“‘I bear witness’—that means: ‘I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in
all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space
and time (thus, sense-perceptible), and although you do not have access
to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me,
because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged in
it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have to
believe me.'” – Jacques Derrida (“Poetics and Politics of Witnessing”
76)
Witnessing is more than seeing, more than recounting testimony. A
witness to an event is its participant, whether central or peripheral.
In its continuity, the act of witnessing carries us past the immediate
crisis of an event, into a post-event life. Processes of witnessing have
manifested as fluid, ongoing testimonies, conveyed through various
mediums such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, reports, and films,
among others. One could argue that at the core of these testimonies lies
what Nadine Gordimer describes in “Literary Witness in A World of
Terror: The Inward Testimony” (2009) as “the duality of inwardness and
the outside world” (Gordimer 68), the dual exploration of one’s inner
self and the external world, the quest to reconcile oneself with the
uncertainties inherent in evolving events and the imperative to conceive
new meanings of self-identity.
We invite papers that consider how testimony has been represented not
only as a form of documented eyewitness literature, but also as a
process that entails transformations, and encounters that elicit new
forms of becoming. By conjugating witnessing with becoming, we invite
you to move past the eventuality of crisis, to understand language as
irrevocably tied to the process of bearing witness, remaking itself
continuously against the possible threat of erasure, “as if it were
being invented at every step, and if it were burning immediately”
(Jacques Derrida The Post Card 11). Differing subjectivities,
selves, and life stories emerge in different environments. How might the
act of bearing witness to uncodified subjective experiences and
marginalized social realities challenge narratives of dominant power
structures?
To return to the temporal disconnect between the witnessed event and the
performance of testimony, becoming can take a similar form. To become
is to recognize the same temporal disconnect, to look backwards at what
once was, yet no longer remains. Becoming might be a reading of the
past, enacted in tandem with the witness’ attempt to reconstruct it,
which remains eternally out of reach. How do these two forms interact
with one another? How else might they intertwine?
As an interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a
variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, ethnography,
anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art
history, religious studies, and gender studies. We welcome papers
related (but not limited) to the following topics:
>
- Testimonial Literature
- Ethics of Bearing Witness
- Living & Writing
- Socio-political events in literature
- Performativity
- Transnationality & the Diaspora
- Queerness & Alterity
- Black Studies
- Indigeneity & Decolonial thought
- Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
- Language & Translation
- Temporality & the Self
Those who wish to participate in the conference should submit an
abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts
must be sent, as attachments, to utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com before December 1, 2023.
Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and
contact information. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.
Contact Information
Zichuan Gan, co-organizer
PhD student
Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
z.gan@mail.utoronto.ca
Contact Email
utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com
