Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths

This is the first critical monograph to explore and delineatethe emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South.

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/Türkiye, the UK and beyond. Drawing on the intersecting fields of literary analysis, biopolitics, testimony studies, trauma theory and postcolonial 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 invokes a wide range of texts from within the nations studied and from diasporic writers. These include: eyewitness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; memoirs and autobiographies like François Bizot’s The Gate, Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father and Ajith Boyagoda’s re-told memoir, A Long Watch; Sanam Maher’s biography of the internet star Qandeel Baloch that exposes the truth technologies of the media; pseudonymous work that reconfigures the authorising identity of the witness; novels by diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Vaddey Ratner, Madeleine Thien and Anuk Arudpragasam; the posthumously published editorial of an assassinated journalist who anticipated his death; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events including Shehan Karunatilaka’s phantasmagoric novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida; and such works as Elif Shafak’s Honour, Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Shalimar the Clown.

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 mark a double agency that challenges multiple orthodoxies and shows how testimonial work from the Global South maps new moral communities by opening up alternative ways of reading truth, subjectivity, healing and justice.

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 Lanka’s Disappeared (forthcoming: 2022).