Bearing Witness: Perspectives on War and Peace from the Arts and Humanities ed. by Sherrill Grace, Patrick Imbert, and Tiffany Johnstone (review)

Conferences on contemporary issues of war and peace are typically convened by organizations like the United Nations or UNESCO, bringing together government policy-makers, military leaders, political scientists, and international law specialists who seek to intervene in debates over human rights violations, military mobilization, economic aid, and official and dissident peace movements. Bearing Witness emerges from a wider contemporary discussion about war and peace belonging to the arts and humanities. For most scholars working in these fields, the purpose is to broaden perspectives rather than narrow the scope to policy assessment and intervention – which the editors of this collection acknowledge, though in such a way as to keep the question of immediate political stakes and active peace negotiation still in view. As the editors explain it, the fourteen essays included in Bearing Witness focus mainly on the language and rhetoric of war in society, media, the arts, and public life in general, and therefore – because of that focus – urgently address the social and political exigencies of contemporary wartime policy and peacetime decision-making. Stressing that arts and humanities research is, in this way, “thoughtful research” constitutes one of the book’s major contributions.

These essays were first presented and worked over at the 2008 annual symposium of the Royal Society of Canada, titled The Cultures of War and Peace/Les cultures de la guerre et de la paix, organized by the Academy of the Arts and Humanities. A number of the authors conclude by weighing concrete concerns against problems of discursive displacement or historical deferral. Lauren Lydic argues that a generalizing, dehistoricizing cultural discourse of “African alterity that emphasizes identity over politics” has shaped both the local and the global response to the Rwandan Genocide, preventing any “space for intervention” from opening up. Laura Brandon shows how official constraints on First and Second World War artists led them to devise a range of allusive and symbolic alternatives to the literal depiction of corpses, thereby denying the human costs of war. Sherrill Grace discusses the narrative strategy of “empathic understanding” as a way for “secondary witnesses” of traumatic experience to avoid seeking redemptive closure, which, as she explains, often ends up denying the trauma that brought about the experience in the first place. In each of these examples, the ethical responsibilities of discourse and representation are understood to come down on the side of the specific, literal, and openly manifest.

The complex responsibility of such forms of witness is the common idiom of “thoughtful” arts production and humanities scholarship taken up throughout the book (especially in the case of “secondary witness,” which is significant given that none of the contributors, according to the editors, has “actually participated in a war”). Contributions from practising artists include Janet Henshaw Danielson’s artist’s statement about a string quartet she composed specially for the occasion of the conference. Her musical piece, she explains, is based on a poem by her uncle Harry Saunders, written only a few months before his death from a shrapnel wound while serving in Holland during the Second World War; in her essay, she negotiates the fine line between communal expression and sentiment, guided reflection and solipsism in memorial art. Similarly, the filmmaker Anne Wheeler defends her controversial “docu-drama” approach to recounting war stories, combining archival footage with dramatic filmmaking. Again, a family subject – in this case, her mother’s struggles between self and selflessness during the Second World War – leads her to recognize the ethical risks and rewards of sounding out surface information through imaginative fiction.

Overall, the argument of this collection is that arts and humanities scholarship reflects the tensions and contradictions of contemporary war culture with critical concern, but also with understanding. All of the contributors attempt to strike this conscientious balance. That is in itself a complex and specialized achievement worthy of closer critical attention and understanding...