KL: Irene Kacandes: Future Perfect or New Europeans

In this talk, I will review my concept of co-witnessing (Kacandes Talk Fiction 2001) and then position us, vis-à-vis some trenchant examples, for a group discussion about the current “refugee” situation:  Which stories, which traumas exactly, are in the news? who is authorizing him/herself or is being authorized to co-witness to those stories? Who is listening?  What events and peoples are being left out altogether?  And the culminating question behind my title:  What is the future perfect—here I obviously mean in the grammatical sense, with a play on the words’ connotations—of that selective co-witnessing (or lack of it)?  When such and such will have happened, what will Europe’s future be?  A specific component that interests me passionately concerns whether some individuals will be allowed to have become “new Europeans.”