Introduction to Section 3

The chapters in this third section document the ways that Western imperial violence has left a path of gendered destruction in its wake. They center the voices of narrators and address stories of wartime trauma and survival. Almost uniformly, the authors of these chapters assert that trauma is survived through human interaction and connection, through breaking silence and, as Theresa de Langis makes clear, “speaking private memory to public power.” ¹ Questions of feminism and oral history methods are explicitly addressed but decentered as speculative analysis about histories of sexual violence, which move gendered survival to the foreground. Interpersonal communication through storytelling, witnessing, and testifying are methods of survival rather than mechanisms for the production of data. Memory politics are pushed to the side in favor of, as Stéphane Martelly concludes, “allowing us to think in an opaque and broken way about opaque and broken things.” ²