LAUSR

This themed issue brings together international scholars from history, literary, media and cultural studies whose work offers new approaches to researching, writing and thinking about the witnessing of diverse instances of conflict and violence, ranging from the Crusades (Cassidy-Welch) to the Holocaust (Dean) and the Vietnam war (Caruth), and extending to cumulative violence experienced by Nigerian and Canadian first nations women (Collins), non-whites in South Africa (Field), seaborne, Australia-bound asylum seekers and refugees (Radstone) and Native Americans (Spence). Emerging from an interdisciplinary symposium on trauma in history and testimony hosted by Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation in 2014, this themed issue focuses on one of trauma studies’ key concepts – witnessing. It is this shared attention to processes and methods of witnessing in all their forms and vicissitudes that binds these essays into a conversation. Cathy Caruth’s revisiting of the Vietnam war’s 1968 My Lai massacre expands on the concept of ‘false witness’ in relation to the history of perpetrator violence as one of cyclical erasure and repetition and raises the question of whether that cycle – as well as the contemporary prominence of ‘fake truth’ – could be ruptured by new modes of witnessing. Focused on the capture of a relic of the True Cross by Saladin at the battle of Hattin in 1187, Megan Cassidy-Welch discusses the challenges posed by contemporary trauma studies to the historian of the medieval period. Finding herself positioned as witness to anachronistic and therefore initially opaque modes of experiencing and representing violence, Cassidy-Welch concludes that the framework offered by contemporary trauma theory’s understanding of witnessing emerges as pertinent, shedding light on the experience and memory of the loss of the True Cross in its historical particularity. Carolyn Dean brings us back to the question of the complex contemporary politics of witnessing. Turning to Didier Fassin’s critique of humanitarian identification with the victim, Dean develops an important historical distinction between different kinds of witness: the survivor-witness that emerged around the 1961 Eichmann trial, and the humanitarian-witness. As Dean points out, recent criticism that mobilizes arguments sceptical of the language of trauma conceives institutionalized compassion for distant others, especially in the form of ‘bearing witness’ to trauma, as leading inevitably to the denial of victims’ political recognition as well as to the erasure of the structural and ongoing underpinnings of violence. On the question of bearing witness to the disappeared through proxy performances on public screens and social media, Felicity Collins contributes to a body of work in trauma theory that calls attention to missing women and schoolgirls as soft targets of multifaceted trauma. Moving witnessing beyond the confines of trauma studies, Susannah Radstone focuses on asymmetrical witnessing, instantiated in the visitor’s viewing of Alex Seton’s artwork Someone died trying to have a life like mine. Radstone proposes that this artwork’s engagement with privilege prompts a mode of Arendtinan