Preface —Decolonising testimony: on the possibilities and limits of witnessing

Abstract

When Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub published their foundational text, Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history, in 1992, they claimed that the twentieth century was 'the era of the witness'.2 They focused specifically on the Holocaust and the 'crises in witnessing' to emerge in its aftermath. In the past 20 years, witnessing has achieved broad international relevance for truth and reconciliation commissions and national inquiries - notably in contexts in which nations are reckoning with the legacies of a divided past. The late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century have therefore been marked by an unprecedented rise in the production and circulation of and demand for testimony. In contexts such as truth commissions, testimony functions to authenticate claims of historical injustice, it enables survivors to tell their stories, and it potentially engages the public as a collective witness to histories of violence. In 1996, for instance, personal testimonies of traumatic experiences played a formative role in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Indigenous Children from their Families and Communities and in the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. While personal testimony has brought hidden histories of violence and abuse into the public domain, in recent years, commissioners, participants, commentators, psychologists and cultural critics have become concerned with the limits as well as the possibilities of testimony. What are the effects of giving testimony on those who have suffered personally from traumatic events? Does giving testimony, as Rebecca Deviti and Adrian Stimson discuss in this issue, re-traumatise already vulnerable individuals, without necessarily providing justice? Under what conditions can the process of bearing witness contribute to a sense of relief and assist in a healing process, a moving on from the traumatic past? The aim of this issue is to explore the possibilities and hmits of testimony and witness in contexts of old and new imperialisms. This issue of Humanities Research, which explores a range of sites in which testimony is produced and consumed, joins other recent initiatives to move the field of trauma studies beyond its European origins.3 A particular feature of this issue is the gathering together of several essays that explore the forms and multiple dimensions of testimony and witness in the settler-colonial nations of Australia and Canada. Much of the recent work aimed at decolonising trauma studies is described as an initiative to bring post-colonial sites and texts into the field. We hesitate to use the term 'post-colonial' to describe nations such as Australia or Canada because these nations have not yet 'decolonised' their institutions and knowledge practices, although we recognize that the term can also connote an important shift in how the oppressive conditions of colonial relations are reconfigured by subsequent nation-building. Several of the essays in this issue, read together, illuminate the specific conditions under which testimony is gathered, framed and presented for witnessing publics in Australia and Canada - nations in which the national memory of settlement/dispossession is still in dispute. The essays reveal the subversive ways in which testimony can be used not only to document harms, but as a powerful strategy for decolonising national histories. They suggest that the testimonial arts promote an Indigenous cultural memory that is simultaneously a challenge to the nation to decolonise national memory. Another aim of this issue is to explore the role of literary and artistic practices in documenting and responding to the challenges posed by the call for testimony. As the following essays demonstrate, the field of testimonial studies is expanding to include artistic and literary practices and visual and textual modes of production in an effort to bear witness to violence. …