Overview

This is the first critical monograph to explore and delineate the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South. Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey/Türkiye, the UK and beyond. Drawing on literary analysis, biopolitics, testimony studies, trauma theory and postcolonial studies, it examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; showing how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma. Ambitious in cultural and conceptual reach, Witness Literature invokes a range of texts from within the nations studied and diasporic writers: eyewitness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields; memoirs and autobiographies like François Bizot’s The Gate and Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father; Sanam Maher’s biography of the internet star Qandeel Baloch; pseudonymous work that reconfigures the authorising identity of the witness; novels by diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Vaddey Ratner and Anuk Arudpragasam; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events including Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida; and such works as Elif Shafak's Honour, Salman Rushdie's Shame and Shalimar the Clown. Offering a compelling and surprising analysis of the representation of life under the threat, Minoli Salgado exposes how the mixed cultural allegiances of the border witness mark a double agency that challenges multiple orthodoxies and shows how testimonial work from the Global South maps new moral communities by opening up alternative ways of reading truth, subjectivity, healing and justice.

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9781350318854

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Reviews

In Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths, Minoli Salgado takes on the urgent task of addressing the ethical complexities of bearing witness to extreme violence, focusing on three marginalized contexts: the Cambodian genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war, and contemporary “honour” killings across several countries. Through a rich tapestry of testimonial narratives from the Global South, ranging from survivor accounts and journalism to fiction and memoir, she challenges conventional, Western-centric understandings of trauma and truth-telling. Salgado’s critical intervention not only amplifies the voices of those silenced or ignored but also explores how literature can navigate cultural difference and expand our conceptions of subjectivity, justice, and healing. This ambitious and deeply insightful work makes an essential contribution to both trauma studies and postcolonial thought, proposing a more inclusive, ethically attuned framework for understanding global suffering. * Stef Craps, Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium; author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds *

Author Information

Minoli Salgado is Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her previous publications include the critical monograph, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2006), the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014) and a book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared (2022).

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