In my Introduction, I noted that human rights activists often deploy various genres of testimony simultaneously, each of which circulates in particular arenas, reaching particular audiences. I want to conclude by suggesting we think about this practice in terms of activists' use of different "registers" to construct political issues. These registers feed off and at times clash with each other in interesting and productive ways. For instance, logocentric and realist forms of documentary evidence and testimony continue to play a fundamental role in the work done by human rights lawyers; they remain powerfully persuasive to U.S. Congressional committees, international legal bodies, and nongovernmental organizations that seek to influence policy rather than mass audiences. Human rights documentary film and video, though they rely on a similar concept of visible evidence, are visual media and as such have a capacity to generate emotion in audiences through the use of evocative storytelling and affective imagery. Activists use this form to mobilize new publics around individuals who function as "nodal points" in a transnational network of identification and solidarity (Nelson 305). Through victims' onscreen narratives or testimonies, witnesses are situated as potential ethical actors that might intervene in the situation that produced the suffering which is on display.

Finally, we know that new media refashion prior media forms such as writing, film, and photography, and that this process of "remediation" (Bolter and Grusin 1999) upends old ideas about subjects and participants, producers and texts that underpin theories about how media work. So, for instance, if we look at human rights websites we find that instead of occupying just one position, we occupy multiple shifting positions (as voyeurs, as consumers, as activists). How does this multiple positioning square with the argument made above that human rights media offer one subject position, that of witness with ethical responsibility? Understanding the ways in which digital activism might reshape the possible horizon of identities and actions that can be produced is critical to making sense of the new arenas of practice and publicity that are emerging around human rights.

Endnotes

1. This essay draws on my review essay, "Principles, Politics, and Publicity: Notes on Human Rights Media" (2003). Thanks to Faye Ginsburg, Jeff Himpele, Barbara Abrash, Brian Larkin, and Ann Cvetkovich for their suggestions on revising this piece. [Return to text]

2. The spread of human rights testimonies also contributed to a more general cultural trend that led Renate Salecl to describe the 1990s as "the decade of testimonies." Why would one pretend to be a victim of the Holocaust? See also Hartman. [Return to text]

3. See McLagan (forthcoming) for a discussion of the performance of human rights testimonies in public fora. I do not deal with live testimonies in this essay. [Return to text]

4. See Bradley and Petro for an exception to this rule. [Return to text]

5. Thanks to Arvind Rajagopal for sharing his thoughts with me on "publicity and its careers." [Return to text]

6. See Ann Cvetkovich's An Archive of Feelings for a discussion of this point in relation to trauma theorists' claim that testimony is an "impossible genre, an attempt to represent the unrepresentable" (167). [Return to text]

7. See Clark on the role of Amnesty International USA in the formation of international human rights norms. [Return to text]

8. For more on this topic, see Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi's seminal study of "small media" during the Iranian revolution; Calhoun on the importance of fax and CNN during the events in China in 1989; and Rafael's essay on cell phone texting during the uprising against President Estrada in the Philippines in 2002. [Return to text]

9. See Ginsburg for more on the use of video in indigenous communities. [Return to text]

10. For more on the use of video in the Rodney King trials, see Feldman 1994, Nichols 1994, and Ronell 1992. [Return to text]

11. See Keck and Sikkink's discussion of Abolitionism as an early form of transnational advocacy. [Return to text]

12. Though see Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, in which contra Cohen and others, she argues for the difficulty of translating pain across the membrane between bodies. [Return to text]

13. When you click, you are taken to the home page of Amnesty International's Stop Torture campaign which includes images of several recent victims of torture and a brief paragraph stating AI's position on freedom from torture as a fundamental human right. At the bottom of the page is a space to enter your email if you want to receive updates and appeals for action. [Return to text]

14. The most recent example of this is the case of Ngawang Sangdrol, a nun detained at the age of 13 for participating in pro-independence demonstrations in Tibet. The most well-known of the Drapchi 14 arrived in the United States in early April 2003 after having been paroled from prison by the Chinese for medical reasons. See www.savetibet.org for more information on her reception in the U.S. See also the book and accompanying CD-Rom of Rukhag 3: The Nuns for Drapchi Prison by Steven D. Marshall, available from Tibet Information Network. [Return to text]

Works Cited

Adams, Vincanne. "Suffering the Winds in Lhasa: Politicized Bodies, Human Rights, Cultural Difference and Humanism in Tibet" in Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12.1 (1998): 74-102.

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Bradley, Mark and Patrice Petro eds. Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Brysk, Alison. "'Hearts and minds': Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In" in Polity 27.4 (1995): 559-588.

Calhoun, Craig. Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Cizek, Katerina and Peter Wintonick, dirs. Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights, and the News. First Run/Icarus Films. 2002. 58 min. color. Video.

Clark, Ann Marie. Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Cmiel, Kenneth. "The emergence of human rights politics in the United States" in The Journal of American History. December 86.3 (1999): 1231-1250.

Cohen, Stanley. "Government Responses to Human Rights Reports: Claims, Denials, and Counterclaims," in Human Rights Quarterly. 18.3 (1994): 517-543.

--. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

Cox, Christopher. "Marketing Human Rights: Amnesty International Group Tries New Tactics in Support of Political Prisoners," Boston Herald, 3 January 2002. See http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/2002/2/3_4.html. Accessed 25 April 2003.

Crawford, Neta. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Feldman, Allen. "On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King" in The Senses Still: Memory and Perception as Material Culture in Modernity. C.N. Serematakis, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

--. "X-children and the Militarization of Everyday Life: Youth, Victimage, and Violence in Transitional Societies," International Journal of Social Welfare. 11.4 (2002): 286-299.

Gaines, Jane. "Political Mimesis," in Collecting Visible Evidence. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 84-102.

Ginsburg, Faye. "From Little Things Big Things Grow: Indigenous Media and Cultural Activism," in Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Activism, ed. Richard Fox and Orin Starn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 118-144.

Hartman, Geoffrey. "Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era," in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 111-126.

Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol, "Cover Issues: Visual Rhetoric and the Gendered Subject of Human Rights," in Just Advocacy: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. Edited by Wndy Hesford and Wendy Kozol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. In press.

Juhasz, Alexandra "They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality, All I Want Is To Show My Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary," in Collecting Visible Evidence. Edited by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 190-215.

Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Keenan, Tom. "Publicity and Indifference: Media, Surveillance, 'Humanitarian Intervention'," in Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. Karlsruhe: ZKM, and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 544-561.

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 1999.

Lennox, Annie. Dir. Testimony: Annie Lennox in Conversation with Palden Gyatso. TVE. Video. 54 min. 1998.

Linfield, Susie. "Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity." Dissent. 48:1 (2001): 9-21.

Manovich, Lev. "Generation Flash." www.rhizome.org. Accessed 23 April 2003.

McLagan, Meg. "Computing for Tibet: Virtual Politics in the Post-Cold War Era." In Connected: Engagements with Media, ed. George Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 159-194.

--. "Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet," in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, eds. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 90-111.

--. "Principles, Publicity, and Politics: Notes on Human Rights Media" in American Anthropologist 105.3 (forthcoming).

Nelson, Diane. "Indian Giver or Nobel Savage: Duping, Assumptions of Identity, and other Double Entendres in Rigoberta Menchu Tum's Stollen past" in American Anthropologist 28.2 (2001): 303-331.

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 17-42.

--. "The Trials and Tribulations of Rodney King," in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Bill Nichols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994.

Rafael, Vincente. "The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines." Public Culture 15.3 (forthcoming).

Ronell, Avital. "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.2 (1992): 1-15.

Salecl, Renata. "Why Would One Pretend To Be a Victim of the Holocaust?" in Other voices 2.1 (February 2000). http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/salecl/wilkomirski.html, accessed July 16, 2003.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annbelle and Ali Mohammadi. Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Williams, Linda. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Wilson, Richard. Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

Woodhead, Leslie. Dir. Srebernica: A Cry from the Grave. UK. WNET. 104 minutes, Beta.

Ziv, Ilan. Consuming Hunger. Maryknoll World Productions. 3 pt. Series, 30 min. each. Video. 1988.