Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

"Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses"--

This book explores the aesthetic and ethical ways in which history and daily life are filmically represented and witnessed in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movies. From the era of the Japanese Occupation to the White Horror and then to the lifting of martial law, the author shows how Hou Hsiao-hsien uses visual media to evoke the rhythms of daily life through the emotional memory of the characters and communities he explores. In particular, the book focuses on the ways in which Hou Hsiao-hsien seeks to reflect the strong dilemmas of identity and the traumatic emotions associated with witnessing history. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates the concepts of daily life, representation and historical trauma in order to focus on how these films represent history and political trauma through the nature of daily life and personal memories, and the resulting historical responsibility and ethics. This is the first academic monography about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films.

Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry.

Christian ethics is less a system of principles, rules, or even virtues, and more of a free and open-ended responsible witness to God's gracious action to be with and for others and the world. Postmodernity has left us with the risky uncertainty of knowing and doing the good. It also leaves us with the global risks of political violence and terrorism, economic globalization and financial crisis, and environmental destruction and global climate change. How should Christians respond to these problems? This book creatively explores how Christian ethics is best understood a witness to God's action, thereby providing the ethical framework for addressing the various problematic social issues that put our world at risk. Haddorff develops the notion of witness through a detailed study of Karl Barth's theological ethics. Barth, he argues, provides a language enabling us to know what a Christian ethics of witness actually looks like in both theory and in practice. In correspondence to God's gracious action, Christians remain free to think and act in faith, hope, and love in respondence to their unique circumstances, even in a world at risk. In their witness, Christians remain confident that God has not abandoned the world but loves and cares for its future.

Because God calls his people to be a living witness to him, morality is mission. Conversely, immorality is anti-mission, a failure to give true testimony or witness. This, in essence, is the theme of this stimulating and challenging volume. The whole life of the people of God, not just verbal proclamation, testifies to the church's faith--or lack of faith--in her Lord.The contributors explain that mission and ethics are intricately and necessarily interwoven, and explore why this is so by unpacking the biblical and theological roots of missional ethics, probing its limits and exploring its possibilities through examination of some foundational themes and a selection of specific issues.Intended primarily for pastors and church leaders, this volume encourages reflection and conversation that will feed the life of the body of Christ. Missional ethics concerns all the ways in which Christian ethical practice flows out of, supports, and advances the wider mission of the church to proclaim the gospel.The contributors are Brian Brock, M. Daniel Carroll R., Jonathan Chaplin, Guido de Graaff, Sean Doherty, Andy Draycott, Joshua Hordern, Matt Jenson, Grant Macaskill, Nathan Moser, Jonathan Rowe, Sarah Ruble, and Christopher J. H. Wright.

The act of bearing witness can reveal much, but what about the figure of the witness itself? As contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by surveillance, the witness--whether artist, historian, scientist, government official, or ordinary citizen--has become empowered in realms from art to politics. In Seeing Witness, Jane Blocker challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique.