Witnessing atrocity through auto-bio-graphy: Wing Tek Lum's The Nanjing Massacre: Poems

摘要

This paper explains the perceptual apparatus of the ‘atrocity photo poems’ comprising The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (201213. Lum , Wing Tek . 2012 . The Nanjing Massacre: Poems , Honolulu : Bamboo Ridge Press . View all references). In particular, how their graphic depiction of violence arises partly from references to actual photographs and oral histories of the event, but mainly from Lum's style of documentary realism (developed in his first book, Expounding the Doubtful Points, 1987) that is modeled on a photograph's modes of conveying information. I use Marianne Hirsch's concept of the family photo album as a scene of mourning and filiation within Holocaust postmemory, Judith Butler's concepts of precariousness, grievability, and framing of visual images, and Susan Sontag's concept of contemplative space to explain how an ethics of witnessing an atrocity is built into the narrated scene of a Nanjing poem and the interpretive space between poem and reader, via an auto-bio-graphical, inter-subjective mode of perception and expression. Lum's auto-bio-graphical witnessing re-cognizes precarity (objectification) as precariousness (subjectification), creates a contemplative space for the reader to participate in such a reformulation of filiation and inter-subjectivity across geopolitical and historical borders, and in doing so, enables the writing of a tomb for the unknown civilian that demonstrates the vital role of the literary arts in critical memory work.View full textDownload full textKeywordsatrocity photos, precariousness, autobiography, Nanjing Massacre, Wing Tek LumRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.659809