This paper discusses the aesthetic and social implications of enacted eyewitness accounts. For Brecht, the principles of eyewitness performance served as a “basic model” for contemporary epic theater as a performed critique of social life, with the “Street Scene” (1940) and a camp scene (1939/40) as the paradigmatic sites of eyewitness acts. With Brecht and Smith, who superimposes these sites in her multi-media work on the Brooklyn Crown Heights Race Riots in 1991 (1992-94), the theatricality of eyewitness accounts, their “uneasy” aesthetics and acting technique, becomes crucial to understanding the present moment in culture. Concomitantly, enacted eyewitness accounts politicize and de-psychologize our understanding of their scenes. They are not about identity – what we are – but about personhood, about how we are as social creatures, in legal, aesthetic, and material terms.
This article argues that Hélène Cixous's fictions develop a poetics of autoethnography. It argues further that this poetics explores undersides of the modern discourse of the sublime as well as limits of the authorial "I" that has been engendered by this discourse. Through a metafiction of "ghostwriting," on the one hand, and a fiction of the peopled "I," on the other, Cixous rearticulates justice and authority in ways that can reinform our understanding of these frames of reality.
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