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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.
List of contents
Introduction Jane Kilby and Antony RowlandPart I: Witnessing in Psychoanalysis and History 1. History, Memory, Testimony Dan Stone 2. Afer the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History Cathy Caruth 3. Fire in the Archive: The Alignment of Witnesses Shoshanam Felman 4. The Public Secret Robert Eaglestone 5. Witnessing, Evidence, and Testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Kirsten Campbell Part II: Beyond Western Testimony 6. Hannah Arendt's Message of Ill-Tidings: Statelessness, Rights and Speech Lyndsey Stonebridge 7. Professional Witnessing in Rwanda: Human Rights and Creative Responses to Genocide Zoe Norridge 8. Hybrid Testimony Matthew Boswell 9.A Natural History of Testimony? Rick Crownshaw Part III: The Enduring Aesthetic: Literature and Testimony 10. Holocaust Memory and the Critique of Violence in Caryl Churchhill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza Stef Craps 11. Living Among the Ruins of Memory and Language: Jorge Semprún and Testimony Ursula Tidd 12. Impossible Histories: Adorno and the Question of Lyric David Miller 13. "The writer begins in the towers": Don DeLillo, 9/11 and the Ethics of Testimony Paula Martin Salván
About the author
Antony Rowland is Professor of Contemporary English Literature in the College of Arts at University of Lincoln, UK.
Jane Kilby is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at University of Salford, UK.
