In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world.Footnote ¹ For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence.Footnote ² For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.

Trials have played a crucial role throughout the twentieth century in uncovering and articulating the meaning of state violence, mass murder, and genocide. Some, like the Djamila Boupacha trial during the Algerian War of Independence, were mobilized to create a “scandal” so that facts of colonial violence could no longer be ignored by the wider public.Footnote ³ As Maria Elander has explained, since “the emergence of ‘human rights’ as a legal category,” late twentieth-century international courts, trials, and tribunals have become a common, even “ordinary response to the aftermath of conflicts and atrocities.”Footnote ⁴ Trials in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia promise recognition, justice, and human rights reparations after genocide. These trials lie somewhat beyond the conceptual and chronological frame of Carolyn J. Dean's The Moral Witness and Emma Kuby's Political Survivors, but they echo the questions both authors explore, namely how state violence, mass atrocities, and genocide came to be understood and conceptualized over the course of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, Rousset is a central character in both, embodying both the possibilities of such denunciations and their limits.

While the act and practice of witnessing have become a commonplace in efforts to learn about past and present violence, these intellectual histories address how it was conceptualized and how it anchored and universalized evocations of human dignity, vulnerability, and empathy in the twentieth century. In different ways, Dean and Kuby expand the boundaries of what constitutes the proper object of intellectual history: they question how modern liberal political regimes’ normative categories of meaning come into being. They consider how affect both legitimates moral categories and is a constitutive feature of the political. They trouble historians’ turn to the framework of memory. Dean proposes a genealogy of the twentieth-century emergence and deployment of the figure of the “moral witness” in a number of trials that took place in France and elsewhere. Kuby recounts the history of the postwar transnational organization imagined and led by Rousset: the Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire (CICRC). This organization aimed to identify and denounce all instances of “concentrationary violence” through investigations and show trials. It interrogated how, in Kuby's words, “testimony against the suffering of others” came to be understood as an imperative and under what conditions it could operate (58). In a related fashion, Dean asks how, by the end of the twentieth century, did the “‘witness to genocide’ … become a pervasive icon of suffering humanity” and a “central trope of contemporary moral culture”? (1). In short, when did witnessing become a “moral fact?” (Dean, 77). By examining how political and moral categories are imbricated, these works explore how violence becomes legible, who can be a “subject” of (state) violence, and why certain forms of violence remain “unthinkable” at particular moments.Footnote ⁵ They also join the scholars of twentieth-century colonial violence who have been interrogating what Lisa Yoneyama calls “the historiographical universal with which we understand the globalized” twentieth century. Their work points to how the story of the horrors of this century's state violence still need to be provincialized.Footnote ⁶

Notwithstanding the two works’ thematic similarities and overlaps, these are not identical projects. The Moral Witness follows from Dean's enduring preoccupation, namely the interrogation of how “the experience of violence [was] figured and inscribed in the social body” and the “Western moral imagination.”Footnote ⁷ Through her interrogation of the role of the Holocaust in the making of mid- to late twentieth-century categories of meaning, Dean's earlier work on moral and political affects has explored how the “pervasive discourse” about the “relationship between suffering” and “identity” was forged, how the status of “victim” is awarded or denied, and how “memory” can, in fact, obscure as much as it reveals.Footnote ⁸ Here, in four succinct chapters, Dean has chosen to examine “four [historical] iterations of the witness to genocide” in five courtroom events that, she argues, shed light on particular discursive instantiations of this figure: the righteous avenger, the Holocaust survivor, and the twin figures of the (postcolonial) “global victim” and “counterwitness” (6–7, 3). To do so, she examines trials that share little in purpose or even audience except for the “conceptualiz[ation of] suffering” and the making of exemplary figures they allowed: some involved libel, some focused on individuals accused of political assassination, and others took place for crimes of genocide and against humanity (13). The most famous of these is, obviously, the 1961 Eichmann trial. In contrast to the prevailing historiography, Dean inscribes it within a longer history that, she argues, reveals “family resemblances” with those that came before but also highlights what was different and novel about it (7, 25). In short, for Dean, despite their apparent differences and historical contexts, “all the trials in one way or another laid the groundwork for abstracting from the experience of real victims of mass violence to create a symbolic witness who possessed unprecedented experience of a human-made, unfathomable darkness” (13).

Dean begins with two relatively unknown trials that were nonetheless “the first major trials in Western Europe featuring victims of interethnic violence and state-sponsored mass atrocities seeking justice” (28). On 15 March 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian murdered Talaat Pasha in Berlin for his role in the 1915 Armenian genocide during which Tehlirian's own family had died (27). His trial lasted only two days. On 15 May 1926, Samuel Schwarzbard, exiled in Paris, shot Symon Petlira, a former army commander, who had overseen the 1917 Ukrainian pogroms. His trial lasted eight days. Both men were acquitted because, it was argued, they “had lost control of their free will” (30). Dean traces how the use of witness testimonies successfully turned these men into moral figures. According to their lawyers, they were “protagonists” rather than mere “objects” of sympathy (58). Though they had been politically involved, they were not portrayed as political actors: each was a “righteous man of honor” and “a humanitarian” who had acted not in revenge but to repair an “affront to human dignity” (58, 39, 59). Here, narrative strategies were crucial in depoliticizing a particular moment in order to legitimate wounded figures who could become representatives of human civilization.

As post-1945 trials demonstrate, witnessing was not necessarily a self-evident narrative figuration. It poses the question of who can be a source of knowledge and speak to the suffering of others. Dean's following chapters are best read together, for they show how victim testimony came to occupy center stage and become exemplary of strategies to address the aftermath of state violence. They also show how the political is at work in the deployment of moral categories even if it is often disavowed as such by historical actors themselves. For instance, in France, both Victor Kravchenko—a Ukrainian exile and “Soviet defector”—and David Rousset caused a scandal by arguing that the Stalinist Gulag was a mere repetition of Nazi camps. Nazism was understood to be synonymous with deportation and the dehumanizing experience of the camp, but not yet associated with the extermination enterprise against Jews and others deemed “racially” inferior. The Cold War context in which Kravchenko and Rousset leveled their accusations meant that this analogy shocked the political and intellectual world. They were derided especially by French communists, and their 1949 and 1950–51 “libel trials” against their communist accusers were conceived as weapons against moral blindness. For Dean, these trials represent a turning point because they managed to turn the practice of legal witness testimony into “a unique vehicle of insight into human depravity that had been forged through suffering in the Nazi and Soviet camps” (63).

Dean argues that the Rousset trial especially managed to embody the “camp survivor” as a unique exemplar of suffering humanity by calling upon witnesses to speak “on behalf of the dead” (108). She argues that the Eichmann trial represented another conceptual shift rather than an “iconic” moment: the heroism rooted in “abjection” of the libel trials was now figured as “radical vulnerability” with the Eichmann trial (80, 96).Footnote ⁹ Despite the “Zionist narrative” that provided “the organizing framework” for the multitude of survivor testimonies, “recasting the victims’ survival in heroic, redemptive terms” always threatened to overwhelm the trial (96). Dean's genealogical reading brings to light how, every time, testimonial narratives always threaten to exceed the conventions of a trial and its demands for a highly regulated legal drama (12). Nonetheless, by recounting “styles of dying” and recounting “wrenching stories,” witnesses “brought [the bond between living and dead] into being” (99, 108). The Jewish survivor was now a moral figure, emblematic of human conscience.

Each moment also reveals how dissolving political and historical differences in order to legitimate quasi-prophetic embodiment of “suffering humanity” necessarily produces exclusions and silences (5). The Rousset trial, which figures in both books, best exemplifies this (as well as the differences between the two projects). Dean argues, “Throughout his work and activism, Rousset pioneered a construction of politics by testimony, one that anticipated a more victim-centered concept of justice” (84). Kuby extends this diagnosis by exploring how, in fact, witnessing came to be “understood as a moral imperative” that claimed to supersede any political consideration and did so much earlier than historians have assumed (30). In different ways, both works complicate Annette Wieworka's definition of the post-Eichmann emergence of the “era of the witness.”Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike Dean, however, who examines how discursive figures emerged at particular moments, Kuby examines the making of an embodied discourse of witnessing and its aporias.

In Political Survivors, Kuby tells the story of the origins, life, and demise of the CICRC, a now mostly forgotten organization. Though transnational in orientation, it was largely driven by its French founder and its French political context. Founded in late 1949 by David Rousset, the organization could easily be reduced to a prehistory of human rights NGOs. For Todorov, it prefigures Amnesty International.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, Kuby examines how the CICRC's mission was deeply embedded in postwar politics. Despite its claims to be “the embodiment of a universalizing ethos born of great suffering, undertaken in the service of global humanity under continued threat,” it reflected the aporias and amnesias of a particular historical moment (3). The force of Kuby's narrative is to foreground the very conceptual categories that shaped the organization, how they emerged, and the contradictory ways in which they could not fully capture that which they aimed to investigate.

In her first two chapters, Kuby traces how former Trotskyist Rousset harnessed his own notion of the “concentrationary universe” to mobilize a number of prominent figures, all former political deportees, in the service of this new and unprecedented initiative. To any historian of late twentieth-century France, the list is remarkably impressive, ranging from Catholic intellectual Louis-Martin-Chauffier to sociologist Germaine Tillion—figures now considered irreproachable in the popular imagination for their anticolonial engagement during the Algerian War of Independence.Footnote ¹² Rousset's “universalizing, present-oriented interpretation of the camps” and disenchantment with communism led him to turn his eyes to the Soviet Union and to the Gulag, which he saw as the foremost urgent threat to humanity (36). The immediate postwar years had seen an outpouring of testimonial literature that brought to light the “central tragedy of deportation” and legitimized Rousset's own endeavors (27–8, 19). After his 1949 controversial public Appeal to “fellow deportees” to investigate the USSR's “concentrationary universe” that angered the French communist and nonaligned left, Rousset set out to found the CICRC (46). The organization included French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, and German delegates whose work, unbeknownst to them, would be funded by the CIA—a “discovery” that Kuby judiciously does not center for it never determined the organization's agenda and was, in fact, instrumentalized by Rousset (87–92).

It was not anticommunism that necessarily drove those who joined Rousset in this enterprise but a genuine desire to prevent the kind of state violence that the camps had embodied. The first challenge for the CICRC members was therefore to define what constituted a “concentrationary regime”: rejecting the “rhetoric of rights” and, in agreement with Rousset's valorization of experience as the foundation for witnessing, the organization affirmed that only “Nazi survivors” could become “expert witnesses” because their own acumen was rooted in “one's own past bodily and psychic sufferings” (5, 18). Driven by this “sensory, intuitive formulation” of the camp experience, they ultimately settled on a minimal, almost vague, definition of camps as systems of imprisonment characterized by “arbitrary privation of liberty … massive forced labor for profit of the State” and “inhumane conditions of detention” (98, 96). This definition shaped the CICRC's mission as it staged show trials and investigated possible concentrationary regimes in Western Europe and beyond. It also revealed the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the organizations’ vision and how universalizing rhetoric has ambiguous effects.

Kuby carefully recounts the CICRC's various initiatives, their ambitions, and their results. Its first major public endeavor was the 1951 show trial against the Soviet Union for “crimes against humanity” that Rousset hoped would do what the Nuremberg Trial had failed to (110). It then set out to investigate other instances of concentrationary regimes, first in Franco's Spanish prisons and Greece in 1952, as well as in colonial Tunisia in 1953 and the People's Republic of China in 1956 (135–53, 167–78). Again, the Cold War loomed large upon these decisions. Rousset's obsession with communism led to his insistence, over and above the protests from other members, to investigate China, just as it fueled his ambition to have the CICRC occupy the “global stage” and seek a permanent place at the United Nations (157, 165). By detailing each investigation, Kuby is able to reveal how the organization's “minimal definition” and obsession with “the resonant traces of the recent German past” would always prove unsatisfactory because it did not allow for a nuanced evaluation of the many different ways state violence could take shape (147–8). Indeed, the CICRC found that Spain and Greece's regimes were of concern but did not meet the definition (152). This fundamental contradiction became glaring when the commission set out in 1957 to investigate the conditions in colonial Algeria in the midst of a brutal war, an investigation that led to the organization's demise: the CIA stopped its funding and the investigators, who included Chauffier and Tillion, found the enterprise nonsensical and politically myopic (193–4). The organization could never acknowledge colonial violence. In fact, as Kuby explains, the “commission was never likely to condemn a western colonial regime as concentrationnaire” (171).

Most important, Kuby shows how dissolving difference between Nazi and communist violence and the refusal to attend to the realities and distinctiveness of colonial violence could only lead to the organization's failure. Realities were always more complicated than Rousset's “binary” logic allowed (7, 136, 224). While the organization claimed to be cosmopolitan, Rousset's own definition established a strict hierarchy of victims in which only the “political deportee” was recognized. Because his universalizing vision flattened differences between the Nazi and communist regimes, Jewish Holocaust survivors who were “racial deportees” had no place in his vision, nor were they permitted to join the organization, unless they had been resisters (98–107). Even so, as Kuby notes, two of its most energetic contributors were in fact Jewish: lawyer Théo Bernard and Holocaust historian Léon Poliakov (102–3, 183–4). Moreover, unlike the “ordinary witness” that came to occupy center stage at the Eichmann trial, in the CICRC only “expert witnesses” could speak (18). Political definitions shaped moral categories. Here the organization's refusal to recognize the Jewish experience of Nazism and to confront the realities of colonial violence revealed the difficulties of claiming a “transnational moral obligation” grounded in one particular form of violence against which all others were compared. They would always pale in comparison.

Rather than investigating the formal structure of witnessing or its figurations, both authors demonstrate how historicization allows us to grasp the contingent and contradictory manner in which these categories have been imagined and deployed. In fact, they very deliberately turn away from formal, categorical, or universalizing theorizing of trauma and testimony that Dominick Lacapra warned against.Footnote ¹³ Instead, they begin from the founding principle that, as Ari Joskowicz has shown, the “act of witnessing” is a complicated and at times paradoxical endeavor always implicated in other (political) logics.Footnote ¹⁴ They offer a critical history of morality and its political effects without resorting to the kinds of “domesticating and reductive forms of contextualization” that have occasionally worried some intellectual historians.Footnote ¹⁵ Dean explains that she has chosen a genealogical approach in order to explore the making of a “moral” category at different historical moments and to examine how each deployment reflected a particular conceptual and discursive regime. In a similar manner, Kuby is interested in the “operative categories of analysis and judgment that were available to the era's” historical actors (13).

Both authors offer a compelling analysis of the ways affect and emotion shaped the political and moral language of the twentieth century—an object of analysis that is less familiar to intellectual history. Dean and Kuby demonstrate how an attention to the historical nature of emotion and experience can highlight the (ambiguous) cultural and intellectual role of affect in these debates and how it defines who can be seen as victim and therefore witness of massacres and genocide. Taking seriously the work of emotions therefore allows both authors to historicize witnessing as conceptual category and narrative strategy. As Dean explains, during Tehlirian's 1921 trial, the “defendant's distress over what he said he witnessed” shaped understandings of Tehlirian as a quasi-heroic “avenger” driven by anguish, despite the fact he had not directly experienced or witnessed the genocide himself (41). For Dean, these interwar trials transformed distant victim figures into witnesses of unspeakable suffering within a European nationalist and imperialist framework (58). In an echo of this interwar discourse, Kuby explains that “CICRC participants put forward a framework for activism grounded in visceral bodily invocations of World War Two's atrocities” (4–5). Here, despite historical continuities, World War II brought about an epistemological break in the ways suffering was conceptualized: long before the Eichmann trial, emotions and personal experience anchored models of suffering humanity, but they did so unevenly (Kuby, 224–5). The subject of empathy, however, was not always the same: Dean shows how the Eichmann trial inaugurated the recognition of psychological suffering while Kuby's analysis reveals how CICRC members believed in a sovereign (albeit traumatized) self. This may seem less surprising for post-1945 France, where phenomenology shaped much of the theorizing of the nature of justice, politics, and colonial violence, from Frantz Fanon to Simone de Beauvoir, while psychoanalysis troubled assumptions about the sovereign self.Footnote ¹⁶

It is therefore no accident that both works begin as French histories. In the last decade, a number of pioneering works have explored post-1945 French and francophone aftereffects of violence and the emergence of discourses of humanitarianism.Footnote ¹⁷ Most of these interrogations of the French and European postwar relation between past and present have usually turned to the question of memory.Footnote ¹⁸ A number of scholars, such as Michael Rothberg, have argued for a “rethinking of memory” that is not “involved in a competition of scarce resources.”Footnote ¹⁹ Rothberg's compelling analysis of what he calls “multidirectional memory”—namely the “interplay of disparate acts of remembrance” (notably of the Holocaust and decolonization) that productively reveals what would otherwise remain silenced—has inspired much scholarship on post-1945 intellectual, literary, political, and visual production. However, as historians have long shown, memory is best understood as a “discursive site” that is never as stable, coherent, or fixed as we imagine it.Footnote ²⁰ Turning exclusively to memory has meant flattening the more ambivalent ways it functions. Kuby illustrates this well with her careful attention to the ways the Cold War shaped different “memory regimes” (62). She demonstrates how the CICRC's “rigid equation between past and present” reveals the limits of “comparative frameworks” while Dean similarly highlights how witnessing emerged out of particular, sometimes pragmatic, concerns (Kuby, 9, 19). Both Kuby and Dean demonstrate that, in contrast to what Rothberg and others have argued, the imbrication of different memorial sites is not necessarily “productive” (Kuby, 62).Footnote ²¹ Moral figures depend upon normative definitions. Heroic models cannot accommodate those who cannot be translated into such redemptive figures. They narrow the possibility of recognition for those, like “racial deportees” (that is, Jewish deportees and survivors), who, in the postwar era, were neither central nor legitimate in memories of World War II and understandings of Nazism. Because memory is a political instrument that functions in contingent and complicated ways, shifting over time and requiring both recognition and silencing, it may be more productive to ask a different set of historical questions.

To do so, both authors propose “minor histories” of some sort: they focus on what could, for the most part, be considered “failures” and “trivial” anecdotes in canonical accounts of the role of law, justice, and human rights.Footnote ²² Dean explains that the trials she examines have remained “insignificant for the development of legal norms and tangential to legal history because they left little mark on law-making” (11). She turns to the Eichmann trial in order to provincialize its canonical role in the making of the “era of the witness.”Footnote ²³ Kuby's more narrowly focused study tells the story of an organization that floundered after just over a decade of existence, riven by conceptual and ethical contradictions that had haunted it since the beginning. In the same manner, the CICRC's mock trials, she explains, “contributed nothing to the development of jurisprudence of legal doctrine” (11). The ultimate failure of the CICRC and the ineffectiveness of the trials Dean examines show why definitions matter and why narratives shape the conditions of legibility for subjects of violence. It was the incredibly vague definition of a “concentration camp” that brought the CICRC's demise: colonial violence challenged its narrow and rigid understanding of state violence. Because, as Dean reminds us, “all trials mobilize moral, political, and social assumptions to the advantage of one side or the other,” they allowed for the legitimation of particular narratives structured through witness testimonies that could never be quite contained by the “courtroom dramas” that had called them forth (62–3). Like the CICRC's mock trials, these are legal fictions that produce the very normative categories they claim to call upon. Examining these “minor” histories therefore allows a critical examination of the ways World War II, Nazism, and the Holocaust have become central to Western understandings of genocide, mass murder, and state violence (Dean, 13). It also raises the question of what the “Western moral imagination” means: if, as Lisa Lowe has argued, we are to examine “how categories [of meaning] are accepted or seen as given,” this requires attending to the fact that Western moral imagination was forged within the framework and practice of settler colonialism and imperialism. It may also complicate arguments regarding the deployment of the witness.Footnote ²⁴

The question of the colonial necessarily troubles genealogies of (Western) state violence and persecutions. It also too often remains the “unthinkable” despite the constitutive nature of the colonial in modern political thought.Footnote ²⁵ The category of the witness (and its necessary foundation, the victim) emerged through and alongside the deployment of racial categories undergirding colonial governance that often prevented the assimilation of colonial violence into the register of immoral and illegitimate state violence. For instance, one might ponder how Tehlirian and Schwarzbard could become the “locus of human conscience” in ways that the other colonial subjects could not (Dean, 39). This was the case for Udham Singh. A Punjabi revolutionary radical, Singh assassinated former lieutenant governor general of Punjab Reginald O'Dwyer on 13 March 1940, and later explained that he had done so to avenge his people.Footnote ²⁶ O'Dwyer had authorized the infamous 1919 Amritsar massacre at Jallianwala Bagh where, officially, 379 Indians were murdered by the British army.Footnote ²⁷ At his 1940 trial, Singh proudly claimed his gesture as a protest against the violence of British imperialism. Imperial violence, however, did not become a subject at the trial, nor did he ever become legible as a “righteous avenger.” Singh was executed on 13 July 1940. If the figure of the witness was predicated upon the recognition of the category of the human and of suffering, these works raise (without fully answering) the question of how such discursive iterations were necessarily constituted through a colonial and postcolonial imaginary.

Rousset, again, provides a fascinating illustration of this contradiction. Not only did Rousset never recognize the distinctive experience of Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities, but what Dean calls his valorization of “abjection” as the central feature of the camp experience would make it difficult to encounter the nature and forms of colonial violence that existed in colonial Algeria (85–7). Kuby is careful to explain that Rousset was not ignorant of colonial realities and had in fact always been committed to anticolonialism. Yet his narrow conception of suffering meant he could never see Théo Bernard's experience in the French transit and prison camp of Drancy, or Algerian prisons as belonging to his universalist, exclusive, and rigid definition of camps. Here, one would have wished for more sustained interrogation of Rousset's own thought and contradictions on this particular question in order to grasp how he reconciled his principled anticolonialism with his inability to consider colonial Algeria as an instance of concentrationary state violence. One wonders too how the Catholic discourse of morality, empathy, and embodied suffering that determined many French intellectuals’ politics in relation to the “horror” of Nazism and of colonial violence (and shaped how deportation was understood more generally then) may have played a role in what could be heard in Cold War France.Footnote ²⁸ This does not take away from but may have illuminated Kuby's larger argument on the ways the “confrontation with colonization” undid his antitotalitarian framework (4).

The question of Western imagination's operative categories becomes especially important in order to illuminate how one becomes a legible subject of violence. Memories of the Holocaust and of colonial violence were necessarily shaped by the history of colonial racism and anti-Semitism and their imbrication, which haunted diagnosis and denunciations of state violence. Such deployment raises the question of the relationality of these categories and how they shape normative definitions of morality. Kuby traces how “politicized Cold War constructions” dictated the (French) elaboration of Nazi victims before the Holocaust had emerged as a legitimate object of memory, in contrast to the trope of the Nazi “horror” of deportation, which dominated (10).Footnote ²⁹ Both Dean and Kuby show how the Jewish victim of the Holocaust came to be a legible subject of empathy. The recognition of Holocaust survivors had been made possible through a reexamination of the nature of the Nazi regime. This contrasted with the fact that, as Dean argues but does not elaborate, “by the 1960s, there was a thin consensus against the violence colonized victims had suffered but not against the colonial regimes that perpetrated it” (6).

In her last chapter, Dean examines the ways the generic victim later replaced the Holocaust witness, revealing the “fragility” of its legitimation (144). The generic victim remains disembodied and faceless—a far cry from its previous instantiations. It is no longer a singular figure but occupies center stage alongside those who testify to violence inflicted upon others, the counterwitness. How these might be forged in a particular postcolonial world and its ambivalent figuration of racialized victims may also shed light on the fact that such generic figures anchored a particularly powerful and widespread discourse of human rights that some, like Samuel Moyn, have dated precisely to the post-Eichmann moment of the 1970s.Footnote ³⁰ Unfortunately, Dean does not investigate any further the meaning of such discursive configuration of normative and legitimate categories of morality. Dean's genealogical approach may therefore, in fact, unwittingly flatten the possible ways in which a consideration of colonial violence might complicate her argument and expand her analysis of the possibilities and limits of the moral witness and its contemporary incarnations.

How might stories of the emergence of the witness be further decolonized? Dean has convincingly shown how the contemporary figure of the witness who is shaped by “post-traumatic memory” has become the simultaneous measure and frame for reckoning with state violence, genocide, and human rights violations (though she discusses few trials in her last chapter, focusing instead on critical and scholarly debates on these issues). How should we consider non-Western deployments of the figure of the witness and how they are implicated and sometimes even complicit in the political performance of human rights categories? What happens when witnesses are few? Or when testimony can only emerge within the constraints of particular legal (and national) regimes? Instances beyond the Western scene have shown how national considerations still determine the borders and limits of human rights discourse. This was precisely the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which ritualized witness testimonies so that they end with (rhetorical) forgiveness to the nation. It has also, strikingly, been the case for trials such as the 2009–10 trial of former Khmer official Kaing Guek Eav (or “Duch”) for his responsibility for the atrocities committed at the Tuol Sleng Prison (or S21) during the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.Footnote ³¹ Here, as Maria Elander demonstrates, rather than acting as the “living record” that prosecutor Gideon Haussner had called for during the Eichmann trial, survivors who testified at the trial could only be made “intelligible in and through legal language.”Footnote ³² They could, that is, only “bear witness to the event of the law.”Footnote ³³ The Cambodian example illustrates very well the enduring contradictions of the universalism claimed by a “western moral imagination” that has shaped the human rights discourse of morality. It suggests that “the forgetting” of settler colonial violence still haunts the conventional story of the emergence of human rights and conceptualizations of human suffering.Footnote ³⁴

I bring up the Cambodian trials because they illustrate how European intellectual history might situate itself in relation to geographical and critical fields that have also explored questions of war, colonial and postcolonial violence, and their complicated entanglements—specifically in East Asian and transpacific studies. These questions were embedded in particular national and transnational contexts. They nonetheless demand defamiliarizing of the conventional narratives of the West's twentieth century. Indeed, they contribute to what Lisa Yoneyama has called for, namely “expos[ing] the epistemic violence of the universalist human rights discourse and the way it institutes the intimate relation between power/law and knowledge.”Footnote ³⁵ This is not a call to “globalize” intellectual history, as some have already argued, but to interrogate the very categories deployed in analyses of the work of modernity and the “linear temporality” that still structures most histories of the West.Footnote ³⁶ Such attention to conceptual decolonizing resists flattening the analysis of political imaginaries. It extends the recent work, for instance, that has sought to place the Holocaust in relation to the global scene of violence. It also broadens the scope and scene of post-1945 history. Dean's and Kuby's work certainly gestures to the ways these histories might be written. They point to the ways the universalizing discourse that emerged in the post-1945 and post-1970s decades has shaped contemporary categories of morality and meaning, but also illuminates their exclusions and ambiguities. To borrow Yoneyama's words again, both works explore the “critical divide between the legibility and illegibility of violence as an integral part of World War Two and Cold War knowledge formations.”Footnote ³⁷ They demonstrate how intellectual history may challenge twentieth-century historiographical givens while refusing any moralism or the temptation of presentism.