ABSTRACT

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

ByJane Kilby, Antony Rowland

part |95 pages

Witnessing in Psychoanalysis and History

chapter |14 pages

History, Memory, Testimony

ByDan Stone

chapter |17 pages

After the End

Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History
ByCathy Caruth

chapter |21 pages

Fire in the Archive

The Alignment of Witnesses
ByShoshana Felman

chapter |14 pages

The Public Secret

ByRobert Eaglestone

chapter |27 pages

Testimonial Modes

Witnessing, Evidence and Testimony Before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1
ByKirsten Campbell

part |66 pages

Beyond Western Testimony

chapter |16 pages

Hannah Arendt's Message of Ill-Tidings

Statelessness, Rights and Speech
ByLyndsey Stonebridge

chapter |15 pages

Professional Witnessing in Rwanda

Human Rights and Creative Responses to Genocide
ByZoe Norridge

chapter |16 pages

Beyond Autobiography

Hybrid Testimony and the Art of Witness
ByMatthew Boswell

chapter |17 pages

A Natural History of Testimony?

ByRick Crownshaw

part |49 pages

The Enduring Aesthetic

chapter |15 pages

Living Among the Ruins of Memory and Language

Jorge Semprún and Testimony
ByUrsula Tidd

chapter |8 pages

Impossible Histories

Adorno and the Question of Lyric
ByDavid Miller

chapter |10 pages

‘The Writer Begins in the Towers'

Don DeLillo, 9/11 and the Ethics of Testimony
BySalván Paula Martín