Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths

(Hardback)

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This book is the first critical study to explore the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony. Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and the UK. Drawing on the intersecting fields of literary analysis, biopolitics, border aesthetics and testimony studies, this book examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma. Ambitious in cultural and conceptual reach, Witness Literature from the Border invokes a wide range of texts from within the nations studied and from diasporic writers. These include: eye witness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodias Killing Fields, Voices of Peace and Still Counting the Dead; memoirs and autobiographies like Loung Ungs First They Killed My Father, Niromi de Soyzas Tamil Tigress and Ajith Boyagodas memoir as told to Sunila Galappatti in A Long Watch; the graphic novel, Vanni; novels of diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatjes and Anuk Arudpragasam; the posthumously published editorial of Lasantha Wickrematunge, an assassinated writer who anticipated his death; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events Forbidden Love by Norma Khouris and Lene Wolds Inside an Honour Killing; and such works as Elif Shafaks Honour, Salman Rushdies Shame and Shalimar the Clown, Madeleine Thiens Dogs at the Perimeter and Francois Bizots The Gate. Offering a compelling and surprising analysis of the representation of life under the threat, Minoli Salgado exposes how the mixed cultural allegiances of the border witness marks a double agency that challenges multiple orthodoxies and marks storytelling as significant in mapping new moral communities.

Author Bio

Minoli Salgado is Professor of International Writing and Director of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy, UK. She is author of Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2007) and has over twenty peer-reviewed articles/chapters on postcolonial literature and theory published in journals. Her other fiction, short and nonfiction include A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), Broken Jaw (2019) and Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lankas Disappeared (forthcoming: 2022).