Cost of Testimony: Mediating and Marketing the Suffering of Distant Others

My project explores the aesthetics, ethics and politics of literary witnessing in five auto/biographical texts from the S-21 detention centre in Cambodia in relation to the politics of representation and the mediation of victims’ voices in witness literature from the cultural margins. It explores the role of ‘dark tourism’ and the cultural and political implications of marketing these texts at the site (where 14,000 people died and seven inmates survived) in relation to the discourse of ‘distant suffering’ presented by Luc Boltanski. I will analyse the ways in which the voices of victims are used to construct historical and evidentiary truth in the mediation of the ‘grand narrative’ of the Cambodian genocide explicitly for local and transnational consumption. I will then compare how this grey literature mediates the ‘little narratives’ of the victims to construct the official past with testimonial mediation and ventriloquy in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull and Matilde Mellibovsky’s Circle of Love over Death. This comparative, transnational critique will reveal the significance of affect and emotional truth in differentiating between intransitive and transitive testimonial texts as they work to create a space for public address, respons-ability and ethical repair.