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Salgado - Can Only the Dead Speak - final revised July 2016.pdf (387.43 kB)

'Can only the dead speak?' Terror, trauma and the witness traveller

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 02:20 authored by Minoli Salgado
My article considers Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman's configuration of the witness traveller in relation to narrative witnessing across a range of texts by exilic writers. Framed and informed by Salman Rushdie’s rhetorical question in Shame, “Can only the dead speak?” — a question that foregrounds the politics of bearing witness to trauma from an exilic perspective — the paper considers the narrative mediation of secondary witnessing across the “threshold” (Agamben, 1998) that separates the primary and secondary witness. In so doing, it follows the hermeneutic logic of boundary-crossing by travelling across a range of literary registers in its consideration of the witness as insider and outsider, a mobile subject that moves across the boundaries of national and cultural affiliation. It shows how exilic writing can place a high premium on the value of a writer’s ruptured double agency and divided loyalty, which is offered as the alternative (and alter-native) discursive space in the absence of the voices of those who have been “disappeared” from the official record.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of Commonwealth Literature

ISSN

0021-9894

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

3

Volume

52

Page range

467-483

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-08-09

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2016-08-09

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-08-09

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