ABSTRACT
The universal good will for which Kant longs, needless to say, does not govern all of witness figures author considered in this study. And yet Carrie Mae Weems’s positioning of the witness figure in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried may expose violence without producing a replication of that violence, a representational move that may be likened to an ethical maxim. In Bastard Out of Carolina Annie Boatwright gets caught in a muddier paradigm of witnessing. Hearing Bone being beaten through the bathroom door Annie Boatwright decides to take up the will of the torturer, Daddy Glenn, to some degree. The witness accedes to fracturing of language, fracturing of image, enigmatic boundaries of erasure, to draw as true a form of suffering as possible, as true as possible an image, of the victim whose suffering must be redeemed by the witness, not enjoyed by the audience.
