[csaa-forum] CFP: Southern Review 'Testimonial Limits'

[Anna Poletti]

Hello
Please excuse cross-posting and circulate amongst your colleagues and 
post grads.

cheers
Anna Poletti

Call for Papers  Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 
Special Issue, 40.3, 2007
Testimonial Limits

Editors: Paul Atkinson & Anna Poletti, Monash University, Gippsland Campus
Inspired by interdisciplinary work such as Felman and Laub's Testimony: 
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, the last 
decade has seen testimony become a topic of keen interest in a range of 
fields of inquiry.  Most often deployed in conjunction with the 
theorisation and analysis of trauma, testimony is positioned as a 
powerful tool for ethical and political theorising, as well as a 
critical case in point for the consideration of the limits of 
representation and reception in a range of contexts.  This issue of 
Southern Review asks what it means to talk about testimony without 
recourse to theories of trauma.  This raises the issue of what it means 
to investigate testimony as a cohesive field of inquiry.  Is testimony 
defined by formal or generic limits or is the event itself the principal 
means of delimitation?  This could include the examination of the role 
of institutions, genre and medium in defining the field of testimony and 
how this is integral to the formation of a testimonial audience.  
Testimony must be understood in terms of the conditions under which 
someone testifies and to whom the testimony is made.  Should we always 
refer to specific audiences in the analysis of testimony or is it 
sufficient to invoke history as a witness?  Of particular interest for 
this issue is the discussion and analysis of those events that are 
rarely spoken of in the literature on testimony, the banal and quotidian.

Contributors are invited to address issues associated with these changes 
to knowledge structures, in particular:
-    Where is testimony used as evidence?  What different practices are 
entailed in giving testimony?  This could include an examination of the 
difference between testimony, public self-exculpation and confession.  
How have practices historically migrated across institutions?
-    How is testimony (in trials, in senate inquiries and other 
specialist forums) reported and represented and turned into a different 
cultural practice (e.g. in the media)?
-    How are testimonial narratives implicated in the fixing of an 
event in time or history?
-    What is the relationship between recollection and the formation of 
cultural memory?
-    What are the discourses, both institutional and cultural, which 
occasion or restrict testimony and/or can testimony function as a genre 
incorporating a range of discourses?
-    Does each form of testimony work according to a particular 
duration?  For example legal testimony is developed in the short 
duration of court or police proceedings whereas historical testimony 
invokes the long duration of historical record.
-    What is the role of audience in both eliciting and constraining 
testimony?
-    What are the forms of "everyday" testimony and witnessing enabled 
by digital technologies and how are they deployed   possible areas of 
examination include blogs, YouTube, media flow, the digitisation of 
archives?
-    What does it mean to bear witness to a media event, to testify to 
that which is already recorded?
-    What does it mean to posit trauma as a given in the act of 
witnessing and how does this relate to the evidentiary function of 
testimony? 

Southern Review invites contributions (4000-6000 words) on the theme of 
"Testimonial Limits."  Papers may be submitted as attachments to an 
email, and should be double-spaced in A4 format and accompanied by an 
abstract (maximum 100 words). Referencing is author-date (notes for 
contributors and full details of house style are available on request).
Expressions of interest and/or abstracts before this date are welcomed 
to facilitate the refereeing process.

The general aim of Southern Review, an interdisciplinary journal, is to 
focus on the connections between communication and politics.  Southern 
Review is interested in communication and cultural technologies, their 
histories, producers and audiences, policies and texts.  It welcomes 
articles that connect these areas either to arenas of legislative or 
parliamentary politics, to governance of social organizations and the 
institutions they constitute, or to broader negotiations of power.

paul.atkinson at arts.monash.edu.au
anna.poletti at arts.monash.edu.au
Full articles due: 31 August, 2007.

-- 
Dr Anna Poletti
Lecturer, Communications & Writing
School of Humanities, Communications & Social Sciences
Monash University
Gippsland Campus
Churchill VIC 3842
AUSTRALIA

e: Anna.Poletti at arts.monash.edu.au
ph: +61 3 990 27452