Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous last title (2003). Some have argued that testimonial or documentary accounts cannot represent the effects of destruction without courting these perils.

In the late first century CE, probably under the rule of the Roman Emperor Titus, the Greek Bithynian Sophist Dio Chrysostom traveled to the city of Rhodes to scold its citizens for their treatment of statues. These were not religious statues, nor were they exemplary works of art. They were certainly not the marble statues commissioned by wealthy individuals for private display. In what would be known as his “Rhodian Oration,” Dio interceded on behalf of honorific portrait statues, erected by the city to honor those who had provided public gifts or services. This exchange of gift and honor is now referred to as euergetism (good works) or benefactions—a system of finance and governance whereby individuals subsidized public functions (such as religious festivals) and the construction of public facilities (such as the baths) or provided other gifts and services to the city. According to Dio, Rhodes was reusing honorific portrait statues—authorizing artisans to chisel out the names of those previously honored and reinscribe the statues' bases with the names of new honorees. As Dio argues, the city was, effectively, plundering its own statues.

In a famous essay, the agnostic bertrand russell hailed tragedy as the highest instantiation of human freedom. tragedy results from human beings' persistence in the conscious, imaginative representation of the plight of humanity in the inhumane universe. Tragedy “builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; … within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty” (53-54). Russell's “servile captains of tyrant Fate” are the instruments by which metaphysical compulsion tortures humans—Death and Pain and Despair. Man, instead of allowing himself to be terrorized as “the slave of Fate,” creates tragedy “to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life” (57). By transforming the human condition into tragic art, humans create their own world of resistance, in which they can be the truly free “burghers” of a dauntless new city-state of the mind.

Globe magazine featured a “world exclusive,” not even a year into Barack Obama's first term as president of the united states, charging him with homosexual infidelity and his wife, Michelle, with coordinating a cover-up (“Obama Gay Cover-Up!”). The magazine followed up two months later, asserting that Obama's lover resided in the White House and was none other than his personal aide, Reggie Love (“Obama's Gay Lover”). Globe, of course, is a dime-store rag whose mission is to sensationalize. I refer to it here because it is perhaps the most relentless among a slew of white-run media outlets that consistently and unfavorably queer Obama, amplifying his nonnormative masculine traits and then, on that basis, assigning him a deceitful, nonheteronormative sexuality.

“I was sure it would make a great story, first for telling and then for writing down,” writes harriet MCbryde Johnson, explaining why she accepts an invitation from Peter Singer to a debate at Princeton University (2003). Initially, Johnson, a disability-rights activist and lawyer who has a neuromuscular disease, is unsure how to interact with Singer, whose philosophy of preferential utilitarianism argues that it is ethical to kill babies born with severe disabilities. Johnson first encounters Singer at an event at the College of Charleston, and she looks to the rules of decorum to help her decide how to handle the situation. When she sees Singer talking to friends, she considers leaving before even being introduced to him. “Hereabouts,” however, “the rule is that if you're not prepared to shoot on sight, you have to be prepared to shake hands. I give Singer the three fingers on my right hand that still work. ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Singer. I'm here for Not Dead Yet.‘ I want to think he flinches just a little” (204 [2005]).

For many commentators on tragic temporality, tragic time is the “now,” binding the characters—the actors of the catastrophe—in the anxiety and horror of a blinding present moment. As Northrop Frye observed in his Fools of Time, “The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation” (3). In performance, in particular, that presentness feels relentless: as Stanley Cavell writes, tragic performance “demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time” (93). This sense of the present mimics our everyday sense of how we live in this world: in David Kastan's words, “Tragic time is, then, the experiential time of human life—a time, that like life itself to which it is inextricably tied, is directional, irreversible, and finite” (80).

Since the shift from modernist, formalist, and old historicist methodologies of mid-twentieth-century criticism, tragedy has been a problematic term. In the earlier age of the American New Critics and their British analog F. R. Leavis, it was one of the classic instances of a “timeless” literary category that embodied the “news that stays news” that Ezra Pound thought epitomized the literary. Tragedy was an example par excellence of a genre tied to a permanent human condition—death. As such, however, it was also largely taken for granted in the practice of the New Critics, American and British—one of the large-scale literary categories that could be safely ignored in favor of the strategies of close reading and detecting complex ironies. At times the whole project of defining a larger genre was simply ruled out of order. Kenneth Muir spoke for many in this critical generation when he wrote, “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy. There are only Shakespearean tragedies” (12).

Translingual writing is all the rage among scholars and teachers of writing studies in the united states. The last decade has seen a plethora of publications on this topic, many of which have received prestigious awards, and conferences have highlighted translingual writing and related topics. It seems that translingual writing has established itself as an intellectual movement. The attention to language in United States writing studies—a field that has traditionally found ways to dissociate itself from language—is a welcome change. At the same time, I am uneasy about the term translingual writing because, as the enthusiasm for this new and evolving intellectual endeavor continues to grow, the notion of translingual writing seems to be uncritically accepted and celebrated.