Abstract
Nonfictional witness narratives and literary testimony travel together. Although such accounts spring from diverse experiences, they increasingly take the form of neoliberal narratives of resilience and redemption. This essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid’s practice of literary witness contests this emerging norm in the humanitarian and philanthropic archive. Her autobiographical fiction refuses a script of suffering and overcoming as the basis for eliciting readerly empathy. Kincaid creates female protagonists who do not conform to gender norms, including selfless mothering, heterosexual virtue, and faith in Western-style education and empowerment. In so doing, she exposes the ambivalences with which testimony can be met when victims are not properly sympathetic. I argue that we should trace the itineraries of the ethical across nonfictional and fictional practices of witness in order to challenge the neoliberal requirement that all victims must tell the same story in order to be heard. (LG)
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