Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (review)

Do oppressed peoples deserve recognition by dominant groups? Is recognition at the heart of political struggle? Judging from mainstream discourses of oppression, strategies of emancipation, and the assumptions undergirding calls to integrate multicultural perspectives in critiques of contemporary life, this seems to be the case. But as Kelly Oliver argues in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, the notion that recognition grants fundamental human dignity and agency is flawed. In her view, conceiving human relations in terms of self and other, and understanding recognition as something the oppressed deserve are themselves stances that derive from the pathology and psychic damage oppression engenders.