ABSTRACT
This chapter explores various forms of eye-witness narrative constructed and performed in the aftermath of trauma encounters, considering the complex social, biological, rhetorical, psychological and cultural networks along which such narratives must travel in order to generate and disseminate meaning and, potentially, new forms of knowledge. Testimonial forms of storytelling that attest to traumatic experience are as old as humanity itself. Definitions of testimony orbit around two key characteristics: evidence and attestation. The age of testimony has arisen alongside a century of global conflict in which eyewitness accounts in real time and in archival material including letters, diaries, photographs and other personal ephemera constitute vital building blocks for the writing of history. The history and reception of slave narratives demonstrates the pressures upon testimony that challenges the accepted rhetoric of powerful institutions. The relationship between history, truth-telling and all forms of testimony is therefore complex and interactive, simultaneously challenging, contradictory and symbiotic.
