On the Times and Places of Embodied Testimony: Remaking the World

ABSTRACT

This forum adopts a process-oriented approach to documenting material and online projects that nurture embodied knowledges for social justice. The contributors contemplate their involvement in collating refugee narratives online, participating in an academic workshop retreat, curating AIDS oral history archives, and pursuing decolonial directions for critical disability arts. They consider the power of embodied testimonies to enact social change by mobilizing memory, compassion, dissonance, anger, and desire, and by disrupting normative neoliberal boundaries of temporality, citizenship, and identity. Noting the essays' “thick” specificity in addressing particular eras, locations, and projects, the introduction argues that the contributors share a commitment to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has theorized as teleopoiesis: the work of “imaginative making” that seeks, from a distance, to create a just world.

Attending to the meeting point of lived embodiments and creative, activist, and pedagogical projects, this forum draws attention to new directions for collective witnessing. Despite neoliberal imperatives to prioritize a meritocratic vision of individual survival and success, and despite the pervasive delegitimizing of women's testimonies, the plural witnessing of testimonio continues to recompose itself in multiple times and places, as Leigh Gilmore elucidates in Tainted Witness (17; see also Ortiz-Vilarelle in this volume). Through their reflexive meditations on the multilayered, affectively charged place of the embodied self in scholarship, the contributors to this forum provide a fresh view of the forms, matrices, and institutional architectures of embodied testimony. Individually and as a set, these reflective, process-oriented essays exercise a certain “teleopoetic” force, enacting a temporal dynamic of social change evocatively described by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (referencing Jacques Derrida's The Politics of Friendship) that aims “to affect the distant [future or location] in a poiesis—an imaginative making—without guarantees” (31).

The forum opens with a multivoiced essay by Vinh Nguyen, Thy Phu, and Y-Dang Troeung exploring embodied narratives of the Southeast Asian refugee crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and their resonances in the contemporary. These authors recount how, in the form of a collaborative blog called Compassionate Canada, they put into circulation an assembly of personal and familial stories in order to intervene in a climate of “xenophobia and securitized borders” and of “compassion fatigue.” Situated at a moment of intense debate in 2015 over how Canada, as a nation, ought to respond to the unfolding crisis in Syria (and beyond), this project countered myths of Canadian generosity and refugee passivity or lack of credibility, showing, as the authors observe in their forum essay, that, “It is time to revive compassion as a political emotion that refugees elicit on their own behalf, for their own political purposes.” Resonating with Phanuel Antwi's call in his Reflection essay (featured earlier in this special issue) to reimagine embodiment as “social debt,” Nguyen, Phu, and Troeung consider how they and their fellow contributors to the blog endeavored to model a thick, complex form of solidarity, drawing on their horizontal connections to enact a critical and dynamic form of “activist citizenship” that “traverses” national borders, ethnicities, hemispheres, and historical times (Isin 148–50).

The next contributions to the forum think through what can be learned as a result of embodied proximities to stories and sites of injustice. Helene Strauss's essay brings into view the “chronopolitics of happiness” in South Africa in the larger context of the (global) corporate rationalization of the postapartheid body-politic and economy, including the higher-education sector. The opportunity to attend a faculty retreat at Emoyeni, a center located in the immediate vicinity of the Lonmin platinum-mine at Marikana, where in 2012 police shot and killed thirty-four striking workers, prompts Strauss and her fellow attendees to wonder about the limits of mindfulness as a practice of renewal for university instructors and administrators. Echoing Nguyen, Phu, and Troeung emphasis on compassion as conceived in Buddhist philosophy and as a necessary but not sufficient condition for social justice, Strauss maintains, however, that the experience of slowing down with others over several days of silent meditation at Emoyeni was not completely enfolded into the “truncated temporalities” of neoliberalism and the related “rush to restore” the veneer of national happiness. Then, in Ryan Conrad and Alexis Shotwell's discussion of Toronto-based activist Michael Smith's 1990 performance for video, entitled Person Livid with AIDS, we encounter a text from an earlier moment in the ongoing HIV|AIDS crisis. Interpreted through a queer-theory lens, Smith's body registers “a visceral sense of temporal and erotic dissonance” that can effect shifts in present and future possibilities (Freeman 14). Hearing, seeing, and feeling Smith's “living” and “livid” anger, Conrad and Shotwell suggest, can reanimate queer rage (e.g. against the criminalization of HIV) in the present. Conrad and Shotwell reflect on an archival project that deliberately preserves and circulates an ephemeral media artifact as part of the AIDS Oral History Project, whereas Strauss's story grapples with an unexpected nearness to a site of state-sanctioned violence, but they share a concern with how to interrupt national-progress narratives that are premised on historical amnesia, that assume justice for all bodies has been achieved.

The final two pieces bring the work of bearing pluralized witness into the realm of critical disability studies and artistic practice. Drawing on her own biography, and particularly on her experience of being read as normatively able and white, Rachel da Silva Gorman pushes against the tendency to conflate disability with visible physical impairment and to assume the whiteness of disabled selves and communities. Consonant with Dawn Shickluna's invitation to see the sensory, subjective, material, and epistemic dimensions of life writing as “significant in revolutionary praxis” (379), Gorman describes a search for modes adequate to an “anticolonial aesthetic” investigation of “embodied representations of war and political violence,” hence the multidisciplinarity of Gorman's work, which encompasses “dance theater” and “visual arts,” creation and curation, alongside academic research. Artist-scholar Eliza Chandler's reflections on “reworlding,” which conclude the forum, put an emphasis on the multiplicity and complexity of embodied difference and on how encounters with art can activate the critical imagination and a sense of possibility. For both Chandler and Gorman, sparks fly when decolonial and critical disability projects come into conversation as they contemplate, respectively, the art of Syrus Marcus Ware (Gorman) and Kent Monkman and Carmen Papalia (Chandler). Our current world, built to prioritize settler-colonial definitions of normative ability, is revealed in these engagements as uninhabitable. As conveyed, too, in the essays by Nguyen, Phu, and Troeung; Strauss; and Conrad and Shotwell, the bodies of refugees, laborers, and sexual minorities are made to suffer or die by state-sanctioned violence, securitizing, policing, exclusion, and concerted neglect. A new world must be made, argues Chandler, and such understandings are made possible through “collective understanding and stubborn survivals,” as Eli Clare emphasizes (xvii). Yet, the precise shape of the new world that a decolonial disability arts aims to create cannot be determined in advance, for it is a shared, “teleopoetic” endeavor, characterized by common cause, a sense of possibility, and a conviviality that seeks to “predicat[e]” the future differently, not to predict or control it (Spivak 31).¹

The essays gathered together in this forum thus extend testimonio, adapting it to particular historical and present-day exigencies and manifesting new assemblies that in turn revise the story of the scholarly self. Much as the forum critiques the ways that bodies are inscribed, circulated, de/valued, and targeted under capitalist and settler-colonialist structures, then, it suggests that personal embodied narratives, archives, and encounters can, simultaneously, as the Indigenous (Unangax) scholar Eve Tuck has proposed, challenge presumptions of particular subjects or communities by deliberately shifting beyond a focus on “damage” to a “desire-based” research model that honors present action and future hopes as much as it contends with (histories of) oppression (416).² Testimonio today responds to the uninhabitability of the present world, insisting that we are never actually alone in these struggles and that there is “nourishment” to be found in differently embodied accounts of our multilayered pasts, presents, and futures (Freeman 19).

McMaster University

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Chandler and her collaborators have emphasized in the context of the digital-storytelling project Re•Vision, “arts-based approaches” propose “becoming pedagogies” as an antidote to those “biopedagogies” that attempt to regulate difference by prescribing ideal “outcomes” (Rice et al. 7).

2. Thank you to S. Trimble for drawing my attention to Eve Tuck's important intervention.