Performances of Witness: Public Selves in the Age of Memory

Abstract

Performances of Witness: Public Selves in the Age of Memory asks an urgent question: How do contemporary artists and cultural consumers navigate the ethical complexities of witnessing representations of violence? Engaging with Trauma Studies, Performance Studies, and Visual Culture, I explore how artists and audiences respond to discursive norms about witnessing, which suggest that the viewer should experience inspiration, edification, or self-improvement from the act of witnessing. Drawing on texts that engage with histories of mass violence in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the American empire, I argue that such discursive norms risk sidelining the experiences of victims of violence and impose a false sense of closure on past events that continue to shape the present and future. Each of my three chapters focuses on a different visual medium: a play, documentary films, and performance artworks. I analyze how my featured texts both enable and thwart readers’ and viewers’ moral improvement or absolution through their acts of witnessing atrocity. At the same time, I show how the featured artists, directors, and creators often contravene their recognition of the unrepresentable past by enacting their own desires for resolution, catharsis, and mastery. I suggest that ethical approaches to witnessing should foreground the viewer’s lingering discomfort and uncertainty, rather than their edification or sense of transformation. In Chapter One, I compare Susan Sontag’s 1993 production of Waiting for Godot during the siege of Sarajevo and her 1968 reporting from Vietnam to show that her self-positioning as model witness and her writing on these two “television wars” articulate western desires for dominating, authoritative, and ultimately directorial engagements with global narratives of violence. In Chapter Two, I analyze Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries about the Indonesian genocide alongside Claude Lanzmann and Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust films, showing how the attempt to center perpetrators’ complicity is frequently refigured as an opportunity for both perpetrators’ and viewers’ moral edification. In Chapter Three, I focus on works of participatory art by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña and by Jordan Wolfson to argue that viewers’ desire for didactic address in museum contexts often gives way to contests of capacity: which viewers can best endure and understand the performance. Ultimately, Performances of Witness shows how cultural scripts for bearing witness often displace the voices of victims of mass violence by centering the edification of contemporary viewers. I suggest, instead, that the embrace of difficulty and discomfort in the act of witnessing helps to prevent a false, overly tidy sense of closure and opens possibilities for partial, imperfect, yet generative forms of solidarity among victims and viewers.