Witnesses of the invisible: Telling Death Stories in Mexican New Media

This book chapter looks at how journalists and artists are responding to the ethical and aesthetical challenges of representing violence and immigration issues in contemporary Mexico. Moving between literary theory and media studies, this piece of research explores testimonial narratives in transmedia collective projects. It is argued that these projects create images of the ‘real’ which are not always coherent with the documentary intentions of their authors. The chapter looks at the topic as part of a global phenomenon: the bodily human experience of confronting cases of extreme violence in contemporary societies, which is described as ‘horrorism’ (Cavarero 2009) and as a ‘posthuman’ experience (Braidotti 2013). By focusing on the intersection between identity, eye-witnessing and storytelling in audiovisual materials and internet-based works, the chapter explores current notions of authorship and new Latin American theoretical approaches to digital culture, such as Cristina Rivera Garza’s idea of ‘necrowriting’ (2013).