MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This presentation attends to the vexed relationship between testimony and representation, especially as it relates to larger science fiction and ethnofuturist projects, by focusing on two contemporary pieces of science fiction: Claire Light’s “Slightly Behind and to the Left” and Ken Liu’s The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary. Testimony, a key component or organizing principle for a number of minority literary and cultural productions, takes center stage in both works, especially in terms of its connections to fiction and uncertainty. This allows for the reconceptualization and critique of concepts such as time, experience, relation, and group identity. In this sense, the uncertain certainty of testimony is refashioned for the future.

Liu’s narrative, centered on virtually re-experiencing historical trauma, involves the question of testimony’s veracity. Through representations of historiographical practices and the suspicion of oral history/testimony, Liu represents the impasse of knowledge’s relation to experience in a political vein. As such, how can literature—especially science fiction—be understood as bearing a unique, interdependent relationship to testimony? While such questions cause one of Liu’s protagonists to commit suicide, the other protagonist becomes an example of how to live with this innate contradiction by brokering a non-sentimental relationship with time, experience, and relation.

In Light’s “Slightly Behind and to the Left,” we witness dual narrators: a brother who recounts Japanese American internment as an extended alien abduction experience and a much younger sister who co-authors (and co-creates) his memoir. As writing subjects merge while remaining distinct, Light’s rewriting of the internment experience demonstrates how the concept of “home” has, like “identity,” become unmoored. Both serve as markers of belonging and estrangement, forming the basis of a new understanding of being: what remains is a specter or ghost of identity which has access to future, collaborative theorizations of belonging.