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After 9/11, the United States became a nation that sanctioned torture. Detainees across the globe were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten by guards, blasted with deafening music and forced into obscene acts. Their torture presents a profound problem for literature: torturous pain and its traumatic aftermath have long been held to destroy language, shatter experience, and refuse representation. Challenging accepted thinking, Gestures of Testimony asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures of a war waged against fear itself. Bringing the vibrant field of affect theory to bear on theories of torture and power, Richardson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show how testimony founded in affect can bear witness to torture and its traumas. Grounded in provocative readings of poems by Guantanamo detainees, memoirs of interrogators and detainees, contemporary films, the Bush Administration's Torture Memos, and fiction by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, Anne Michaels, and Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Richardson traces the workings of affect, biopower, and aesthetics to re-think literary testimony. Gestures of Testimony gives shape to a mode of affective witnessing, a reaching beyond the page in the writing of torture that reveals violent trauma - even as it embodies its veiling.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable
Chapter 1: Tortured Bodies
Chapter 2: Reading Torture
Chapter 3: Seeing Torture
Chapter 4: Writing Trauma
Chapter 5: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma
Chapter 6: Writing Torturous Affect
Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Michael Richardson is Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where he teaches media and communication. He co-edited the collection Traumatic Affect (2013) and his research has appeared in international journals. A former speechwriter, he also writes political commentary, reviews, and fiction.
Summary
After 9/11, the United States became a nation that sanctioned torture. Detainees across the globe were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten by guards, blasted with deafening music and forced into obscene acts. Their torture presents a profound problem for literature: torturous pain and its traumatic aftermath have long been held to destroy language, shatter experience, and refuse representation. Challenging accepted thinking, Gestures of Testimony asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures of a war waged against fear itself.
Bringing the vibrant field of affect theory to bear on theories of torture and power, Richardson adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show how testimony founded in affect can bear witness to torture and its traumas. Grounded in provocative readings of poems by Guantanamo detainees, memoirs of interrogators and detainees, contemporary films, the Bush Administration’s Torture Memos, and fiction by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, Anne Michaels, and Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Richardson traces the workings of affect, biopower, and aesthetics to re-think literary testimony. Gestures of Testimony gives shape to a mode of affective witnessing, a reaching beyond the page in the writing of torture that reveals violent trauma — even as it embodies its veiling.
Foreword
Brings together theories of affect, trauma and power to propose new practices of bearing literary witness to the torture of the war on terror.
Additional text
This study glosses poetry, memoirs, legal memoranda, photographs, and films to theorize torture in the war on terror and in literature. Drawing from theories of power, trauma, affect, and testimony, Richardson brings into dialogue analysis of the post-9/11 world with literary testimonies of torture from the twentieth century, including works by Franz Kafka, J. M. Coetzee, and George Orwell. Both “critique and manifesto,” the book seeks to demonstrate the belief of many human rights and literature scholars: fiction “can help achieve justice.
