Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths

This is the first critical monograph to explore and delineate the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South. Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey/Türkiye, the UK and beyond.Drawing on the intersecting fields of literary analysis, biopolitics, testimony studies, trauma theory and postcolonial studies, this book examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma. Ambitious in cultural and conceptual reach, Witness Literature invokes a wide range o