Testimonial cultures: An introduction

The desire to testify now pervades contemporary culture. The imperative to speak out and to tell one's story operates across the traditional boundaries of public and private spaces, and is mobilised by disenfranchised subjects and celebrities alike. These testimonial forms are evident both in popular culture, such as talk shows and confessional television more generally, and in mainstream politics, as demonstrated by the confessions of public figures, such as the late Princess Diana or President Clinton. Such imperatives have reshaped autobiography, confession and remembrance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, producing new testimonial forms, be they visual, artefactual, spoken, written or even bodily. These numerous testimonies bring with them new obligations of witnessing; readers, viewers, spectators, consumers are all required to become witnesses as they participate indifferent cultural forms. The demand to match the testimonial moment with the appropriate witness response may produce ambivalent and conflicted reactions: sympathy, terror, relief, recognition, empathy, anger, resentment, denial and disbelief. We have become witnesses to the testimonial projects of survivors of rape and child sexual abuse, cancer and AIDS, racist and homophobic attacks, war and torture, as well as to the atrocities of slavery, the Holocaust and apartheid. Thus, accounts of traumas of exceptional violence and of historical injustice proliferate alongside stories of everyday discrimination or misdemeanour.