On the Times and Places of Embodied Testimony: Remaking the World

This forum adopts a process-oriented approach to documenting material and online projects that nurture embodied knowledges for social justice. The contributors contemplate their involvement in collating refugee narratives online, participating in an academic workshop retreat, curating AIDS oral history archives, and pursuing decolonial directions for critical disability arts. They consider the power of embodied testimonies to enact social change by mobilizing memory, compassion, dissonance, anger, and desire, and by disrupting normative neoliberal boundaries of temporality, citizenship, and identity. Noting the essays' “thick” specificity in addressing particular eras, locations, and projects, the introduction argues that the contributors share a commitment to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has theorized as teleopoiesis: the work of “imaginative making” that seeks, from a distance, to create a just world.