Voice of the Witness

Prerequisites: Instructor’s permission is required for enrollment. Email mh2349@columbia.edu. The historian Annette Wievorka has called our age the “era of witness.” This course examines the emergence of testimony as a genre and a telling source of evidence in the aftermath of 20th and 21st century catastrophes.  Focusing comparatively on several key sites that illuminate theoretical and gender dimensions of testimony  – war, dictatorship and crimes against humanity as well as rape and sexual abuse – we will study acts of witness in oral history, memoirs, blogs, film, performance and in trials and truth commissions. We will also look at the memorial functions of testimony archives and the role of testimony in museums and memorials. Authors studied will include Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Susan Brison, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, Charlotte Delbo, Judith Lewis Herrman, Antje Krog, Claude Lanzmann, Primo Levi, François Lyotard, Rigoberta Menchú, Anna Deveare Smith, Art Spiegelman, among others.