In Heart of Darkness,
The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Works on Empire, ed. David
Damrosch. New York: Pearson Longman.
Cooppan, Vilashini. 2012. ‘Affecting Politics: Post-Apartheid Fiction
and the Limits of Trauma’. In Trauma, Memory and Narrative in the
Contemporary South African Novel, ed. Ewald Mengel and Michale
Borzaga. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 47–64.
Cooppan, Vilashini. 2013a. ‘Net Work: Area Studies, Comparison, and
Connectivity’. PMLA 128 (3): pp. 615–21.
Cooppan, Vilashini. 2013b. ‘Codes for World Literature: Network Theory
and the Field Imaginary’. In Approaches to World Literature, ed. Joachim
Kupper. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 103–20.
Copway, George. 1847. The Life, History, and Travels, of Kah-ge-gah-bowh
(George Copway), a young Indian chief of the Ojebwa nation, a convert
to the Christian faith, and a missionary to his people for twelve years.
Albany: Weed and Parsons. <https://archive.org/details/lifehistory
andt00copwgoog>.
Coullie, Judith. 2007. ‘Remembering to Forget: Testimony, Collective
Memory and the Genesis of the ‘New’ South African Nation in Country
of My Skull’. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 19
(2): pp. 123–43.
Coullie, J. L., S. Meyer, T. H. Ngwenya, and T. Olver. 2006. Selves in Question:

Interviews on Southern African Autobiography: Writing Past Colonialism.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Coundouriotis, Eleni. 2010. ‘The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem
of Arrested Historicization’. Journal of Human Rights 9 (2): pp.
191–206.
Couser, G. Thomas. 2012. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Crais, Clifton and Pamela Scully. 2009. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot
Venus. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds.
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crosby, Alison. 2006. ‘The Boundaries of Belonging: Refections on
Migration Policies into the 21st Century’. Inter Pares Occasional Paper
7 (June). <http://www.interpares.ca/en/publications/pdf/boundaries_of_
belonging.pdf>. Accessed 14 July 2013.
Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah. 1999. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of
Slavery. London, 1791. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton
Unversity Press.
Damrosch, David. 2009. Teaching World Literature. New York: MLA.
Danticat, Edwidge. 2007. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Vintage Books.
Davies, Tony. 2008. Humanism. London: Routledge.
Dawes, James. 2007. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Deb, Nilanjana. 2006. ‘Reading Australian Texts in India: Some Problems’.
Crossings 10 (3). Online. <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20060803-
0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_1/indexee54.html?apply=india_b>.
de Kock, Leon. 2001. ‘Introduction: South Africa in the Global Imaginary’.
Poetics Today. Special issue on South Africa: South Africa in the Global
Imaginary, ed. Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlehem, and Sonja Laden. Duke
University Press, 22 (2): pp. 263–98.
de la Bédoyère, Camilla. 2005. No One Loved Gorillas More. Dian
Fossey: Letters from the Mist. Washington, DC: National Geographic.
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. The Instant of My Death. Demeure: Fiction and
Testimony. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dhawan, Nikita and Shalini Randiera. 2013. ‘Perspectives on Globalization
and Subalternity’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed.
Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 559–86.
Didur, Jill. 2009. ‘A Review of Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary
Project of English Canada’. International Journal of Canadian Studies
38: pp. 191–5.
Dimock, Wai Chee. 2007. ‘Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge’.

PMLA 2 (5): pp. 1377–88.
Dlamini, Jacob. 2009. Native Nostalgia. Auckland Park: Jacana Media Pty Ltd.
Docker, John. 1998. ‘Recasting Sally Morgan’s My Place: The Fictionality of
Identity and the Phenomenology of the Converso’. Humanities Research
1: pp. 3–22.
Dolah, Sarah Nilsson and Jean-Pierre Karegeye. 2012. ‘The International
Community in Child Soldier Narratives’. Peace Review 24 (3): pp. 320–4.
Dortins, Emma. 2009. ‘The Many Truths of Bennelong’s Tragedy’. Abor
iginal History 33: pp. 53–76. <http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/
view/ Aboriginal+History+Volume+33/9921/ch03.html#toc_marker-8>.
Accessed 18 November 2013.
Drake-Brockman, Judith. 2001. Wongi Wongi. Victoria Park, WA: Hesperian
Press.
Driver, Dorothy. 2000. ‘Afterword’ to Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story. New
York: The Feminist Press.
Egan, Susanna. 2011. Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in
Autobiography. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Eggers, Dave. 2006. What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino
Achak Deng. London: Penguin Books.
Eggers, Dave. 2007. ‘It Was Just Boys Walking’. The Guardian, 26 May. Online.
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/26/featuresreviews.
guardianreview29>.
Eigenbrod, Renate. 2012. ‘The “Look of Recognition”: Transcultural
Circulation of Trauma in Indigenous Texts’. Canadian Literature 215
(winter): pp. 16–32.
Elliott Clarke, George. 2009a. ‘ “How White Are Your Whites?” A Response
to Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English
Canada’. International Journal of Canadian Studies 38: pp. 207–19.
Elliott Clarke, George. 2009b. ‘Review of White Civility’. University of
Toronto Quarterly 78 (1). <http://www.muse.uq.edu.au/journals/univer
sity_of_ toronto_quarterly/v078/78.1.clark>.
Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African
Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Equiano, Olaudah. 2003 [1789]. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings,
ed. Vincent Carretta. [First published in London] New York: Penguin Books.
Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young. Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fanon, Franz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: First Evergreen
Black Cat Edition.
Farrier, David. 2011. Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Farrier, David and Patricia Tuitt. 2013. ‘Beyond Biopolitics: Agamben,

Asylum, and Postcolonial Critique’. In The Oxford Handbook of
Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp. 253–70.
Fedigan, Linda Marie. 2001. ‘The Paradox of Feminist Primatology: The
Goddess’s Discipline?’ In Feminism in Twentieth Century Science,
Technology and Medicine, ed. Angela N. H. Crenger, Elizabeth Lunbeck,
and Londa Schiebirger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 46–72.
Fee, Margery. 2009. ‘White Civility and Aboriginal Law/Epistemology’.
International Journal of Canadian Studies 38: pp. 197–205.
Fee, Margery. 2012. ‘The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’.
Canadian Literature 215 (winter): pp. 6–15.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and
London: Routledge.
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World
Order. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ferguson, Moira. 1992. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and
Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. New York: Routledge.
Ferguson, Moira. 1993. Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary
Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Ferguson, Moira, ed. 1997. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave,
Related by Herself. Revised edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Foley, Conor. 2008. The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War.
London: Verso.
Fossey, Dian. 2001 [1983]. Gorillas in the Mist. 1983. London: Phoenix.
Foucault, Michel. 1973. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction.
London: Penguin.
Fournier, Suzanne and Ernie Crey. 1998. Stolen From Our Embrace: The
Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal
Communities. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Fraser, Robert. 2008. Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the
Script. London: Routledge.
Frankenburg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social
Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge.
Freeland, Cynthia A. 2010. Portraits and Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frow, John. 1997. Time and Commodity: Essays in Cultural Theory and
Postmodernity. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press.
Frow, John. 2007. ‘ “Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You
Need”: Genre Theory Today’. PMLA 122 (5), pp. 1626–34.
Fullagar, Kate. 2008. ‘ “Savages that are come among us”: Mai, Bennelong,
and British Imperial Culture, 1774–1795’. The Eighteenth Century 49 (3): pp.
211–37.
Fullagar, Kate. 2009. ‘Bennelong in Britain’. Aboriginal History 33: pp. 31–51.
<http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Aboriginal+History+Vo
lume+33/9921/ch02.html#toc_marker-7>.
Gaertner, David. 2012. ‘ “Redress as Gift”: Historical Reparations and the
Logic of the Gift in Roy Miki’s Redress’. In Tracing the Lines: Reflections
on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki,
ed. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Larissa Lai, and Christopher Lee.
Vancouver: Talon Books.
Gajarawala, Toral Jatin. 2013. Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the
Crisis of Caste. New York: Fordham University Press.
Ganguly, Debjani. 2012. ‘Dalit Life Narratives’. In The Cambridge Companion
to Modern Indian Culture, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 142–62.
Ganguly, Debjani. 2014. This Thing Called the World: Novelization after 1989.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Garber, Marjorie. 2004. ‘Compassion’. In Compassion: The Culture
and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant. New York and
Garman, Anthea. 2007. ‘Antjie Krog and the Accumulation of “Media
Meta-Capital” ’. Current Writing 19 (2), pp. 1–23.
Garman, Anthea. 2010. ‘Global Resonance, Local Amplification: Antjie
Krog on a World Stage.’ Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 36
(1), pp. 187–200.
Gates, Henry Louis. 1987. Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Mentor.
Gelder, Ken. 2010. ‘Proximate Reading: Australian Literature in Transnational
Reading Frameworks’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian
Literature: JASAL (1447-8986): p. 1.
Gelder, Ken and Jane Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and
Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Publishing.
Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gibbons, Luke. 2003. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the
Colonial Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gikandi, Simon. 2010. ‘Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and
the Claims of Locality’. In Rerouting the Postcolonial, ed. Janet Wilson,
Christina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. London: Routledge,
pp. 22–35.
Gikandi, Simon. 2013. ‘The Fantasy of the Library’. PMLA 128 (1): pp. 9–20.
Gilligan, Chris and Carol Marley. 2010. ‘Migration and Divisions: Thoughts
on (Anti) Narrativity in Visual Representations of Mobile People.’ FQS 11
(2) Art. 32. Online. <http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/
article/view/1476/2981>. Accessed 14 July 2013.
Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Gingell, Susan with Jill Didur. 2009. ‘Author Meets Critic Forum on
Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada’.
International Journal of Canadian Studies 38: pp. 183–8.
Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan. 2003. Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey. 1988. Film. Dir. Michael
Apted. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Bryan Brown, Julie Harris. Universal
Pictures.
Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq.
London: Blackwell.
Gregory, Derek. 2010. ‘Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in
the Global War Prison’. In Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Elleke Boehmer
and Stephen Morton. London: Blackwell, pp. 55–98.
Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas,
Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grossman, Michèle. 2013. Entangled Subjects: Indigenous/Australian
Cross-Cultures of Talk, Text and Modernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Grossman, Michèle, Marcia Langton, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson,
eds. 2003. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous
Australians. Melbourne: MUP.
Haag, Oliver. 2014. ‘Becoming Privileged in Australia: Romany Europe,
Indigenous Australia and the Transformation of Race’. In Ngapartji
Ngapartji, In Turn, In Turn: Ego-Histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia,
ed. Vanessa Castejon, Anna Cole, Oliver Haag, and Karen Hughes.
Canberra: ANU E-Press.
Haddour, Azzedine, ed. 2006. The Fanon Reader. London: Pluto Press.
Haebich, Anna. 2000. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families,
1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Haig-Brown, Celia. 1993. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian
Residential School. Vancouver: Tillacum Library.
Hall, Catherine. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the
English Imagination, 1830–1867. London: Polity.
Hall, Catherine. 2012. Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Hanes, Stephanie. 2006. ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’. San Francisco Chronicle, 10

September. Online. <http://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/GORILLAS-IN-
OUR-MIDST-As-their-horrors-recede-2469837.php>. Accessed 15 July 2010.
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, a nd Self-Making
in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hassan, Salah D. and David Álvarez. 2013. ‘Baleful Postcoloniality’,
Biography 36 (1) (winter).
Hayes, Harold. 1991. The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey. London: Chatto &
Windus.
Healy, Chris. 2008. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: University of New South
Wales Press.
Heartfield, James. 2011. The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian
Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and
the Congo, 1836–1909. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hebing, Mirielle. 2009. ‘Refugee Stories in Britain: Narratives of Personal Experi
ences in a Network of Power Relations’. PhD diss., City University, London.
Heiss, Anita M. 2001. Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937.
Sydney: Scholastic.
Heiss, Anita M. 2003. Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous
Literature. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Heiss, Anita M. 2012. Am I Black Enough for You? Sydney: Bantam.
Heiss, Anita M. and Peter Minter, eds. 2008. Macquarie PEN Anthology of
Aboriginal Literature. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Henry, Yazir. 2012. ‘The Ethics and Morality of Witnessing: On the Politics of
Antjie Krog (Samuel’s) Country of My Skull’. In E. Mengel and M. Borzaga,
Trauma, Memory and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 107–42.
Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence.
New York: Basic Books.
Hesford, Wendy S. 2011. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions,
Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller, eds. 2011. Rites of Return: Diaspora
Poetics and the Politics of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hockley Youth Project. The Equiano Project. <http://www.equiano.org/culture_
club.html>. Accessed 18 November 2013.
Holden, Philip. 2011. ‘Postcolonial Auto/biography’. In The Cambridge History
of Postcolonial Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press and Cambridge Histories Online. Accessed 4 July 2012.

DOI:10.1017/CHOL9781107007017.006.
Holmes, Rachel. 2007. The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie
Baartman: Born 1789–Buried 2002. London: Bloomsbury.
Holmes, Richard. 1996. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.
London: Vintage.
Holt, Albert. 2001. Forcibly Removed. Broome, WA: Magabala Books.
Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End.
Hoy, Helen. 2001. How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in
Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Huddart, David. 2007. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography. London:
Routledge.
Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.
New York: Routledge.
Huggan, Graham. 2007. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism,
Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huggan, Graham. 2013a. Nature’s Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the
Television Age. London: Routledge.
Huggan, Graham, ed. 2013b. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin, 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature,
Animals, Environment. London: Routledge.
Huggins, Jackie. 1993. ‘Always Was Always Will Be’. Australian Historical
Studies 25 (100): pp. 459–64.
Hughes-D’Aeth, Tony. 2002. ‘Which Rabbit-Proof Fence? Empathy, Assimi
lation, Hollywood’. Australian Humanities Review 27 (September). <http://
www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2002/
hughesdaeth.html>. Accessed 25 September 2014.
Hulme, Peter. 2005. ‘Beyond the Straits: Postcolonial Allegories of the
Globe’. In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, pp. 41–61.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. 1989. The New Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Hunt, Lynn. 2007. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2013. ‘An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in
Congo’. In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura
Stoler. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 39–66.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Ishay, Micheline R. 2008. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times
to the Globalization Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jahme, Carole. 2000. Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution.
New York: Soho.
Jaine, Linda, ed. 1995. Residential Schools: The Stolen Years. Saskatoon:
University of Saskatchewan.
Jolly, Rosemary. 2010. Cultured Violence: Narrrative, Social Suffering,
and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Jose, Nicholas, ed. 2009. The Literature of Australia: An Anthology.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Kaplan, Caren. 1992. ‘Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and
Transnational Feminist Subjects’. In De/Colonizing the Subject: The
Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 115–38.
Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of
Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Karlin, Beth and Richard Matthew. 2012. ‘Kony 2012 and the Mediatization
of Child Soldiers’. Peace Review 24 (3): pp. 255–61.
Kearney, J. A. 2010. ‘The Representation of Child Soldiers in Contemporary
African Fiction’. Journal of Literary Studies 26 (1): pp. 67–94.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 1997. ‘The Narrator as Witness: Testimony, Trauma and
Narrative Form in My Place’. Meridian 16 (2): pp. 235–60.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 2011a. ‘An Australian Archive of Feelings’. Australian
Feminist Studies 26: pp. 257–79.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 2011b. ‘Indigenous Australian Arts of Return: Mediating
Perverse Archives’. In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of
Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 88–104.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 2012. ‘Humanity’s Footprint: Reading Rings of Saturn and
Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene Era’. Biography 35 (1): pp. 170–89.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 2013a. ‘Moving Testimony’. Unpublished paper.
Kennedy, Rosanne. 2013b. 'Soul Music Dreaming: The Sapphires, the 1960s
and Transnational Memory’, Memory Studies 6 (3): pp. 331–44.
King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative.
Toronto: Anansi.
Kirschling, Gregory. 2007. ‘Dave Eggers on What Is the What’,
Entertainment Weekly, online article, 28 October 2007 <http://www.
ew.com/ew/article/0,,20154178_2,00.html>.
Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. 1997. Social Suffering.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as
Process’. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. ‘Approaching Abjection’. In The Portable Kristeva,
ed. Kelly Oliver. 2nd edn. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.
229–47.
Krog, Antjie. 1998. Country of My Skull. Johannesburg: Random House.

Krog, Antjie. 2003. A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Random House.
Krog, Antjie. 2007. ‘Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of “I” ’. River
Teeth 8 (2): pp. 34–43, 128.
Krog, Antjie. 2009. Begging to Be Black. Cape Town: Random House Struik.
Krog, Antjie, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kpano Ratele. 2009. There Was This
Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu
Konile. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Krog, Antjie. 2013. Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. London: Seagull
Books.
Kumar, Raj. 2010. Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and
Identity. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan.
Kyser, Kristina. 2007. ‘George and Ruth: An Interview with George Elliott
Clarke about Writing and Ethics’. University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (3): pp.
861–73.
LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Langford, Ruby. 1998. Don’t Take Your Love to Town. Ringwood,
Victoria: Penguin.
Langton, Marcia. 2003. ‘Culture Wars’. In Blacklines: Contemporary
Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michèle Grossman,
Marcia Langton, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Melbourne: Melbourne
Laqueur, Thomas. 1989. ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’.
In The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 176–205.
Laqueur, Thomas. 2009. ‘Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in
the Making of “Humanity” ’. In Humanitarianism and Suffering: The
Mobilization of Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard Brown.
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–57.
Lathers, Marie. 2006. ‘Toward an Excremental Posthumanism: Primatology,
Women, and Waste’, Society and Animals 14 (4): pp. 417–36.
Leane, Jeanine. 2011. Purple Threads. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Lecker, Robert. 1995. The Canonization of English–Canadian Literature.
Concord, ON: Anansi Press.
Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans.
Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Levy, Anita. 1991. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender,
1832–1898. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lionnet, Françoise. 1995. Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature,
Identity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Liwanga, Roger-Claude. 2009. ‘Rape Makes it More Dangerous to be a

Woman than a Soldier in Times of War’. Cape Times 7 December: p. 9.
Loomba, Ania, ed. 2005. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Lutz, Catherine A. and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema, ed. Lucien Taylor.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McGonegal, Julie. 2009. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial
Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
McGregor, Liz and Sarah Nuttall. 2007. At Risk: Writing on and over the
Edge of South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Macintyre, Stuart and Anna Clark. 2003. The History Wars. Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press.
McKegney, Sam. 2013. ‘ “pain, pleasure, shame. Shame”: Masculine
Embodiment, Kinship and Indigenous Reterritorialization’. Canadian
Literature 216 (spring): pp. 12–34.
McKenna, Mark. 2002. Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History
of Place. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism,
and Dehistoricization’. Cultural Anthropology 11 (3): pp. 377–404.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism,
Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Mandela, Nelson. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom. London: Abacus.
Mandela, Nelson. 2010. Conversations With Myself. New York: Picador.
Mara, Wil. 2004. Dian Fossey among the Gorillas. New York: Scholastic/
Children’s Press.
Marcus, Laura. 1999. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory,
Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Martins, Catarina. 2011. ‘The Dangers of the Single Story: Child-Soldiers in
Literary Fiction and Film’. Childhood 18 (4): pp. 434–46.
Mathews, Tom. 1998. Light Shining through the Mist: A Photobiography of
Dian Fossey. Washington, DC: National Geographic.
Mathur, Ashok, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagné. 2011. Cultivating
Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity.
Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. London: W. W. Norton.
Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2002. ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’. Public Culture 14

(1) pp. 239–73.
Mbembe, Achille. 2008. ‘What is Postcolonial Thinking? An Interview
with Achille Mbembe’. Eurozine. Online. <http://www.eurozine.com/
articles/2008-01-09-mbembe-en.html>. Accessed 4 December 2013.
Medovarski, Andrea. 2014. ‘Roughing It in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna
Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black Diaspora’. Canadian
Literature 220 (spring): pp. 94–115.
Mellor, Doreen and Anna Haebich. 2002. Many Voices: Reflections on
Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation. Canberra: National Library
of Australia.
Melvern, Linda. 2006. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide.
London: Verso.
Mengel, Ewald and Michela Borzaga, eds. 2012. Trauma, Memory and
Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Michaels, Eric. 1988. ‘Para-Ethnography’, Art and Text 30 (September–
October): pp. 42–51.
Miller, J. R. 1996. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Milloy, John S. 1999. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and
the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: The University of
Manitoba Press.
Mitra, Reena and R. K. Dhawan. 2009. Sally Morgan’s ‘My Place’: A Critical
Study. New Delhi: Prestige Books.
Modjeska, Drusilla. 2000. ‘A Bitter Wind’. In Reconciliation: Essays on
Australian Reconciliation, ed. Michelle Grattan. Melbourne: Bookman
Press, pp. 158–64.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moodie, Susanna. 1988. Roughing It in the Bush, or Life in Canada, ed. Carl
Ballstadt. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2005a. ‘The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Roots and
Routes of Postcolonial Life-Writing’. A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 20 (2): pp.
155–69.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2005b. ‘Western Autobiography and Colonial
Discourse: The Case of Rousseau’s “Orientalism” ’. Social Identities 11 (4)
(July): pp. 301–14.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2009. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Cultural Politics and
Self-Representation. London: Routledge.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2013. ‘ “Baleful Postcoloniality” and Palestinian
Women’s Life Writing’. Biography 36 (1) (winter): pp. 51–70.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2008. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty

Matters. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees. London: Verso.
Morgan, Marlo. 1994. Mutant Message Down Under. New York:
Harper-Collins.
Morris, Rosalind C., ed. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the
History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morton, Stephen. 2013. ‘Violence, Law and Justice in the Colonial Present’.
In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 179–96.
Moss, Laura and Cynthia Sugars, eds. 2008. Canadian Literature in
English: Texts and Contexts. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada.
Moudileno, Lydie. 2009. ‘Returning Remains: Saartjie Baartman, or “The
Hottentot Venus” as Transnational Postcolonial Icon’. Forum for Modern
Language Studies 45 (2). doi:10.1093/fmls/cqp005. Accessed 13 August
2012.
Mount, Dana and Susie O’Brien. 2013. ‘Postcolonialism and the Environment’.
In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 521–39.
Mowat, Farley. 1987. Woman in the Mists: The Story of Dian Fossey and the
Mountain Gorillas of Africa. New York: Warner Books.
Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Muecke, Stephen. 1988. ‘Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive
Hypothesis’. Southerly 48 (4): pp. 405–18.
Nadin, Corinne J. 2002. Dian Fossey: At Home with the Giant Gorillas.
Brookfield, CT: Millbrook.
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families. 1997. Bringing Them Home: Report
of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from their Families. Sydney: HREOC.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2006. ‘Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as
Testimonio’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41 (2): pp. 83–100.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2009a. ‘Postcolonial Affects: Victim Life Narratives and
Human Rights in Contemporary India’. Postcolonial Text 5(4). Online.
<http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/1078>.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2009b. ‘Postcolonial “Testimonio”: Reading Aboriginal
Narratives’. In Reading Down Under, ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal.
New Delhi: SSP Publications.
Newell, Stephanie. 2006. West African Literatures: Ways of Reading.
Nienaber, Georgianne. 2006. Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey.

New York: iUniverse.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nixon, Rob. 2012. ‘Non-Fiction Booms, North and South: A Transatlantic
Perspective’. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
13 (1–2): pp. 29–49.
Nussbaum, Felicity. 1995. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology
in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Nuttall, Sarah. 1998. ‘Telling “Free” Stories? Memory and Democracy in
South African Autobiography since 1994’. In Negotiating the Past: The
Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee.
Cape Town: Oxford University Press, pp. 75–88.
Nuttall, Sarah. 2009. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on
Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Nyoongah, Janine Little. 1994. ‘Talking with Ruby Langford Ginibi’.
Australian Women’s Studies Resource. <http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/
talkingwithruby>. Accessed 28 September 2014.
Oboe, Annalisa. 2007. ‘The TRC Women’s Hearings as Performance and
Protest in the New South Africa’. Research in African Literatures 38
(3): pp. 60–76.
O’Connell, Sanjida. 2010. ‘Sisters under the Skin’. Review of Jahme. The
Guardian 10 June. Online. <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/
jun/10/scienceandnature>. Accessed 15 July 2010.
Oliver, Kelly. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Oliver, Kelly. 2002. The Portable Kristeva. 2nd edn. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Olsson, Kristina. 2013. Boy, Lost. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Parr Traill, Catherine. 1986. Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake
Plains, ed. Rupert Scheider. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Parr Traill, Catherine. 1997. The Backwoods of Canada, ed. Michael
A. Peterman. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London
and New York: Routledge.
Patton, Paul. 2010. Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Payne, Leigh A. 2008. Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth not Reconciliation
in Confessions of State Violence. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peterson, Dale. 2008. Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Phillips, Caryl. 2003. ‘Out of Africa’. The Guardian 22 February. Online.

<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/22/classics.chinu-
aachebe>. Accessed 15 July 2010.
Posel, Deborah and Graeme Simpson, eds. 2002. Commissioning the
Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous
Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. ‘The Governance of the Prior’. Interventions 13
(1): pp. 13–30.
Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner, eds. 2012. The Global and the
Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Prince, Mary. 2000. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave.
Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson. Revised edition. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press.
Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pugliese, Joseph. 2004. ‘Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality’.
Borderlands e-journal 1 (i).
Pugliese, Joseph. 2009. ‘Crisis Heterotopias and the Border Zones of the
Dead’. Continuum 23 (5): pp. 663–79.
Quinby, Lee. 1992. ‘The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology
of Ideographic Selfhood’. In De/Colonizing the Subject, ed. Sidonie Smith
and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Racine, Josiane and Jean Luc Racine. 1997. Viramma: Life of an Untouchable,
trans. Will Hobson. London: Verso.
Rak, Julie. 2004. ‘Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre
and Public Identity’. Genre 36 (Fall/Winter): pp. 305–26.
Read, Peter. 2000a. A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen
Generation. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Read, Peter. 2000b. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reed, Lucy. 2009. ‘Look On! “Silence: Rape in Congo.” ’ IntLawGrrls: Voices
on International Law, Policy, Practice. Online. <http://www.intlawgrrls.
com/2009/01/look-on-silence-rape-in-congo.html>. Accessed 15 July 2010.
Rees, Amanda. 2009. The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art
of Field Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Regan, Paulette. 2010. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential
Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC
Press.
Rege, Sharmila. 2013. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit
Women’s Testimonios. New Delhi: Zubaan Books.
Reynolds, Henry. 1999. Why Weren’t We Told? Ringwood, Vic: Penguin.

Riley, Denise. 2003. Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of the
Woman in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Roberts, Jessica. 2013. ‘Contested Testimonial: China Keitetsi’s Child
Soldier: Fighting for My Life’. Unpublished conference paper. Boston:
MLA.
Rosen, Sarah Maya and David Rosen. 2012. ‘Representing Child Soldiers in
Fiction and Film’. Peace Review 24 (3): pp. 305–12.
Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International
Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum.
Ross, Fiona. 2002. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. London: Pluto Press.
Rostan, Kim. 2007. ‘The Ethics of Infidelity in Country of My Skull’. Current
Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 19 (2): pp. 144–62.
Online. <http://currentwriting.ukzn.ac.za/index.php?option=com_con
tent&view=article&id=57:theeditors&catid=8:theeditors&Itemid=9>
and <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2007.96782.78>. Accessed 17
June 2012.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multi-directional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Rothberg, Michael. 2013. ‘Remembering Back. Cultural Memory, Colonial
Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies, ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 359–79.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2008. Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar.
Rowse, Tim. 1993. ‘Sally Morgan’s Kaftan’. Australian Historical Studies
25/100: pp. 465–8.
Rowse, Tim. 1994. After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Rudd, Kevin. 2008. ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’, February
13. Parliament House, Canberra, Prime Minister of Australia: Speeches.
<http://www.pm.gov.au/node/5952>. Accessed 30 November 2013.
Said, Edward W. 1994a. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward W. 1994b. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, Edward W. 1999. Out of Place: A Memoir. London: Granta Books.
Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Salih, Sara. 2004. The History of Mary Prince. London: Penguin Books.
Sancho, Ignatius. 1998. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African.
London, 1782. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Putnam.
Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge.
Sanders, Mark. 2007. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the

Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sangtin Writers. 2012. ‘Solidarity, Self-Critique, and Survival: Sangtin
Struggles with Fieldwork’. In The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in
our Time, ed. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner. New York: Columbia
Sangtin Writers Collective. 2006. Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought
and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Sangtin Writers Collective. 2009. ‘Still Playing With Fire’. Critical Asian
Studies 41 (3): pp. 429–45.
Sarkar, Bhaskar and Janet Walker, eds. 2010. Documentary Testimonies:
Global Archives of Suffering. New York and London: Routledge.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1968. ‘Preface’. In Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
New York: First Evergreen Black Cat Edition.
Scarry, Elaine. 2012. ‘Poetry Changed the World: Injury and the Ethics of
Reading’. Boston Review (July/August). Online. <http://www.boston-
review.net/poetry-arts-culture/poetry-changed-world-elaine-scarry>.
Accessed 7 August 2012.
Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated
Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schaller, George. 1964. The Year of the Gorilla. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Schultheis, Alexandra. 2008. ‘African Child Soldiers and Humanitarian
Consumption’. Peace Review 20 (1): pp. 31–40.
Seed, Patricia. 2013. ‘The Imperial Past: Spain and Portugal in the New
World’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham
Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91–106.
Sharpe, Jenny. 2003. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black
Women’s Lives. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press.
Sharpe, Joanne. 2013. ‘Africa’s Colonial Present: Development, Violence and
Postcolonial Security’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies,
ed. Graham Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 235–52.
Sharrad, Paul. 2010. ‘Seen through Other Eyes: Reconstructing Australian
Literature in India’. JASAL 10: pp. 1–15.
Shehadeh, Raja. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape.
New York: Scribner.
Shemak, April. 2011. Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial
Discourse. New York: Fordham University Press.
Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative
Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press.
Slipperjack, Ruby. 1987. Honour the Sun. Winnipeg: Pemmican.

Sliwinski, Sharon. 2011. Human Rights in Camera. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Smith, Adam. 2009. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Penguin
Books.
Smith, Keith Vincent. 2009. ‘Woollarawarre Bennelong: Rethinking the
Tragic Narrative’. Aboriginal History 33. <http://epress.anu.edu.au/
apps/bookworm/view/Aboriginal+History+Volume+33/9921/title.html>.
Accessed 18 November 2013.
Smith, Keith Vincent. 2013. ‘Woollarawarre Bennelong’, Dictionary of
Sydney. <http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/woollarawarre_bennelong>.
Accessed September 2014.
Smith, Sidonie. 1998. ‘Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance’.
In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia
Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 108–15.
Smith, Sidonie. 2012. ‘Narratives and Rights: Zlata’s Diary and the
Circulation of Stories of Ethnic Suffering’. In The Global and the
Intimate: Feminism in our Time, ed. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner.
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 168–85.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. 1992. De/Colonizing the Subject: The
Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide
for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd edn. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2012. ‘Witness or False Witness?: Metrics
of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in
First Person Testimony’. Biography 35 (4): pp. 590–625.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravotry. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural
Politics. New York: Methuen.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews,
Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. London and
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Circumfession’.
In Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter
Ruhe. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. ‘In Response: Looking Back, Looking
Forward’. In Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea,
ed. Rosalind Morris. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 227–36.
Srinivasan, Maria Preethi. 2008. ‘A Dalit and First Nations Canadian

Speak of the Women in Their Bones’. Indigenous Biography and
Autobiography: Aboriginal History 17, pp. 109–29.
Srinivasan, Maria Preethi. 2012. ‘Constructing Aboriginal and Dalit
Women’s Subjectivity and Making “Difference” Speak: An Illustration
through the Writings of Jackie Huggins, Kumud Pawde and Bama’.
Southerly 70 (3): pp. 95–115.
Stanley, Liz. 1992. The Auto/biographical I. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Sterling, Shirley. 1992. My Name is Seepeetza. Toronto: Douglas and
McIntyre.
Stoler, Laura Ann. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History
of Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Stoler, Laura Ann. 2013. ‘Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and
Empire’. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham
Huggan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39–68.
Stone Peters, Julie. 2012. ‘ “Literature,” the “Rights of Man,” and Narratives
of Atrocity: Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony’. In
Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth
Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. New York and
Sugars, Cynthia. 2014. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre
of Self-Invention. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Sugars, Cynthia and Gerry Turcotte, eds. 2009. Unsettled Remains: Canadian
Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier
University Press.
Suleri, Sara. 1992. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
Sutton, Peter. 2009. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the
End of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Swanson Goldberg, Elizabeth and Alexandra Schultheis Moore.
2012. Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature.
Szörény, Anna. 2006. ‘The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee
Coffee-table Books’. Visual Studies 21 (01): pp. 24–41.
Szörény, Anna. 2009. ‘Distanced Suffering: Photographed Suffering and
the Construction of White In/vulnerability’. Social Semiotics 19 (2):
pp. 93–109.
Tench, Watkin. 2009. Watkin Tench’s 1788: Comprising ‘A Narrative of the
Expedition to Botany Bay’ and ‘A Complete Account of the Settlement at
Port Jackson’, ed. Tim Flannery. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Thomas, Sue. 2005. ‘Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel
Cases Over The History of Mary Prince’. The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 3/2005, 40 (1): pp. 113–35.
Thomas, Sue. 2011. ‘New Information on Mary Prince in London’. Notes and
Queries 58 (1): pp. 82–5.
Thomas, Sue. 2014. Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the
Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures, 1804–1834. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Thomas, Tony. 2010. ‘My Place: A Betrayal of Trust’. Quadrant. 15 May. Online.
<https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2010/05/my-place-
fabricating-family-history/>. Accessed 28 November 2013.
Thompson, Allan, ed. 2007. The Media and the Rwanda Genocide.
London: Pluto.
Torchin, Leshu. 2012. Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film,
Video, and the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern
Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Torrington, Arthur, Tira McLean, Victoria Osborne, and Ian Gros
venor. 2007. Equiano: Enslavement, Resistance and Abolition.
Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. 7 vols. <http://
www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/victims_main_vol7.pdf>.
Accessed 8 January 2012.
Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and
Indigenous Peoples. 2nd edn. London: Zed Books.
Twidle, Hedley. 2012. ‘ “In a Country Where You Couldn’t Make this Shit
up”?: Literary Non-Fiction in South Africa’. Safundi: The Journal of South
African and American Studies 13 (1–2): pp. 5–28.
Twitchell, Elizabeth. 2011. ‘Dave Eggers’s What Is the What: Fictionalizing
Trauma in the Era of Misery Lit’. American Literature 83 (3): pp. 621–48.
Valmiki, Omprakash. 2003. Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, trans. Arun
Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press.
Van Rijswijk, Honni. 2014. ‘From Subjugation to Sovereignty: Re-Writing
the Aboriginal Child in Law’s Violent Imaginary’. Unpublished paper.
van Toorn, Penny. 1999. ‘Tactical History Business: The Ambivalent Politics
of Commodifying the Stolen Generations’. Southerly 59 (3–4): pp. 225–66.
van Toorn, Penny. 2006. Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal
Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.
Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Walder, Dennis. 2011. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and
Memory. New York and London: Routledge.
Walvin, James. 2007. ‘Equiano Then and Now’. In Equiano: Enslavement,

Resistance and Abolition, ed. Arthur Torrington et al. Birmingham:
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, pp. 12–21.
Watson, Julia. 2001. ‘Autoethnography’. In Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Vol. 1,
ed. Margaretta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 83–5.
Watson, Scott. 2011. ‘The “Human” as Referent Object? Humanitarianism as
Securitization’. Security Dialogue 42 (3): pp. 3–20.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire. London: Cassell.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2001. ‘In the Second Person: Narrative Transactions in
Stolen Generations Testimony’. Biography 24 (1): pp. 197–214.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2007. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2011a. ‘Embridry’. Profession 2011. New York: MLA.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2011b. ‘Remediating the Hoax.’ Australian Feminist
Studies 26: pp. 349–67.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2012. ‘Post-ing Lives’. Biography 35 (1) (winter): pp. v–xvi.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2013a. ‘Outside Country’. In Scenes of Reading: Is
Australian Literature a World Literature?, ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid
Rooney. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2013b. ‘Protection’. In Contesting the Humanities, ed.
Tony Bennett. Sydney: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Wicomb, Zoë. 1998. ‘Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of
Whiteness’. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and
Culture 4 (3): pp. 363–83.
Wicomb, Zoë. 2001, David's Story, afterword by Dorothy Driver.
New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
Wicomb, Zoë. 2005. ‘Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection
of the Postcolonial Author’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41(2):
pp. 144–55.
Williams, Randall. 2010. The Divided World: Human Rights and its Violence.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London:
New Left Books.
Wilson, Janet, Christina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. 2010.
Rerouting the Postcolonial. London: Routledge.
Wolfe, Cary, ed. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press.
Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of
Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London
and New York: Cassell.
Woolley, Agnes. 2014. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing

Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Young, Robert J. C. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West.
London: Routledge.
Young, Robert J. C. 2003. Post-Colonialism: A Very Short Introduction.
Young, Sandra. 2012. ‘Hospitality in a Postapartheid Archive: Reflections on
There Was This Goat and the Challenge of Alterity’. Research in African
Literatures 43 (2): pp. 115–37.
Younging, Gregory, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagné. 2011. Response,
Responsibility and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey.
Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. <www.refugeecouncil.org.au>.
Accessed 14 July 2013.
INDEX
abolitionism (of slavery) 7, 9–10, 16, constrained by gender or

19, 42, 44, 152, 187, 188 indigeneity 46, 61
contributes to modern delayed 188
testimony 201–2 of humanitarianism 110, 130
forms Victorian domestic opportunistic 41, 71
subjectivity 55 political 67, 80, 179, 181, 188
mimics slavery power relations 45, through self-exploitation 45,
49, 52–3 110, 128
aboriginality, see indigeneity subaltern 8, 39, 45
accountability 9, 160–1, 162, 179, 203 of testimony 6, 10, 67, 138, 143,
Achebe, Chinua 115 149, 153, 159, 169
activism Ahmed, Sara 6–7, 84–5, 143, 150–1,
abolitionist 143 169–70, 172, 173–4
Dalit 5, 157, 160 on economy of affect 7, 18, 22,
feminist 113, 159, 160 29, 84–5, 91, 110, 169–70,
humanitarian 25, 40–1, 94, 172–3, 189
107, 124, 130, 163, 168, 181, on fear 172–4, 181
188, 191 Akeley, Carl 118–19, 131n.9,
human rights 40, 147, 157, 160 133n.17
indigenous 159 alterity 61, 63
socio-political 2, 5, 6, 11, 44, 97, commodified 6, 191
113, 129, 147, 162, 204 amanuensis 20, 30, 45–6, 49, 51–2,
supported by testimony 16 87, 141, 146, 189, 193
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 191–2 Amiry, Suad 176, 198n.7
Adorno, Theodor 99–100, 177 Anderson Kay 26n.11, 29, 31
affect 19, 39, 70, 81–2, 88, 93–4, 121, Anderson, Linda 3
122, 132n.11, 137, 141, 143, 188 apartheid
crucial to witness 8, 68, 85, 146 ambiguities within 77–8
economy of 7, 18, 22, 29, 84–5, 91, as great world event 10, 76
110, 169–70, 172–3, 189 human rights violations by 76, 81
involved in civic formation 81, 150 legacies of 2
as loss and mourning 123, 124, political resistance to 2, 82, 87
125, 128 as structural violence 95
Agamben, Giorgio 195 see also literature, post-apartheid
on spaces of exception 185, 196 apology, national 141, 144, 147,
agency 25n.4, 44, 93, 109, 123, 124, 149, 150, 152, 153, 163, 164,
153, 180, 203 167n.36
232 • Index
Apted, Michael affect in 16, 24

Gorillas in the Mist (film) 124–5 audience evoked 193
introduces reflexivity 124 as civic duty 9, 81, 150
Ashcroft, Bill 202 embodied 181
asylum seekers, see refugees ethics of 25, 49, 82, 99, 101, 109,
Attenborough, David 131n.8 146, 189
Attwood, Bain 142 failure of 68, 69, 173, 190
Auerbach, Erich 177 through humanitarian
Australia, see Bennelong; discourse 21, 67
Port Jackson; My Place; as making relevant 169, 187
Stolen Generations narrative; performative 96, 103n.9
Tench, Captain Watkin in reconciliation 151
authenticity 3, 47, 140, 158, 203 self-consciousness in 54
metrics of 193, 199n.14, as transactional burden 8, 16, 19,
in testimony 20, 21, 67, 158, 192 40, 42, 163
from the unified autobiographical transformation through 96
subject 3, 191 benevolence, see humanitarianism
autobiography 65–6, 139–40, 191 Bennelong 8–9, 10, 27–33, 35, 41–2,
decolonized 3–4, 203 49, 50, 55, 58, 68, 76, 97
defined 3–4, 96 as cosmopolitan figure 27, 33, 41
distinguished from Berlant, Lauren 68, 142, 152
memoir 96–7, 120 Bhaba, Homi 5, 60, 62, 76, 180, 188
elicits empathy 17–19 on ‘the join’ 2, 5, 75, 91, 101, 180
indigenous 56, 58–63 on postcolonial time 61, 63
unsettled by testimony 4 on ‘unreconciled
autocriticism 102, 175, 178 narratives’ 63, 64n.1
defined 175 Bishop, Rebecca 122
autrebiography 78, 79, 80 Black Skin, White Masks, see
Fanon, Frantz
Baartman, Saartjie (Hottentot Black Words (database) 136–7, 138
Venus) 10, 35–43, 44–5, 46, Boehmer, Elleke 202
50, 68, 76, 92–3 Botany Bay, see Port Jackson
achieves limited Boyd, Jodi 137–8
self-determination 110 Boym, Svetlana 103n.2
biography of 36–7 Braidotti, Rosi 101, 122
as legal precedent 40, 201 Bringing Them Home (report), see
as post-apartheid icon 36, 37, 88 Stolen Generations narrative
refuses role of victimized subal- Brink, André 85
tern 39–40, 41, 45–6 Brodzki, Bella 142
scientific interest in 37–8, 42n.1 Brouillette, Sarah 191
seen as liminally human 37–40, 42 Burke, Edmund 24
spectacularization of 36–8, Busby, Cathy (installation artist) 144
432n.1, 49 Buss, Helen 96–7
Baucom, Ian 24, 44, 54, 61 Butler, Judith 116
bearing witness 17, 63, 79, 84, 94, 151, on precariousness and mourning
158, 171, 180 116, 122, 123
Index • 233
Butler, Kelly Jean 163 defined 2

Byrd, Jodi 153, 155 on memoir 97
pursues juxtapositions 63, 66,
Carretta, Vincent 25n.5, 26n.6, 80, 180
71, 202 on refugees 171–4
Casement, Roger 129 views presence of the past 61–2
Castejon, Vanessa 153–4
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 1, 3, 7, 63, 67, Dalits 5, 69, 155–6, 158, 159,
180, 204 162, 202
child removal 136, 137, 138, 140–2, activism of 5, 157, 160
144, 161 testimonial texts listed 157
elements in repudiation of 147–8 testimony accrues value 162
justification given for 145 see also Sangtin Writers
later classed as genocide 145 Collective
in My Place 146 Damrosch, David 137, 152–3
resistance to 145–6 on worldly books 137, 164n.3
Child Soldier trope 9, 190–1, 192, Danticat, Edwidge 185
193, 196, 199n.14 Brother I’m Dying 181–8
Clifford, James 108 Dawes, James 109, 193
Coetzee, J.M. 76, 79 ‘deaf listening’ 86, 89, 92, 94, 102,
autrebiography of 78, 79, 80 109, 110, 146
Disgrace 79, 88, 98, 100, 101 decolonization 2, 108
Lives of Animals 79 African 133n.17
Scenes from Provincial Life 78, 79 of autobiography 3–4
commodification 35–6, 38, 46–8, 49, via Deleuzian ethics 100
65, 86, 87, 112 by indigenous people 138, 144
and gifting 161, 162, 194 of the settler subject 151–2
postcolonial literature prone to 191 Deleuze, Giles 100–1, 106n.27
compassion fatigue 9, 44, 190 Derrida, Jacques 84, 132n.3
Congo 6, 69, 107–8, 111, 115, 116, Digit (gorilla) 122, 124, 126
117–18, 129 Dimock, Wai Chee
Congo Reform Association 113, 129 on remediation 118
Conrad, Joseph Disgrace, see Coetzee, J.M.
critique of humanitarianism 115 Dlamini, Jacob 77–8, 83, 163
Heart of Darkness 115–16 Dortins, Emma 33
Cooppan, Vilashini 88, 155 DRC (Democratic Republic of
Copway, George Congo), see Congo
(Kah-ge-g-gah-Bowh) 58–64 Driver, Dorothy 87–8
uses humanitarian discourse 58 ‘dying race’ trope 56, 122
presents collective view 58
Country of My Skull, see Krog, Antjie ecocriticism 108
Craps, Stef 12n.4, 149 Eggers, Dave 9, 181, 189, 192–6,
criticism, postcolonial 10, 24, 45, 48, 199n.14
50, 102, 186, 202 mythopoeic narration of 195–6
connects analysis and What is the What 192–7
praxis 160–1, 164, 203 Elliott Clarke, George 51, 53, 56, 63
234 • Index
emotions Fee, Margery 146, 163

in autobiography 140 Felman, Shoshana 169, 183, 187, 194
and the body 22, 29 feminism 2, 56n.1, 62, 79, 110–11,
in empathic witnessing 22, 24, 142 127, 159, 160
Enlightenment view of 5 activism 113, 159, 160
evoked by refugees 172 contributed to decolonization 4
as public cultural phenomena 6–7, on embodied subjectivity 122–3
152, 169 and film-making 111–12
in reconciliation 144 inadequate approach to
and testimony 7, 84, 138 non-western subjects 40, 41
see also affect and primatology 119, 120–1,
Enlightenment 1, 3, 10, 22, 23, 24, 25, 131n.10
41, 61, 62, 66–7, 69, 130, 204 Ferguson, Moira 49
originary site of autobiography 69 Fossey, Dian 107–10, 117–30
humanism of 5, 7, 16, 38 abused by militia 128
intellectuals of 37 active conservation 126
promotes individualism 4 biographical treatment of 127–8,
view of the emotions 5 135n.23
Eora (indigenous Australians) 27, 29, career influenced by technological
32, 33, 42 media 119
Equiano, Olaudah 4–5, 7, 10, 15–16, celebrity of 117, 124, 125, 126
25n.4, 49, 50, 94, 202–3 criticized for
authenticity and veracity in 20–21, anthropomorphism 131n.10
26n.6, 67–8 Gorillas in the Mist
entrepreneurship of 8, 15, 20, (film) 124–5, 126, 133n.17
45–6, 71 (memoir) 118, 119, 120,
paralleled with Tench 17–30 121–2, 123
presentation as domesticated legacy merchandise of 125
man 20, 28, 49, 55 murder of 124
rhetorical tactics of 7, 8, scientific status questioned 132n.11
18–20, 25n.5 sees gorillas as ‘civilized’ 120
understands humanitarianism is Foucault, Michel 127
fragile 22, 33, 35 Frankenberg, Ruth 61–2
useful to the abolition move- Freeland, Cynthia 25n.4
ment 16, 17, 18, 20 Frow, John 97, 162
Fullagar, Kate 31–2
Falconbridge, Anna Maria 23, 24,
26n.8, 54 Galdikas, Biruté 119, 125, 131n.10
Fanon, Frantz 1, 10n.1, 61, 67, 69, Garman, Anthea 104n.10
95, 103n.5, 161, 171, 180, Gelder, Ken 65
202, 204 geographies, imaginative 64, 164,
Black Skin White Masks 7, 172, 174 176–7, 178, 181, 182, 184, 185,
entanglement of colonizer and 189, 196, 197
colonized 161 gifting 30, 95, 117, 126, 193–4
on fear 172 and commodity 162, 194
Farrier, David 6, 12n.7, 170–1 incurs obligation 162, 194
Index • 235
of recognition 93, 120 report on Stolen Generations 2,

of stories 161–2 141, 147
of voice 193, 196 humanism 10, 42, 91, 115
Gikandi, Simon 171–3, 174, 178, challenged by
189, 191 post-humanism 80, 98
Gilmore, Leigh 188 distortions under colonialism 8,
Ginibi, Ruby Langford 165n.7 36, 180
Glissant, Édouard 184 ethics of recognition 7
Goodall, Jane 119, 125, 131n.10 limits of 100, 202, 204
gorilla girl 117–20, 121–7 new versions of 7, 10, 64, 80,
challenges species boundaries 128 98–9, 114, 130, 161,
limits of expression of 128–9 180, 202
gorillas 108, 110, 117–26 postcolonial 203
Gregory, Derek 63, 171, 196–7 humanitarianism 9, 42, 81, 161
Grossman, Michèle 140, 162 associated with
Grosz, Elizabeth 122 domesticity 55, 164
arbitrariness and fragility of 33,
habeas corpus 39, 40, 42n.2, 201 35, 45, 50
Hall, Catherine 54–5 enabled Others’
Haraway, Donna 119, 120–1, 122–3, self-representation 66–7
132n.13 expanded sympathetic
Harris, Wilson 184 compass 188
Hartman, Saidiya 9, 50, 55, 186 figure of the dead in 187–8
Hayes, Harold 128 limitations of spectatorship of 115
Healy, Chris 62 replicates colonial power relations
Heiss, Anita 139–40, 167n.37 10, 40, 49, 50, 52–3, 94
Henry, Yazir 9, 85–6, 104n.12 self-enhancing 40–1, 68
Hesford, Wendy 112 as tactic for
history appropriation 60, 204
as civic formation 62 Hunt, Lyn 23, 66
conflicts with testimony 138, 140 Hunt, Nancy Rose 115, 129
as durée 5, 49
as imaginative 178 identity 19, 62, 100, 154, 176, 178
Holocaust 92, 99–100, 137, 148, ‘African’ 25n.5, 106n.27
152, 153 celebrity 134n.19
Hottentot Venus, see Baartman, composite 97
Saartjie as constructed 103
Hoy, Helen 161 as contingent 175, 201
Huddart, David 102 Dalit 157
Huggan, Graham 3, 10n.1, 117, ethnic 55
133n.16, 143, 165n.11, 204 face as marker of 123
Huggins, Jackie 154, 156 gendered 55, 133n.17
Hulme, Peter 171, 173–4, 178, 186 historical 179
Human Rights and Equal human 38, 203
Opportunity Commission indigenous 60, 164n.1
(HREOC) national 150, 170
236 • Index
identity (Cont.) Krog, Antjie 75, 88, 89, 93, 97, 98,
political 89 99–102, 104n.10, 104n.11,
post-apartheid 83, 93 104n.23, 137
postcolonial 172 Change of Tongue, A 83
self- 66 Country of My Skull 76, 78, 79, 80,
slave 19 82–7, 90, 92, 96, 101
as victim 39 appropriates testimony 85–6
white 51, 86–7, 151–2 narrative positioning of 82–3
Indian residential schools 144, 145, blends memoir and testimony 98
147, 151–2, 161–3 rehabilitates whiteness 83, 87,
Indian Residential Schools Settlement 88–9, 93
Agreement 144; see also uses African traditions 10
Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (Canada) Langton, Marcia 139, 141, 150
Inquiry into the Stolen Generations on My Place and white guilt 139,
(Australia) 2, 141, 147, 163–4 146, 149
Interesting Narrative, see Equiano, Laqueur, Thomas 174
Olaudah Laub, Dori 103n.9
indigeneity 2, 16, 94, 149 Leakey, Louis 119, 121, 125, 132n.11
as discovery 140 life, grievable 114, 116, 123, 129,
in My Place 136, 152, 156, 166n.29 169, 203
theory of 137–8 life writing, postcolonial
transnationally resonant 152–6 autobiography distinguished
from 3, 69
Jackson, Lisa F. 115, 130n.4 complex fluid networks of
The Greatest Silence 110–13, textuality in 70
123–4 efficaciousness of 10, 69, 156
Jolly, Margaretta 3 entanglements important
Jolly, Rosemary 83, 85, 86, 104n.12 to 63, 164
on ‘cultured violence’ 9, 77, 80, 89 explored through testimonial
on ‘deaf listening’ 86, 89 narrative 10, 16
explores nature of being
Kah-ge-ga-Bowh, see human 47, 119–20
Copway, George indigenous 139–40, 161, 163
Kaplan, Caren 4, 106n.26, 177–8 individualization diminishes
Kennedy, Rosanne 141, 149, 163, 166 social critique 33
n.26, 169, 198 n.6, 199n.12 individualization through
Kentridge, William affect in 29
Ubu and the Truth Commission involved with
80, 83–4 self-constitution, 99
Konile, Mrs Notrose Nobomvu issues in reading 44
(witness at TRC) 9, 90–3 as a longue durée 5, 9, 49, 69, 70,
refuses discursive 71, 79, 96, 97, 109, 180, 188,
domestication 93–5 189, 196, 204
Kopytoff, Ivan 19, 46, 48 melancholy colonial Canadian 59
Kristeva, Julia 187 peritexts important for 20–1
Index • 237
post-apartheid 78 métissage 2, 4
prone to commodification 191 modernity 3, 4, 5, 22
as public heritage 62–3 colonial 5, 6, 7, 10, 16–17, 25, 36,
varieties of 3, 5, 17 38, 40, 44, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55,
Lionnet, Françoise 4, 202 56, 61, 63
literature defined 4, 10n.3
contributes to humanistic western 5, 22
thought 17 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 41,
hosts testimony 82–4, 169, 180, 159, 160
181, 184, 189, 194, 195, 201 Moodie, John Dunbar 51, 52, 53
post-apartheid 36, 83 Moodie, Susanna 49, 51–7, 61
ambiguous view of anxiety of liminality of 53,
apartheid 77–8 55–6, 61
challenges the TRC Roughing It as displaced slave
orthodoxies 78 narrative 63
cultured violence in 89, 99–100 social circle in Upper Canada 53
as literature of affect 88 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 3, 4, 65, 66,
seeks national renewal 84, 101, 140, 198n.6
102, 150 Morel, E.D. 129
uses colonial history 87 Moretti, Franco 5–6, 12n.6, 170
whiteness in 86–7 Morgan, Sally, see My Place
settler 60, 136, 137, 140, 146, 149, 161 Moss, Laura 62–3
Little Children Are Sacred Mowat, Farley
report 163–4 Woman in the Mists 127–8
Lost Boys trope 9, 190–1, 192, 195, Mukherjee, Arun Prabha 158
196, 199n.14 My Place (Sally Morgan) 136–7, 152,
154, 155
Macaulay, Thomas 55 assuages white guilt 139, 146, 149
Macaulay, Zachary authenticity questioned 140, 165n.10
(abolitionist) 44, 55 discovers Aboriginality 156
MacDougall, David 123–4 focuses debate on reading
Mai, see Omai indigeneity 139–40, 161
Malkki, Liisa 179–80, 181, 192, 198n.9 initiated Stolen Generations
Mamdami, Mahmood 114–15 narratives 138
Mandela, Nelson 78, 83, 98, 195, read as testimonial
202, 203 narrative 141–2, 146
Maracle, Brian 63 reception of 139–40, 146
marriage 56n.1 translations of 137
Mauss, Marcel 162, 194
Mbembe, Achille 7, 63, 67, 99, Nagar, Richa 159, 160
180, 201 narrative, Dalit 155–60
memoir 96–7, 120 campaign to publicize 155
settler 151–2 status from international
memory acceptance 159, 162
as cultural 138 transnational
studies 149 emplacement 159–60, 162
238 • Index
Narrative of the Expedition to asserts textual materiality 6, 71

Botany Bay, A, see Tench, critiques humanism 7, 10, 66–7
Captain Watkin ignores refugees 6, 170–1
narrative key concepts in 174
postcolonial, see life-writing, and life-writing 1, 3
postcolonial and Marxism 167n.35
slave 1, 3, 4, 10, 15, 19, 20, 21, 23, as moral crusade 171
25, 48, 50, 63, 67, 87, 94, 143, reading 5
168, 185–7, 188 repudiates the Enlightenment
affects status of author 48 self 67, 203
collective voice of 5 sees present through past 61,
contributes to modern 63, 70–1
testimony 201–2 theory of 2, 3, 63–4, 175
corporeal testimony in 186 vocabulary of 172, 173, 174, 177,
differently gendered 45–6 196, 198n.9, 204
testimonial, see testimony as world-changing 2, 10
nation see also criticism, postcolonial
resisted by indigenous writing 161 Povinelli, Elizabeth 9, 143
National Geographic franchise 119, Prince, Mary 10, 44–50, 52–4,
124, 125, 131n.10 55, 63, 67
Native Nostalgia, see Dlamini, Jacob agency through
Newell, Stephanie 105n.23 self-exploitation 110
Nienaber, Georgianne 128 as articulate antagonist 45, 50, 93
Nixon, Rob 63 as asylum seeker 63, 202
‘noble savage’ trope 56, 60 body
nostalgia 77–8, 83, 103n.2 as evidence 48–50, 147
Nuttall, Sarah 78, 80, 103n.5 spectacularized 48–9
claims authenticity and truth 67
Omai (Pacific Islander) 30–1 rhetorical tactics of 9, 45, 52
orientalism, see Said, Edward, on Pringle, Thomas 48, 51
orientalism proximate reading 2, 4, 5, 22, 23, 24,
65, 69, 137
Parker, Mary Ann 23, 24, 54 defined 65
Parry, Benita 8, 12n.8, 12n.9, 41, Pugliesi, Joseph 186
167n.35
Patton, Paul 101, 105n.24, 105n.25, Quinby, Lee 97
106n.27
penal settlement 5, 15, 16, 17, 28, 32, 33 racism 7, 103n.5, 108, 153
arousing sympathy 23 in colonialism 180
Peterson, Dale 128 My Place assuaging guilt from 139
Phillip, Governor Arthur 27, 31 scientific 37, 94
Phillips, Caryl 115 Rak, Julie 97
Port Jackson (Australia) 5, 15, 21–4, rape, see warfare, rape
26n.8, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 41, reading
62, 139 contrapuntal 2, 177, 184, 195, 196
postcolonialism 1, 2, 3, 130 proximate 2, 4, 5, 22, 23, 24, 65, 69, 137
Index • 239
rescue 160 defines autonomous

suspicious 140, 147, 158 identity 65–6, 67
transnational 137 Rushdie, Salman
recognition 9, 12n.10, 21–22, 114, 129 The Satanic Verses 100
as agent of oppression 10 Rwanda 108, 109, 111, 114, 117
cunning of 9, 143, 149
elicited by testimony 138 Said, Edward 103n.5, 168, 171, 174,
ethics of 81 195, 196
exhaustion of 101, 138 on contrapuntal reading 177,
interspecies 120 195, 196
limitation of its on exile 177–8, 181, 198n.8
benevolence 45, 174 on imaginative geographies 176–7,
politics of 50 178, 185
refugees 2, 6, 40, 63, 69, 108, 130, on orientalism 7, 176, 189
138, 168–175, 177–91, 192–3, Out of Place 175–8
194, 195–7, 201, 202 Salih, Sara 47, 63, 201, 202
contrasted with exiles 177, 198n.8 Samuels, Antjie 85, 96, 102
defined 198n.2 Sanders, Mark 78–9, 84, 103n.6
inspire fear and terror 173, Sangtin Writers Collective
181, 197 (Dalit) 159–61
invisibility of 172–3, 174, 177, 187 transnational strategy of 159
processing of 182–4 Sanwekwe (Congolese tracker) 118,
produce affective response 172–3 133n.17
as socially dead 173, 180, 188, 202 Sartre, Jean-Paul
and testimony 168–9 on contradictory
Regan, Paulette 151 colonialism 180, 189
residential schools, see Indian Schaffer, Kay 3, 76, 141, 156,
residential schools 165n.7, 179
rights Schaller, George 118, 133n.17
animal 108, 117 The Year of the Gorilla 118
human 16, 22, 23, 38–40, 69, 81, Scott, Ridley 133n.19
108, 129, 143, 192, 203–4 selfhood 3, 97, 126, 203
Dalit recognition campaign 155 settler-colonialism 1, 10
discourse 109, 164, 179, 188 Cape Colony 52, 83, 98
documentation for 175, 177–8, displaces indigenes 35,
183–4, 187, 197 59–60, 98, 99
international regime of 76 legacies of 142
intersect with animal reconciliation in 163
rights 117–18 shame 7, 9
violations of 81, 90, 112, 156, community renewal
157, 179 through 150–2
property 60 involves self-recognition151–2
romanticism 3, 29, 54, 60, 79, 178, 203 mobilized by testimony 168,
Rothberg, Michael 99, 153, 163 179, 193
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4–5, 37, 67–9, national 102, 150
192, 198 n.6 Sharpe, Jenny 45, 48, 49
240 • Index
Shehadeh, Raja 176 Inquiry into 2, 141, 147, 163–4

slavery 1, 2, 4, 10, 44, 76, 137, 145, 185 Stoler, Anna Laura 17
bodily evidence of 48–9 Stanley, Liz 72n.2
commodification within 19, 22, storytelling, humanitarian 112, 114,
38, 46–8 116, 118, 129
evolving status within 47–8 critiqued 110
paralleled to indigenous defined 109
dispossession 145 haunted by theft and hoax 193
Sliwinski, Sharon 113 limited agency of 110, 113, 179–80
Smith, Adam 12n.8, 22, 39 mobilizes shame 179
impartial spectator theory 24, 26n.9 trauma in 114, 116
Smith, K.V. 66, 71n.1 Strickland, Susanna, see Moodie,
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, see Tuhiwai Susanna
Smith, Linda Sugars, Cynthia 62–3
Smith, Sidonie 3, 44, 65, 71n.1, 76, subalternity 6, 7–8, 40–1, 45,
105n.22, 140, 141, 160, 165n.7, 50, 67, 68, 95, 110, 143, 149,
179, 193, 199n.13, 199n.14 171, 203
South Africa, see apartheid; lit- refugees as the new subalterns 171
erature, post-apartheid; subjectivity, peripatetic 176, 198n.6
Truth and Reconciliation Sydney Cove, see Port Jackson
Commission (TRC)
(South Africa) Tench, Captain Watkin 15–17, 21–24,
species boundaries 99, 114, 116–17, 27, 28–30, 31, 32, 33n.2, 42, 58,
121, 124, 131n.8, 133n.15 68, 97, 202
breached by compassion 117–19 appeal to humanitarianism
challenged by the grievable life 123 21, 23
collapse under violence 116, 203 ethnographic interest of 28–9
critiqued by Coetzee 80 narrating position of 21, 24
dissolved by mourning and loss 122 testimony 1, 2, 4, 67, 100
popular culture technology accrues value 18, 65, 76, 110, 117,
undermines 123 142, 143, 147, 149, 153, 159,
required by the humanist 162, 164, 191, 192
self 37, 101 affect in 7, 152, 169
recognition across 120, 122 agency of 5, 138, 143, 149, 153
Saartjie Baartman a test case audience expectations of 190
for 37–8 constraints on 170
testimony challenges 95 contingent liminality of 10, 16–17,
Spivak, Gayatri 7–8, 12n.8, 40–1, 25, 94–5, 149, 187, 195
43n.3, 67, 68, 164n.3 contrasted with memoir 97
Srinivasan, Maria Preethi 155–6, 159 corporeal 186
Stanley, Liz 72n.2 drivers of efficacy of 147–8
Stolen Generations narrative 5, 69, fluctuating aftermath of 75–6, 191
138, 142–4, 146, 148, 149–50, formative not reflective 143
152, 153, 161, 163–4, 165n.10 fragile effects of 8, 9, 10, 17, 23,
Bringing Them Home (report) 141, 142, 143, 170, 190, 194, 203
147, 152, 153, 163, 165n.10 grounded in the political 142
Index • 241
hosted by literature 82–4, 169, 180, Truth and Reconciliation

181, 184, 189, 194, 195, 197 Commission (TRC)
in the national interest 149–50 (Canada) 144, 151, 152, 162–3
needs to be domesticated 90–1 effects of 145
performativity of 8, 83, 190 (South Africa) 2, 5, 9, 68–9,
present tense of 5, 75, 193 75–102, 104n.15, 108
as process of becoming 94 accepts multiple truths 149
problematic sociability of 69, 71n.1 aftermaths of 76–102, 143
speaks collectively 67–8 defined 103n.6
as speech act 169 formed collective memory 81
in transnational contexts 149, 152–5 healing agenda seen as
as valuable and efficacious 16, 18, coercive 86, 102
69, 84, 138 neglected structural conditions
theory, postcolonial, see in testimony 92
postcolonialism online archive of 81, 85, 90, 96
Thomas, Sue 46 subsumes testimony to master
There Was This Goat 9, 82, 90–3, 95, narrative 94
98, 101 ur texts of 76, 78–80, 82, 83, 85,
Torgovnick, Marianna 115–16 100, 102
tourism 108, 121, 126, 133n14 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda 105n.18, 138,
disaster 126, 134n.20 144, 161
ecotourism 126, 134n.20 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 85,
Traill, Catharine Parr 51, 60 89, 91, 98
transactions, testimonial, see
testimony ubuntu 81, 91, 99
transculturation 1, 4, 5, 12n.9, 32, 112 questions western humanism 83
transnationality 1, 4, 77, 108, 137,
149, 158, 160, 179 Valmiki, Omprakash 157–8
of influence 79 van Toorn, Penny 30, 141
of networks 2, 70, 80, 84,76, 102, violence
155, 162 cultured 77, 78, 80, 86, 89, 92, 96,
of public 78, 82, 85, 86, 159, 102, 109, 143
147, 179 gendered 107, 111, 115, 118, 127,
of readership 4, 137, 156, 159 129, 203
of relations 64
of witnessing 112, 159 Walvin, James 70
trauma 33, 67–8, 77–8, 91, 109, warfare, rape 108, 118, 127, 128–9,
118, 142 130, 130n.4
atavistic 146 feminist film on 110–15, 130n.4
cultures 154 humanitarian response to 107,
difficulty in narrating 112, 114 111, 114
framed in rights human rights violation 110,
discourses 109, 115 111, 112
historical 76, 93, 146, 188–9 impunity of 109, 111, 115
literature of 79–80 limited response to 2, 6, 69,
theory of 92, 100, 148–9 138, 203
242 • Index
warfare, rape (Cont.) Williams, Raymond 162, 193

perpetrators of 113–14 Windschuttle, Keith 146–7,
as structural violence 109, 111 165n.10
victims of 109, 110, 111 witness, bearing, see bearing
identified as a war crime 112 witness
war on terror 40, 171 Wollstonecraft, Mary 56n.1
Watson, Julia 3, 44, 65, 105n.22, 140, Women Make Movies collective 112
156, 160, 193, 199n.13, 199n.14 Woolley, Agnes 195
Weaver, Sigourney 124, 125, 134n.19
What is the What, see Eggers, Dave Young, Robert C. 1–2, 7, 8, 69, 150,
whiteness 83, 87, 93,151–2 171, 172, 178, 198n.9
Wicomb, Zoë 9, 36, 83, 86–7, 89, 96, Young, Sandra 91
102, 106n.28
David’s Story 87–8 Zaire, see Congo

(Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures) Gillian Whitlock-Postcolonial Life Narrative - Testimonial Transactions-Oxford University Press (2015)

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

(Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures) Gillian Whitlock-Postcolonial Life Narrative - Testimonial Transactions-Oxford University Press (2015)

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

OX FO R D S T U D I E S I N P O S TCO LO N I A L L I T E R AT U R E S

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures aim to offer stimulating

General Editor: Elleke Boehmer

The Indian English Novel

Pacific Islands Writing

West African Literatures

Postcolonial Poetry in English

This book was supported by a Discovery grant from the Australian

where I have presented my thinking on postcolonial life narra-

Fanon’s struggle to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the human—

. . . much of postcolonial theory is not so much about static ideas or practices as

With this emphasis on struggle and social activism in mind,

canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of self-

Late last century critical interventions under the broad rubric of

that speaks on behalf of a collective rather than the singular authori-

postcolonial life writing is shaped by this ebb and flow of social

provoke shame and aversion; however, these are changing currencies

‘but of the effects of cruelty and blindness produced by a certain

Literary testimonies are performative, rhetorical acts that ‘summon

contemporary testimonial literature this tradition of tactical engage-

testimonial cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Reading

dissemination and mediation of European modernity. See Ashcroft (2009)

different experiences and knowledges. However they have one thing

distant strangers, debates about empathic engagement with others

together emphasizes that the authority to write and give an account

I am sensible I ought to entreat your pardon for addressing to you a work so

The framing of the Narrative indicates the co-production of an auto-

appeal to ‘benevolence’, ‘suffering’, and ‘man’ invokes an ethics of

covers of almost all recent editions) that depicts Equiano in the

Both Tench and Equiano appeal to discourses of humanitari-

benevolence that was a product of Enlightenment modernity.

In Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) Anna Maria Falconbridge

Enlightenment political philosophy and theories of literary and vis-

of witness, and these generate the aesthetic and political value of

6. Ironically the debate about Equiano’s origins has been triggered by

In August 1796 at Sydney Cove the Australian indigenous man known

fragment amongst the voluminous memoirs from that first decade

The currency of Bennelong’s letter remains obscure—its addressee

thinking on race shared by the Atlantic networks Tench knows so

establishes Tench as a compelling First Fleet memoirist, in his own

South Pacific man by James Cook’s second expedition in 1774. Mai, as

indigenous Australians from lines of sight, and the lack of recogni-

Flannery, an authoritative figure in debates about how heritage is defined

By drawing different readings of Bennelong’s ‘Letter’ together in this

of Baartman—in biography and in fictional narratives such as Zoë

as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, both drawings and cartoons, are familiar

as unruly and grotesque or disciplined and ­normative—becomes a

To a contemplative and feeling man few things are so painful as to behold

Macaulay testifies to the act of viewing as a spectacle that degrades

writ of habeas corpus2 to be issued on Baartman’s ‘keepers’ and in

activism. ‘The Case of the Hottentot Venus’ also set a precedent in

of ‘enlightened compassion’ in testimonial transactions. The sym-

bear witness establishes bodies of evidence and lines of sight that

imprisonment the subject is ordered to be released (Rachel Holmes 2007,

In Spectres of the Atlantic, his cultural history of the Zong atrocity,

autobiographical representation can represent this, are critical issues

Herself’, to an amanuensis, and there is to date no portraiture or vis-

I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in

a succession of phases and changes in status through ongoing trade

deeply cut, or lacerated with gashes, by some instrument wielded by most

Here Prince’s body becomes a spectacle, exhibited in a testamentary

discussion of the scenes of subjection in American slave narrative,

In recent debates about ‘white civility’ and literary history in Canada,

as unruly and grotesque or disciplined and normative—becomes a