Old Questions in New Boxes: Mia Kirshner's I Live Here and the Problematics of Transnational Witnessing

Symbolized in Amnesty International's candle illuminating the darkness, the rhetoric of exposure has long been a central trope of humanitarian discourse: the promise of revelation presumes that egregious violations are otherwise secret and that, in Thomas Keenan's words, "those agents whose behavior it wishes to affect—governments, armies, businesses, and militias—are exposed in some significant way to the force of public opinion, and that they are (psychically or emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural context that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment, disgrace, or ignominy." ¹ Despite the implausibility of these conditions, as well as the dangers of oversaturation, "mass and especially the image-based media" have only accentuated the ostensible self-evidence of this approach. ² The rhetoric of exposure posits a liberal subject as its addressee who is ready and willing to respond to humanitarian appeals constructed through an "aesthetics of suffering," particularly in the form of indignation-inducing shock or the representation of victims who are "deserving" of aid or assistance. ³ Such familiar humanitarian narratives comprise, as Lilie Chouliaraki writes, "rhetorical practices of transnational actors that engage with universal ethical claims, such as common humanity or global civil society, to mobilize action on human suffering." ⁴

In her recent scholarship, Chouliaraki traces the contemporary movement from these rhetorical practices to a new "post-humanitarian sensibility"—one she locates explicitly in mixed-media humanitarian appeals—that "breaks with [the emotional repertoire of] pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism." ⁵ The humanitarian rhetorics she identifies at both poles, whether based on shared sentiment "in a moral economy of abundance, an economy where everyone can, in principle, feel for and act on distant suffering in an unrestricted manner" or appeals operating in an "economy of scarcity" and through the "individual judgment" of the consumer, pose particular challenges for a transnational feminist approach to gender-based rights violations. ⁶

We turn to a case study of the Canadian actress and self-styled activist Mia Kirshner's multimedia project I Live Here to illuminate both the contradictions and the potential embedded in its construction of transnational subjects and addressees, as well as to resist the collapse of "transnational" into a presumed universalism of either capitalist or post-Enlightenment humanitarian sensibilities. Executed with support from Amnesty International and linked to a website featuring book sales, short videos, fan art, and descriptions of ongoing projects, I Live Here encourages consumption of its diverse texts "revealing secret lives" as a means of raising awareness and mobilizing public opinion against the violations it chronicles. ⁷ The project is presented in a whitewashed box which folds out to reveal one eighty-four-page "notebook" in each of its four pockets, each claiming to bear witness to the experiences of people living in a distinct region in the grip of a distinct human rights or humanitarian crisis. The goal of our inquiry into I Live Here is to further ongoing intellectual conversations about the potential for literary and cultural texts to ethically advance the emancipatory and progressive aspects of global human rights claims and cultures—and about the risks that they may instead remain aestheticized commodities, nourishing the neo-imperialist global capitalism that is so profoundly implicated in conditions enabling both civil and political rights violations and economic deprivations and abuses.

In an essay on the "geopolitical rhetorics" of human rights responses to the global sex trade, Wendy Hesford examines the trope of exposure and argues that campaigns based on that trope "overlook the rhetorical-geopolitical dimensions of identity and identification practices produced by the contradictions of transnationality." ⁸ We extend Hesford's argument in order to decipher the transnational address of I Live Here at our particular historical moment. The text, which depicts women's vulnerability, sexual abuses, and sex work in Chechnya/Ingushetia, Burma, Ciudad Juárez, and Malawi, begins with the statement...