That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (review)

James Dawes's That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity begins with the simple declaration that it is "about those who decided to do something" (1). Doing "something" means coming to the assistance of vulnerable human beings, often in the kind of foreign location one imagines reserved for a "humanitarian crisis" or abuses of human rights. The book, however, is devoted to clouding the idea that humanitarian aid emerges from clear moral decisions on the part of actors, and that their actions are always healing, sanctifying, and far away. In other words, if one chooses to do something, and then chooses to speak so that the world may know the horror, what remains to be figured is what drives people to the heart of a catastrophe; how do they choose to talk about it; and what are the actual results of that choice to do something and then to speak out?

Dawes tries to approach such matters by emphasizing that more often than we realize humanitarian action necessarily passes through words—some that move people to act, some that are simply moving. Rather than follow the well-established literature about subjects bearing witness to horrific experience—either through endurance and survival, or looking at the secondary witnesses' acts of representation—the book rightly takes language formation and formulation as its primary subject. He presents language used as a tool for information and advocacy; at work in the aesthetic re-creations of catastrophe for voyeuristic pleasure; as a means for claiming one's human rights; and as a means for declaring someone worthy of those rights. The decision to do something thus becomes the decision to do something with words—in a strict Austinian sense and beyond.

Whether it is the shelled streets of Sarajevo, a United Nations' office in Turkey, or the genocide in Rwanda, there is a universal plight—for Dawes, wherever human rights are under siege or suspended, wherever people are vulnerable to atrocity, and wherever humanitarian aid goes to work delivering aid or government-like judgments, a four-fold question rightfully applies: what are the ethical parameters of taking just action in a given situation? What difference will the chosen action make? And in a mirror construction, what are the ethical borders of telling "stories" about the atrocities there, and what impact do such stories, in all their forms, have?

Trying to trace the intersection of storytelling and humanitarian work pushes That the World May Know in two directions. Writing about the ethical binds of his human subjects leads Dawes into the inevitable psychological considerations of extremely complex motivations. Conversely, looking at the many forms of relevant language and communication (broadly defined as "storytelling") encompasses both the wide variety of narrative constructions—such as novels and memoirs, reporting, juridical testimony, and the determining reports of humanitarian workers—and their respective receptions. Dawes seems genuinely concerned with exchange, interaction, and the ideologically informed sites where aesthetics and ethics meet to create political possibilities; possibilities both opened and limited by ideological and ethical restraints. In each case, then, there is an action of language that must be seen in the light of the uses to which its representative repertoire is directed.

To work on these issues—it should be clear they are much too broad to work through—Dawes has an introduction and four chapters. The first, "Genocide," calls up Rwanda as a case study, exploring the competing versions of the disaster. Here Dawes looks at the "right" to represent such an event, contrasting, for instance, the memoir of participants like the UN commander of peace keeping there, General Roméo Dallaire, to novelists, journalists, and lawyers in Rwanda's criminal tribunal. In each case we are asked to question the investments of those who write and speak about the genocide and have investments in such storytelling. The second chapter, "Interrogation," presents a study of institutional forms of language at work on "refugees." By comparing...