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Beyond Empathy: Reading, Bearing Witness, and Testimony
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- Author / Creator
- Lael Netzer, Orly
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“Beyond Empathy: Reading, Bearing Witness, and Testimony” is focused on the audiences of testimony, exploring the relational and ethical imperatives encompassed in audiences’ engagement with creative forms of testimonial accounts. Deeply rooted in colonial trajectories and grounded in confessional and judicial discourses of truth-telling, creative testimonies — from memoirs, to autobiographical poetry collections, documentaries, performance and art installations — communicate urgent accounts of injustice, invoking an ethical demand to bear witness, and a responsibility to carry testimony’s truth to effect socio-political change. In this dissertation, I examine what it means to bear witness to creative testimony, and the ways that audiences are called to do so; or, in other words, how audiences’ ethical responsibilities and political power are framed, mediated, and enacted. I interrogate the prevailing perspective that affective recognition and response fulfill the ethical demands and mobilize the political efficacies of creative testimonies, and argue that to honour the relational and ethical imperatives encompassed in such accounts requires pushing audiences beyond empathy.
To this end, I turn to autobiographical literature and art produced in Canada during the second decade of the 21st century. My attention to a particular moment and place emerges from identifying relationality as a defining trope in contemporary public debate, cultural production, and scholarly discourse in Canada. I identify the past decade as enthralled in a process where the communities who live on this land are exploring what it means to be in relation and are (re)considering their relations to one another, disrupting the shared imaginary of the humanitarian, multicultural or reconciliatory nation, and their responsibilities as citizens of the state. Weaving together the politics of national literature in Canada and the transactions of creative testimony in the public sphere, my project brings together work in autobiography studies with Indigenous, transnational, and settler perspective on literature in/about Canada, while also relying on research in reading, pedagogy, memory, and trauma studies. In so doing, the project draws attention to the power and responsibilities of both general and scholarly audiences, including the institutional and structural frameworks that are shaped by the politics of national literature, and which in turn direct the production, circulation, and consumption of testimony.
The structure of my dissertation is thus guided by a logic of mapping the problems or risks with current models of reading testimony, and identifying potential ways to move past them. The first two chapters contend with the colonial legacies and trajectories of recognition. They establish how the state’s politics of recognition and redress are mirrored in the prevalence of empathic modes of recognition which are situated as the desired ethical response to testimony’s demands, demonstrating that both the political and affective modes of recognition thus de-facto serve to entrench the very colonial structures that testimony protests. I conclude this section with an argument to urgently reframe reading testimony beyond audiences’ empathy, to refuse the politics and ethics of recognition and turn to feminist, Indigenous, and other culturally situated relational models. In the second half of the dissertation I explore how such models are enacted in literary and art-based testimony, proposing an approach to testimony through paratextual entry points. I argue that approaching audiences’ engagement through testimony’s material thresholds highlights its ethical demands beyond mere recognition, providing audiences with tangible strategies to account for implication in structures of oppression and foster response through an ethics and praxis of care, or, in other words, to move from reading to witnessing and foster right relations.
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2021
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.