“The same spaces but…different worlds”: Witness-bearing and redefinitions of shared space

Abstract

This article considers what witnessing calls for when it addresses ongoing inequities or structural violence. It can be all too easy for well-meaning acts of witnessing to perpetuate inequities by reinforcing the authority of privileged witnesses to interpret the conditions they see and the space where the witnessing encounter takes place. I contend that bearing witness to inequity must include openness to the ways the subject (the person seen by the witness) defines the space of the encounter and how that definition might change the witness’s conception of their own role(s) and right(s) within that space. I advance this view through analysis of two texts that bear witness to post-transitional South Africa: Ivan Vladislavić’s 2006 book Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked and Sisonke Msimang and Lebogang Mashile’s 2015 lecture-performance With Friends Like These: The Politics of Friendship in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys shows how acts of witnessing can perpetuate violence when privileged witnesses retain the authority to define the spaces where the witnessing encounter occurs: to determine who and what those spaces are for, who belongs in them, and what functions they serve. Msimang and Mashile’s With Friends Like These reveals the potential for transformation caused by polyvocal challenges to normative accounts of existing social and physical spaces. Placing these two texts side by side exposes the stakes of the formulation of witnessing advanced here and shows some of the forms such redefinitions of space can take, illustrating what might seem like a fairly abstract ideal in real-world terms.