Testimonial Literature Research Articles

Justicia y testimonio entre imagen y palabra. Bases para un estudio de la fotografía de los movimientos guerrilleros en Centroamérica

This paper presents and discusses a conceptual perspective on the relationship between documentary photography and testimonial literature. The conceptual perspective focuses on the performative aspect of language, in the case of testimonial literature (speech act), and raises the possibility of understanding documentary photographic images from this same performative aspect, as an image act. This theoretical procedure involves a philosophical assessment of our concepts of justice and of the foundations for an analysis of the representation of political violence, in images and words. From this literary and photographic plane, it is possible to bring forth another justice and another study of images of guerrilla armed conflicts in Central America.

The Final Solution in Early Polish Testimonial Fiction: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Witnessing World

While early Jewish literary testimonies of the Holocaust have received a remarkable amount of critical attention, very little has been said about the early literary responses of the Poles, the closest witnesses to the disaster. The location of the Holocaust, which took place mainly on the Polish territory, placed the Poles between the victims and the perpetrators. As the testimonial literature studied here shows, the borderline witnessing situation produced an emotional and ethical crisis, because the reality of the Final Solution put to test the humanistic fortitude of the writers. This paper examines the impact of the Jewish plight in literary testimonies in Józef Mackiewicz's ‘Ponary – “Baza”’ (1945), which records the liquidation of a transport of Jews in Ponary, Tadeusz Borowski's ‘This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ (1946), which describes a transport of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a narrative composed of three 1947 stories,‘The Landscape that Survived Death’, ‘Victory’, and ‘Returned Kindness’ of three stories by Kornel Filipowicz, which depict the Jewish search to survive. These first person testimonials focus on the narrators’ response of emotional numbness and moral compromise. The concreteness of the Final Solution dehumanized not only the perpetrators and the victims; the bestiality of the former and the degradation of the latter affected the humanity of the witnesses because their disengagement from the victims signified acquiescence with the genocidal scheme of the German executioners. The testimonial narratives attest to the narrators’ twofold objective to recount the reality that they witnessed and to examine its effect on their psyche. Whereas the testimonial component of the texts demonstrates the narrators’ sense of obligation to record the facts, the literary component of confession communicates the need to reckon with the effects of discontent, shame and guilt of the wartime experience. The humanistic aspect of the stories lies in their narrators’ recognition of their emotional detachment from the victims as emotional failure and ethical transgression.

Prosecutors’ perspectives on using recorded child witness interviews about abuse as evidence-in-chief

Over the past two decades, numerous English-speaking countries have implemented legislative reform to allow children’s investigative interviews about abuse to be electronically recorded and made available for use as evidence-in-chief at trial. Prior evaluations suggest that the procedure has both advantages and disadvantages for prosecutors. This study adopted a constructive approach by eliciting contemporaneous and detailed feedback from 19 Crown prosecutors about the challenges of using electronically recorded interviews as evidence-in-chief and suggestions for how these challenges may be addressed. Thematic analysis revealed concerns in several areas; (a) the quality of questioning in interviews, (b) the jurors’ engagement with the witness, (c) the sense of formality and solemnity of evidence, (d) the clarity of the evidence and (e) the child’s preparedness for cross-examination. These themes are discussed within the context of the broader child testimony literature and recommendations for improvement are offered.

Elena Poniatowska: Then, Now and Forever

Elena Poniatowska’s extraordinary literary output and her delightful personality justly merit her position as Mexico’s most dearly loved and highly respected author. I consider myself truly fortunate to have had the luxury of intensively studying her writings during the process of my doctoral dissertation. In this essay, I recall my introduction to Poniatowska’s work, her impact on my postgraduate studies, and how I, as a historian, employ her testimonial literature in my classes and the teaching of undergraduate students in the United Kingdom.

Témoignages fictionnels au féminin : une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne by Névine El Nossery (review)

Reviewed by: Témoignages fictionnels au féminin : une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne by Névine El Nossery Anna Rocca El Nossery, Névine. Témoignages fictionnels au féminin : une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne. Amsterdam/New York : Rodopi, 2012. Pp 237. ISBN 9789042035928. $65 (Paper). In this comparative study, Nevine El Nossery addresses the works of four Algerian female author–Assia Djebar, Latifa Ben Mansour, Leïla Marouane and Malika Mokeddem–by exploring the hybrid literary genres and narrative strategies used to capture the horrors of the Algerian civil war during the 1990s. Determined to understand how literature can translate violence, El Nossery rigorously tackles thorny questions surrounding the relationship between history, literature, ethics and testimony; the borders between fictional and factual literary production; and the differences between testimonial literature and fictionalized testimonials. El Nossery argues that these four authors resort to fictionalized testimonials as a way to fill both the blanks of the official Algerian history and the gaps between experienced and represented trauma. Fictionalized [End Page 102] testimonials, El Nossery explains, should not be confused with testimonial literature. Even if both share the ethical need to acknowledge marginalized voices and to correct the mainstream history, fictionalized testimonials favor an aesthetic approach and the writer’s personal and intimate awareness. The attention to aesthetics, El Nossery precises, by no means interferes with the authenticity of these authors’ texts. On the contrary, working around truth by way of symbolic fictionalized narratives seems to be the only option for these four Algerian writers. According to El Nossery, they confront the atrocities of one of the most ferocious civil wars of our times and explain how women have been targeted and accused of being the origin of societal decadence, while demonstrating that fiction can sometimes be closer to the truth than historical reports. In addition to these authors’ writings, the study takes into consideration journalistic and autobiographical accounts by other female Algerian writers in the 1990s, which allows El Nossery to show the juxtapositions, intersections and porosities between the genres of fictionalized and factual testimonials. The study is organized into five chapters. The first chapter is an introductory excursus on the Islamic historical, political and theological tenets that incubated the fratricidal slaughters in Algeria. In the following four chapters, El Nossery analyzes the ways in which each author chose specific perspectives to respond to Islamist fundamentalism and at the same time address the hypocrisy of Algeria’s official history fabricated in the forty years following independence. In chapter two, El Nossery contends that Assia Djebar recurs to a historiographical metalanguage, masterfully weaving together history and fiction as well as ethics and literature in order to write as close as possible to the Algerian civil war’s victims. Rather than commemorating fatalities, Djebar aims to recreate the victims’ stories while alive, by emphasizing women’s courage and defiance towards old and new oppressors. According to El Nossery, Algerian women’s stories ultimately allow Djebar to insert fragments of her own personal life, too. Chapter three is devoted to Malika Mokeddem’s writings. El Nossery claims that during the 1990s, Mokeddem’s narrative style was provocative, direct, trenchant and raw, flawlessly combining fiction and historical events. Mokeddem’s leitmotif of women’s nomadism became a symbolic reference attesting to women’s rebellion, emancipation and dissidence but also calling for the reader’s political awareness and engagement. In so doing, Mokeddem rewrote the Algerian civil war by showing how testimony and literature are two complementary ways of writing. Chapter four deals with the theme of rape in time of war and its historical denial. Leïla Marouane’s writings and other journalistic and autobiographical accounts are analyzed. El Nossery posits that Marouane’s baroque style combining tragic real events and burlesque is the perfect example of fictional testimonial. Thematic and textual violence rendered by macabre and comic situations allows Marouane to contextualize and focus on the devastating effects of rape and sexual repression, among which are women’s dissociation, madness and delirium. In chapter five, El Nossery defines Ben Mansour’s narrative as a scriptothérapie, which is a writing that...

The Return of the Repressed Self: Michał Głowiński's Autobiographical Wartime Writing

In this article, I examine Michal Glowinski’s late-postwar autobiographical writings, arguing that the author’s account of his wartime experience is a manifestation of the return of the repressed and self-censored self. I also examine the relationship between imaginative autobiographical Holocaust literature and Holocaust testimony produced by child survivors, trying to identify the point at which wartime memory surfaces among child survivors and how such memory unfolds. Glowinski’s autobiographical works, in particular The Black Seasons , exhibit features of Holocaust testimonial literature written by child survivors in multiple languages.

Memory as Performance: Fatima Gallaire’s Rimm la Gazelle and Molly des Sables

Fatima Gallaire’s plays from the 1990s belong to the category of testimonial literature: her female protagonists reveal aspects of Algerian women’s restricted lives under shari’a and the negotiations made in the interests of self-autonomy and increased agency. For example, in Princesses , the main character returns to her Algerian homeland after living for an extended period in France. The play describes her seemingly peaceful reception by the townspeople, who later become violent because Princesse has not observed Muslim values in her life abroad. Les Co-épouses illustrates the practice of polygamy and the interactions between a man’s co-wives for mutual protection. As in Princesses , the female characters rely on one another for emotional and even material support as they divulge the difficulties of their daily lives. Besides her plays containing multiple female characters, Fatima Gallaire has written one-act plays in which a single woman performs all the roles: in Rimm la Gazelle , an Algerian-born French woman reminisces as she tells her mother why she will be returning to her birthplace; in Molly des Sables , an Algerian Jewish woman plays 14 different roles as she reveals her psychological maladjustment to her marriage and new country. Relying on Lévinas’s theory of “the face,” Lacan’s concepts of le corps morcelé , and Vygotsky’s ideas on the “external monologue”, Evans analyzes the performance element as a means of revealing trauma and acquiring greater mental health. Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma and research on drama therapy also inform this study. The latter has been shown to be an effective means of beginning the recovery process from catastrophic events: by re-enacting scenes from one’s past, one is able to move the instances “recorded” in the brain from iconic to semantic memory, thereby adding to one’s life story. It is this very process that is healing for the actor in question.

Tabud ja reeglid. Sissevaateid eesti laagriromaani

The article concentrates on Estonian novels depicting Soviet prison camps in the 1940s and 1950s. The goal is to map themes, motifs and characteristics in such novels, concentrating on various taboos and rules in the prison camp environment. For a long time the Soviet prison camp theme was not publicly discussed in Estonia due to political reasons. Texts dealing with prison camps could appear in print only outside the Soviet Union; the way Estonians saw these historical events and hellish experiences were depicted mostly in exile novels. Most notable are the novels by Arved Viirlaid (b. 1922), e.g., Kes tappis Eerik Hormi? ( Who Killed Eerik Horm? ) (1974), Surnud ei loe ( The Dead do not Read ) (1975), Vaim ja ahelad ( Mind and Chains ) (1961). Estonian prison camp novels can be seen as “the literature of testimony”, to use the term by Leona Toker. Dramatic historical events are written down to record the events and to show the inhumane nature of Soviet society. These records of the dramatic past follow certain patterns and create certain self- and hetero-images. A prison camp is a closed territory within a closed territory; prison camps can be seen as small models of Soviet society. Prison camp novels give a detailed view of the environment of the prison camp, its inhabitants and activities. Two central aspects are labour and food; the life of the prisoner whirls around these. The most important thing is to survive, which often leads to moral decline, e.g., stealing, cheating. However, there are lines Estonians do not cross, e.g., cannibalism or homosexual relationships with superiors. Estonians are always depicted as political prisoners (not common criminals) and heterosexuals, while Russians are portrayed mainly as criminals and often also as homosexuals. Another important component of the image of the Estonians is their enterprising spirit and ability to manage even under very difficult conditions. Therefore, several oppositions can be identified, e.g., Estonians vs . Russians; political prisoners vs . criminals; heterosexuals vs . homosexuals; civilized vs . barbaric, etc.

Translating the Revolution: Otherness in Cuban Testimonial Literature

Drawing on existing theories in the field, this paper seeks to explore the issues that surround the translation of Cuban testimonial texts, emphasizing the inevitable portrayal of the Self as an Other. The notion of translation as an articulation of otherness has become a focus of interest in contemporary translation studies. Notwithstanding the worth of the general framework that has emerged as a result, the need for country-specific research is underscored by Cuba’s unique location on the contemporary political map – and its alleged “exceptionalism” – which sets it apart from cultural contexts that have been previously studied. Because of the isolated nature of Cuba, it is important to highlight the gap between the Cuban literature that is published, translated and read outside Cuba, on the one hand, and the Cuban literature that is published and read in Cuba, on the other. The results of bibliographical research and fieldwork indicate that, although publishers and literary experts alike place great emphasis on the significance of otherness, their interest centres on the dissemination of the Cuban experience seen “from inside” (so as to counterbalance Cuban narratives produced by exiles). In doing so, they underscore the “universal nature” of the human experience and play down any alterity that may hinder the translation process.

Inaccuracy and Testimonial Literature: The Case of Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

In his 2001 review essay of three survivor accounts of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), Sody Lay criticizes Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) for historical and cultural inaccuracies, calling Ung’s testimonial text “a sensationalization and over-dramatization of the Killing Fields experience” (“Cambodian” 173). Lay not only accuses Ung of consciously manipulating her story for “the sake of making a buck,” but he also questions her status as a Cambodian: “Given Ung’s lack of memory and her apparent disdain for everything Khmer, it is not only ironic but misrepresentative for her book to be subtitled ‘a daughter of Cambodia remembers’” (181). The Khmer Institute Web site, which Lay co-founded and for which he serves as Executive Director, has published scathing reviews of Ung’s book with similar accusations regarding historical inaccuracies and cultural inauthenticity. One group of reviewers examines a section in First They Killed My Father in which the Ung family takes a trip in the early 1970s to Angkor Wat, pointing out that such a trip was impossible because the area was a battle zone at that time. The reviewers then note that Ung miscalculates Cambodia’s Angkorian period (from approximately the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) when she wrote that “Angkor Wat was built by powerful Khmer kings as monuments of self-glorification in the ninth century and completed three hundred years later” (Ung 67), reducing this seven-hundred-year period to half of its length. The reviewers conclude: “A true ‘daughter of Cambodia’ would not be so careless as to provide such blatantly incorrect information about these [Angkor Wat] temples, as they are an integral part of Khmer heritage and pride” (Hor, Lay, and Quinn). However, such harsh criticism does not take into account the impact on survivors such as Ung of losing family members, being separated from their homeland, and struggling with a new language and culture in an attempt to build a new home thousands of miles away from Cambodia, in a place with unfamiliar customs and rituals. Furthermore, not every Cambodian American has had identical experiences. In attempting to make sense of this controversy, we must explore how to take Lay’s charges into account while still valuing Ung’s memoir. This essay begins with a discussion of the Lay-Ung controversy in the context of the Cambodian diasporic community, paying close attention to the politics of representation and our need for multiple and diverse representations. Teri Shaffer Yamada’s work on Cambodian American autobiography informs the discussion of Ung’s First They Killed

Narrativas armadas: a guerrilha urbana no testemunho de Alex Polari e Herbert Daniel

Este trabalho é fruto de inquietações e reflexões acerca das possíveis relações que a História pode ter com a Literatura, na medida em que há décadas os debates têm se desenvolvido em prol da delimitação de fronteiras entre o discurso historiográfico e os textos literários e, também, do estabelecimento da Literatura como fonte para o desenvolvimento de pesquisas históricas. Pretendemos, aqui, avaliar o gênero da Literatura de Testemunho, através das obras Passagem Para o Próximo Sonho (1982), de Herbert Daniel, e Em Busca do Tesouro (1982), de Alex Polari, que consideramos essenciais para dar ênfase aos novos temas e abordagens que vêm ganhando espaço com o crescente número de trabalhos dedicados a estudar o período em que se constituiu a guerrilha urbana durante a ditadura militar brasileira. Sendo assim, o objetivo deste estudo concentra-se em analisar as representações históricas, sociais, políticas e culturais construídas pelos narradores-testemunha sobre as “esquerdas” brasileiras e o panorama guerrilheiro que se formou no pós 1968 durante o regime militar brasileiro.

What to Read Now: Testimonial Narratives

6 World Literature Today What to Read Now Testimonial Narratives Tobias Hecht Testimonial narrative is at once a discrete literary genre and an acknowledgment of the limits of literature itself. Rather than evoking oppression and brutality as fiction might, testimonial literature lays them bare through the words of those who endure and painfully resist, exalting rather than hiding the rough edges of those written out of history. Biography of a Runaway Slave Miguel Barnet Nick Hill, tr. This is arguably where the testimonial novel was born. Barnet, an anthropologist , interviewed Esteban Montejo in his 103rd year, a man who had lived in Cuba both as a slave and a fugitive slave and who fought in the island’s War of Independence against Spain. The resulting book didn’t fit easily into any existing category of literature or anthropology and came to be known as testimonio. I Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala Rigoberta Menchú Ann Wright, tr. Doubtless the best-known and also most-contested example of testimonio , this work conveys the harrowing facts of being indigenous in Guatemala . A point of entry into testimonial narrative, it is also worth returning to, as it suggests several stories at once—including how the testimonial novel can be riven in two, with the story told by the speaker and the one rendered a text by another ultimately incompatible. The famous controversy that looms over this work, pitting Menchú’s memory against a few facts dug up by a dogged anthropologist, should not distract the reader. Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak Jean Hatzfeld Linda Coverdale, tr. Testimonial literature may have been born in Latin America, but it responds to a human and universal need to bear witness, and in that sense it can flourish in any context. In Life Laid Bare, fourteen survivors of Rwanda’s genocide speak about the weeks of killing, how they survived , and all that was lost. Fourteen sworn statements from Abu Ghraib prisoners reprinted in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) These brief documents sketch the eerie imaginations of the torturer, glimpsed for instance through the bottom of a bag used to cover the prisoner’s head. The view is onto other Iraqi men in women’s panties, a number of objects to be inserted rectally, electricity, a heap of naked bodies (photographed to laughter). That intimate, claustrophobic portrait seems to open out from the grim cells and onto a foreign policy that itself is delirious like a prisoner standing on a small box for five nights. Tobias Hecht is the author of the ethnographic novel After Life. His book At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil won the Margaret Mead Prize. notebook 6 World Literature Today ...

Anne Frank Abroad: The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature

28 World Literature Today essay K nown to the English-speaking world by its translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s diary marks what many regard as the seminal example of testimonial literature. Today, the international fame of the diary is well known; the number of its translations now reaches over sixty. Taking a long journey from its original Dutch, translations of the Diary reach globally into languages such as Farsi, Sinhalese, and Esperanto. Yet little has been documented about its afterlife in these numerous non-European languages. Despite the Diary’s wide circulation, most examinations only focus on the text’s proliferation throughout Europe and North America. Here, I would like to trace the Diary’s circulation outside the West, examining the text’s influence in places like North Korea, Cambodia, Bosnia, Palestine, and Algeria. Looking at the ways a familiar text is interpreted in less-familiar settings not only tells us about the transnational circulation of atrocity testimonies but also tells us something about the way world literature works. Anne Frank Abroad The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature Katherine Wilson “If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made of herself since.” – Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer photo : anne frank fonds basel / anne frank house / getty images may–june 2013 • 29 When we examine the Diary’s foreign translations , we might be surprised to discover unexpected and, at times, disconcerting interpretations of the Diary emerging from areas such as North Korea, Palestine, and Cambodia. The “Anne Frank Translation Project” in Cambodia, for example, has proven to be an important teaching tool used to combat the widespread public belief that mass atrocity is unique to Cambodia. “Genocide did not only happen in Cambodia,” cites the Diary’s Khmer translator, Sayana Ser, in an interview for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s podcast, Voices on Antisemitism. Ser’s mission is to offer Cambodians a way to make sense of the Khmer Rouge genocide within the broader framework of the world history of atrocity: “I think if [Cambodians ] know that genocide has happened in other places, they would not feel like they are the only ones that suffered.” So far, so good—right? You might be more scandalized to learn how the Diary is officially used in North Korea. In 2004 a Dutch film crew gained rare access to cover the Diary’s adoption as a required text in all secondary schools in the nation. They revealed firsthand that the Diary was being used as an allegory to paint then-President George W. Bush as Hitler and the North Koreans as the Jews. As one North Korean student explained in an interview, “According to our respected leader, Kim Jong Il, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the great classics of the world. That is why we read the diary—out of great respect for our leader.” When questioned about what they had learned from reading the Diary, one student stated, “That warmonger Bush is just as bad as Hitler. Because of him we will always live in fear of war.” Another student declared, “For world peace, America will have to be destroyed. Only then will Anne’s dream of peace come true.” The negotiation between the host culture and source culture of a work is complicated— much can arguably be lost in translation. In What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch sees this as a natural attribute of world literature: “The receiving culture can use the foreign material in all sorts of ways: as a positive model for the future development of its own tradition; as a negative case of a primitive, or decadent, strand that must be avoided or rooted out at home; or, more neutrally, as an image of radical otherness against which the home tradition can more clearly be defined.” Damrosch concludes that world literature is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about the work’s source culture.” We may believe that the Diary’s circulation will advance an accurate education about the Holocaust—a value held by...

Autobiografia, autoficção: debate teórico a partir de “El escritor y el otro” de Carlos Liscano

The book El escritor y el otro by the author Carlos Liscano from Uruguay, proposes a deep discussion on the games of fictional creation, and also reflects the possible limits of the authors factual life and its written form. With that starting point, this paper aims to argue how Liscano’s text suggests the problematization between the fiction that appears to be a life story and the mutual contaminations derived from that crossing. In El escritor y el otro both life and writing are fictionalized, acting as a literature that looks inwards, that is self questioning. Beyond that, the book also reveals the diversity of the “I” of a Liscano that inscribes himself as fiction, and at the same time appeals often to self-referentiality, to data recognized as being from the personal life of the public man and also from Uruguay, projecting the desire to wipe off the frontiers between factual and fictional. Therefore, we start from the hypothesis that the stories present in El escritor y el otro are not limited to a testimonial literature neither to a autobiographical literature, but are projected through a script that is assumed to be undecided in terms of gender, in a text that reinvents a life in its words, and outlines the performance of an author and his spectacular image, as a way to mock the writers life and the same speculate form of the own text that he elaborates.

Subjects under Study: Broadening the Perceptions of Future Filmmakers and Film Scholars

Our Contemporary Wars as Opportunities for Educating and My Motivations for Course DevelopmentEach day I am mindful of the fact that I am teaching students during a time of war. The tragedies, the costs of war, and the effects of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan not only matter now, but also will be with us for decades or longer. Even though most of our students are safe within the confines of the United States and have not seen war firsthand, many who come to our campuses have family members, friends, and acquaintances who are, or have been, deployed to these theaters. And with increasing frequency, veterans are joining us in our classrooms as a result of the post-9/11 GI Bill. In light of all of these facts, students often express the desire to understand what current military-service personnel and veterans have experienced. Ultimately, today's conflicts offer educators the opportunity to engage film students in immediate events and experiences that can significantly deepen their understand- ing of the world around them and the subjects they analyze and film.For film educators, current events provide the chance to explore real-world subjects in the classroom, but they also challenge us to incorporate innovative teaching techniques that can help us reach our students. Since many students come to my class with unclear or stereotypical visions of the military-service experience and of war in general, I have crafted a multifaceted pedagogical approach that helps students become fully engaged in analyzing the war film genre so that they can better un- derstand a film subject. In the course, students screen war films, read veteran testimonial literature, interview veterans concerning their military-service experience, invite veterans and their families to speak to our class, and par- ticipate in a variety of service-learning projects that help them contextualize course materials. For those who teach other areas of film studies and film production, this method can facilitate deeper student understanding of a variety of film genres and subjects. For example, if one is teaching a documentary film course, stu- dents may benefit from a similar pedagogical approach that addresses a specific subject, such as urban poverty, educational funding, minority rights, or a variety of other research topics. Thus, this template for a film course that immerses students in a close study of a subject through film, written and oral testimony, and service learning is not limited to an exploration of war alone.Although I caution my students that no one course (and no one film, for that matter) can provide all insights concerning a given subject, the course War, Film, and the Soldier Experi- ence demonstrates that one can more deeply research a topic from many different perspec- tives, which results in a more complete picture of the subject under study. Herein, I present an overview of the pedagogical approach I take in the classroom. Based on David Kolb's concep- tualization of learning styles, it offers particular promise for film faculty who wish not to simply use film to reach students but to utilize other teaching approaches to help film students un- derstand the nuances that must be considered by filmmakers and film scholars who study particular populations or subjects. I provide details concerning how the course is structured and how I intersect the course elements during three different periods of time in the course calendar, and I discuss student feedback per- taining to their stated reasons for enrolling in the course and their overall class experience.Kolb and Learning StylesResearch suggests that students learn in a vari- ety of ways. With this in mind, I have designed War, Film, and the Soldier Experience to ap- peal to a wide variety of learning styles by vary- ing my pedagogical approaches in the class- room. According to Kolb, learning occurs in a cycle comprised of concrete experience (CE), a feeling dimension; reflective observation (RO), a watching dimension; abstract conceptualiza- tion (AC), a thinking dimension; and active ex- perimentation (AE), a doing dimension (Evans, Forney, Guido, Patton, and Renn 138). …

Gazing Abroad, The Chilean Military’s Reading of International Events: Implications for Doctrine, Ideology, and Behavior, 1945–1975

Chile’s Army Academy of War, founded in 1886, established academic study as an integral part of the new professional soldier’s formation. Henceforth officers specialized in different areas of military science and contemplated contemporary armed conflicts as a means to stay abreast of changes in modern warfare. This article, based on institutional publications and testimonial literature, has two principle objectives. First, it highlights the importance of an indigenous intellectual tradition in Chile’s armed forces. Second, it situates the Chilean military in relation to world events from 1960 to 1975 and demonstrates the significance of wars in Vietnam, South Asia, and the Middle East - among other events - for the ideological, strategic, and tactical dispositions of Chilean officers as they overthrew Salvador Allende, responded to the possibility of war with Peru, and implemented a national security doctrine after 1973. Drawing attention to the voice of Chilean military actors as they evaluated armed conflicts and thought about world events demonstrates the importance of this international context for the military’s doctrine and departs from a certain tendency to overlook the indigenous perspective of South American militaries after 1945.

Living the Kindertransport: A Poetic Representation

This article is a poetic rendition of a recorded and transcribed oral life history of John (Hans) Hanauer, a Holocaust-Kindertransport survivor. The aim of the poem is to reproduce in poetic form the experiences of the Kindertransport— the transportation of German-Jewish children, parted from their parents, to England just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Using an arts-based research approach, the poem offers insight into this lesser known Holocaust experience and adds to the literature of Holocaust testimony.

Tortured Bodies, Resilient Souls: Algeria's Women Combatants Depicted by Danièèle Djamila Amrane-Minne, Louisette Ighilahriz, and Assia Djebar

Algerian women participated actively in Algeria's liberation struggle (1954― 1962), but, as Algerian historian Daniele Djamila Amrane-Minne notes, their contribution has often been overlooked by historians and the public at large. Drawing upon the three sources Amrane-Minne cites as areas of omission-fiction, memoirs, historical research-my study addresses two interrelated questions posed by this special issue: To what extent does the search for the truth about the past reveal hidden histories? How do the dynamics of gender intersect with efforts at social restoration and collaboration ? Selections include Amrane-Minne's historical study-originally her doctoral thesis—La guerre d'Algerie (1954―1962), Femmes au combat (1993), Louisette Ighilariz's memoir, Algerienne (2001), and Assia Djebar's novel, La femme sans sepulture [Woman without a Tomb] (2002). Representing diverse genres and introducing multiple voices, these three texts are forms of testimonial literature; each in its way grapples with the physical and psychological demands of intense political engagement.

REPRESENTANDO O IRREPRESENTÁVEL: O TESTEMUNHO DA GUERRA NO “MANUSCRITO CUERVO” DE MAX AUB

Abstract: The literature of testimony has been subject of numerous investigative works both in literary studies as in other areas of knowledge. This kind of literary production, closely related to history, presents itself in the attempt tore present and recover the memory of traumatic experiences in situations that can be termed as catastrophic, for example, those related to the Holocaust. Dealing specifically with Spanish literature, one can say that there are some authors, among them Max Aub, who wrote testimonial works of strongly tone, representing not only the experiences of World War II, but also those related to the Spanish civil war or Franco’s dictatorship. In Manuscrito Cuervo: historia de Jacobo, Max Aub uses literature as an art, to represent the testimony of the experiences that thousands of people in Nazi concentration camps of World War II have undergone. In this report, endowed with irony and built in a very peculiar way, Aub develops a narrative in which the focus from where the horror of concentration camps is seen far from the human, so it is in an inhuman context, the reader is presented a narrator who is not a man but a crow. From these considerations, it can be said that the aim of this work is to develop a reading of the Manuscrito Cuervo that note show the structure of the text helps to represent the unrepresentable, in other words, it tends to observe how the literary art is used to represent the trauma resulting from concentration camp experiences. KEYWORDS: testimony, memory, Spanish literature

The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory

In today's Russia the whole-scale rehabilitation of the Soviet regime and specifically of the figure of Stalin co-exists with a vast and widely available archive of the historical and testimonial literature exhaustively chronicling Stalin's crimes against his own people. This paper argues that to make sense of the complex convergence of the cultures of remembering and forgetting in the post-Soviet Russian society, we must turn our attention to the relationship between memory and affect under totalitarianism.