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This chapter discusses history, memory, suffering, and truth as themes that circulated in 1970s USSR. The concern for truth in conjunction with the related concepts of realism and authenticity become particularly pertinent to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings. As a work that bears witness to its historical moment, Schnittke’s piece offers a disjointed musical surface marked by many different styles and quotations, typical of his “polystylism” of the 1970s and 80s. This chapter argues that Schnittke’s “truth” does not come from the “documentary” quality of his musical quotations, but from the musical narrative they comprise. Through an analogical analysis, this chapter considers the concerto’s fragmented musical surface, with is references to past musical styles and its varied handling of musical time, in relationship to trauma conceptualized as a “disease of time.” His work performs the break down of linear narrative frequently ascribed to the effects of trauma.

This chapter exaimes Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and its testimony of the Holocaust. Fatelessness being Kertész’s first novel was published some thirty years after his liberation from the concentration camps. The novel itself is not autobiographical, nor is it perceived by Kertész to even be a novel. Employing sophisticated novelistic techniques, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy from Budapest who is transported and survives Auschwitz—bearing some resemblance to Kertész’s own experience. Fatelessness along with Black Dogs and Maus all share the same element of being narrated in the first person. This suggests that writings about the experience of the Holocaust hold more bearing when done in the form of testimony rather than in the third person. Thus the central question of this chapter relates to the possibility of a work of fiction as an illustration bearing witness to the Holocaust.

In this chapter, the author explores what it means to bear witness within the context of labor organizing in the maquiladoras of Mexico. She considers the practice of bearing witness as a way to name the political work of representation done by maquiladora worker-organizers and their allies and to link labor organizing with critical practices elsewhere. She proposes a strong understanding of witnessing as a potentially perilous and necessary practice that binds the individual to a collective endeavor and standpoint. After discussing the genres of testimony and ethnography for what they tell us about the passionate politics of bearing witness and the often vexed position of the witness-ally, the author presents stories that capture some of the complicated affective relations that bearing witness entailed for her in her encounters with organizers in maquiladora communities. These stories highlight some of the affective dynamics that shape relations along the chain of bearing witness.

This introductory chapter discusses Husain Tekrī, which is a collection of Muslim saint shrines. It first defines some of the major terms that are used throughout the book, including walī and khwāja. It then studies the notion of bearing witness, which is part of what all pilgrims recognize as authoritative and powerful about Muslim saints. It uses the Muslim saint shrines in order to study the way pilgrims consider subcontinental Islamic memorial structures as connected and basically interchangeable manifestations of a single type of power. The chapter also studies the dargāh culture, the historical connection of Muslim saint shrines to the Muslim rulers and institutions, and Husain Tekrī's historical relationship with the nawabs of Jaora.

This chapter examines how family members and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing sought justice and accountability and the ways they negotiated the criminal justice system, along with their views on participation, appropriate sentences, the desirability of state trials as supplements to federal proceedings, and the necessity of attending trials and Timothy McVeigh's execution. It discusses the role of justice and accountability in reconstructing lives after culturally traumatic events, how law acts as a site of individual and collected memory work, and the importance of legal proceedings in reconstructive behaviors. It also considers how family members and survivors engaged in bearing witness to demand justice and how the trials of McVeigh and his fellow suspect Terry Nichols became struggles for “the privilege of recounting the past.”

The eight witnesses were Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel Smith. Their statement, titled “The Testimony of Eight Witnesses,” states, “Joseph Smith Jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record, with words of soberness, that . . . we have seen and hefted, . . . and we give our names unto the world, . . . and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.”

This chapter examines how family members and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing sought justice and accountability and the ways they negotiated the criminal justice system, along with their views on participation, appropriate sentences, the desirability of state trials as supplements to federal proceedings, and the necessity of attending trials and Timothy McVeigh's execution. It discusses the role of justice and accountability in reconstructing lives after culturally traumatic events, how law acts as a site of individual and collected memory work, and the importance of legal proceedings in reconstructive behaviors. It also considers how family members and survivors engaged in bearing witness to demand justice and how the trials of McVeigh and his fellow suspect Terry Nichols became struggles for “the privilege of recounting the past.”

Derrida’s later work is marked by an apparent hostility to Islam.  Derrida claimed that Islam was “the other of democracy.”  He supported the coup that forestalled the likely victory of Algerian Islamists in democratic elections, arguing for the idea of democratic autoimmunity.Though he freely acknowledged his debts to Judaism and Christianity, he insisted on his distance from Islam, the Muslim philosophic tradition, and Arabic.  Yet five times a day for the first nineteen years of his life Derrida heard the Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, sound over the city.  Derrida is often seen in and through the figure of the Marrano, but what is concealed in his work is not Judaism but Islam.This chapter contends that the concerns recorded and recited in the adhan are inscribed in Derrida’s philosophy, most notably in the imperative to bear witness, and that Derrida’s work obliquely acknowledges the costs of exclusion of the Muslim.  Reading Derrida conscious of the hidden Muslim, the phantom friend, re-opens the possibilities of democracy for Muslims, and for all the Abrahamic faiths.

This chapter examines the role of compassion in the phenomenon of witness bearing by telling the tragic story of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, along with his mother, five-year-old brother, and other Syrian refugees when their boat capsized after leaving Bodrum in Turkey. A series of photographs of Alan taken by photo-journalist Nilüfer Demir have come to symbolise a perceived turning point in the emotional script of refugee reception in Europe. Drawing on the iconic visual testimony of Alan Kurdi's death, this chapter explores how compassion was mobilised in critiques of the restrictive policies and lack of action by the UK during the refugee crisis. It first considers how compassion has been used to mobilise resistance to restrictive government refugee policies before discussing the responses to Alan's death and how they engaged with a discourse of compassion.

This chapter investigates some of the broader themes that emerge from the interviews, in particular the question of morality and moral authority. In particular, it draws how ethics and morality come to have practical durability and what it tells about authority in war reporting and the field of cultural production generally. Journalistic ethics decreases to the strategic effects of individuals and institutions enacting certain ethics, and the implications of particular ethics achieving effective universality as the dominant principles of differentiation in the journalistic field. The most commonly evoked moral principles in the interviews were selflessness, giving voice, bearing witness, public service and holding power to account. The common theme in disavowals of morality is that acting ‘properly’ in a field is simply a matter of common sense or professionalism. It is noted that morality plays a dual function in war reporting.

Orwell’s early work appeared under a pseudonym, revealing nothing about himself. Orwell sacrificed the power to record the shame of his compromised public life yet not only needed to bear witness but to bare his emotional investment. Orwell invented an essay form he called “sketches,” highlighting his complicity in the systems he served—British imperialism, class hierarchy, schooling that used his marginal social status to advance its own agenda. The method produced the groundbreaking essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” in which the scholarship boy, separated from his family and home at eight, brings glory to his preparatory school by securing entry to Britain’s illustrious public schools, burying the humiliations he endures. This long essay could not be published in Orwell’s lifetime but became a model for a form in which memory is a weapon, revealing the solitude of a childhood deprived of family and the security of home.

This book addresses the importance of war reporting. The phenomenological premise of this book is that conscious experience of the world is not pre-given but determined by the multiple contexts in which humans are situated—material, economic, historical, social, cultural and mediated. War reporting is traditionally conceived in terms of information retrieval and processing structured according to wider cultural values such as bearing witness, giving voice and holding power to account. Pierre Bourdieu's corpus of work is strongly interdisciplinary, combining qualitative and quantitative research methodology with a theoretical framework that draws on sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science and the history of ideas. The key concepts of Bourdieu's work are considered. His stated views on journalism are also explained. He defends the idea of esotericism in the cultural sphere. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is shown.

Can bad timing or insufficient access explain why photojournalism rarely bears witness to death? It becomes clear that logistical challenges are not the problem. In fact, major resources are leveraged successfully to assure that photojournalists achieve ample and immediate access. Ironically, despite the copious resources devoted to granting photojournalists immediate access, they are often willing to turn a blind eye. The missing images reflect an editorial drive among photojournalists and their editors to conceal the corpse. The gaps in the visual record of images are an artefact of choice—an act of self-censorship.

This chapter examines how a shift from the notion of compassion that is felt at a distance to a practice of compassion as suffering with one another in solidarity has been achieved by the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It begins with an overview of the origins of the undocumented youth movement, followed by a discussion of their campaign for the rights of the country's undocumented young people, their campaign for the passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and their response to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) introduced by President Barack Obama. It also considers the movement's use of storytelling as testimony in their DREAM Act campaign and shows how compassion as solidarity and co-suffering can play an important role in enabling witness bearing and the building of a more inclusive and enduring resistance to suffering and social injustice.

“Transmission” is a term used, curiously enough, in both technology and psychology. In the former, it denotes the transfer of messages from one point to another, a view that was principally theorized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Technologically speaking, transmission names the conveyance of information from sender to receiver through a designated channel by means of symbols or signals. This technical formulation of transmission constitutes the operational basis of numerous media technologies. In psychology, transmission is often used to describe the way behavior and symptoms of traumatized parents are transferred to their children, causing transgenerational trauma. Such transmission can be direct or indirect, overt or covert; indeed, transmission of trauma might be the result of either over-disclosure of knowledge and facts, or of under- disclosure, even of persistent silence, which “can often communicate traumatic messages as powerfully as words.” In both technological and psychological uses, transmission denotes a unilateral handing over across space and/ or time. But clearly psychological transmission implies more than the mere delivery of messages: it involves a delivery that exceeds that of meaning or information proper, a transmission taking place as though beyond words, on the affective rather than on the cognitive level. This book has posited media as linking the two senses of transmission above by virtue of the technological capability of effecting impact in excess of message, and contact in excess of content. And nowhere are the stakes in linking technological and psychological transmissions higher than in the mediation of trauma. In this book I have advanced an argument about the deep association of media and trauma. The media discussed here—radio, videotape, television, digital, and virtual—comprise different instantiations of the mediation of trauma: the ways media technologies sustain and convey the experience of unsettling experience. Media reach to the Real, and in so doing make available a register whose registration is of corporeality itself. Bodies find expression through media in the Real, revealing materiality as a common substratum.