ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on the practice of collecting testimony by the group Detained Voices to interrogate the function of witnessing in radical anti-border and anti-carceral movements. On the one hand, witnessing provides first-hand knowledge of hidden sites of oppression, humanises the suffering of othered groups, and can challenge official discourses with experiential knowledges of people subjected to state violence. On the other hand, witnessing – which is commonly associated with notions of authentic voice – often draws on individual experiences of dramatic violence rather than on everyday mundane violence; it also trades on an emotional politics of empathy and identification with suffering. Through a post-representational analysis of witnessing in the Detained Voices project, this chapter assesses the ways in which witnessing can facilitate collaboration between activists outside detention and those resisting from within, and how it can address imbalances of power across social movements.
