Narratives Of Survivors Research Articles

Remembering Communist Violence: The Bulgarian Gulag and the Conscience of the West

This article problematizes the rhetorical appropriations of memories of violence by focusing on a collection of narratives of former labor camp inmates in communist Bulgaria. The collection, published in the United States in 1999 under the title Voices From the GULAG: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria, was edited and introduced by Tzvetan Todorov and represents an effort to interpret the meaning of communist political violence. By examining Todorov's strategies of interpretation, the article discusses how the personal narratives of camp survivors are appropriated in a rhetoric of conscience, directed at Western public opinion, whereby their historical and political significance is transformed. The analysis demonstrates how the painful accounts of victims are discursively subsumed into an ideological discourse about a morally superior, democratic West and a corrupt, totalitarian East.

Consistency and change in the repeated narratives of Holocaust survivors

In this article, we study the oral history interviews of eight survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We give a detailed analysis of a central narrative in their life story, the “selection narrative,” the experience of being forcibly separated from family into groups for labor or death, as it is told in the late 1970s-to-early 1980s and again in the 1990s. We study patterns of structure and variation in the referential aspects of narrative, how narratives recapitulate past actions, and the evaluative aspects of narrative, how narratives are interpreted. Our analysis of these eight sets of repeated narratives focuses on four processes that help structure consistent accounts over time: the past, previous tellings, culture and the interview situation. In each set of repeated narratives, the selection narrative maintains significant portions of the complicating action and evaluations over time. At the same time, various changes are evident that alter the style or interpretation of the narrative. In other words, changes were, in large measure, observed in “how” or “why” the narrative was told but not in “what” was recounted. Our data suggests that despite changes in context, critical aspects of our identities endure over long periods of time.

Posttraumatic stress disorder in disaster relief workers following direct and indirect trauma exposure to Ground Zero*

The present study compared rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relief workers at the World Trade Center collapse from two sources: direct exposure to the disaster site and indirect exposure through survivor narratives. Standardized clinical interviews for PTSD were conducted with 109 relief workers 6-8 months after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Rates of acute PTSD from direct and indirect exposure to traumatic stressors were 6.4% and 4.6%, respectively. The findings suggest that indirect exposures can lead to PTSD even when Criterion A1 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 463), i.e., "experienced by a family member or other close associate" is not met. Further research is necessary to define precisely the parameters of indirect traumatic exposure that may be linked to the development of PTSD.

Contested memories: efforts of the powerful to silence former inmates’ histories of life in an institution for ‘mental defectives’

This paper discusses the barriers encountered in undertaking an oral history project with survivors of a total institution for ‘mental defectives’ in the province of Alberta, Canada. Powerful social actors were able to bar access to survivors through legal guardianship orders, and to make access to the institution and its grounds and to publicly archived materials quite prohibitive to the researcher. In addition to overt efforts on the part of powerful social actors to block the project, concerns about the potential to discredit survivor narratives led to changes in the research design. Specifically, research and literature about the ‘acquiescence’ of intellectuals with intellectual impairments led the researcher to broaden the sources for this history as a preemptive strategy. Despite these barriers, survivors of the institution provided a rich and powerful testimony to the brutality of institutionalization, and provide us with an emancipatory history from the perspectives of those most oppressed by disability policies and practices.

The organisation and content of trauma memories in survivors of road traffic accidents

We investigated the trauma narratives of 131 road traffic accident survivors prospectively, at 1 week, 6 weeks, and 3 months post-trauma. At 1 and 6 weeks, narratives of survivors with acute stress disorder (ASD) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were less coherent and included more dissociation content. By 3 months, their narratives also contained more repetition, more non-consecutive chunks, and more sensory words. Traumatic brain injury was associated with a separate characteristic, confusion, at all three time points. Three aspects of narrative organisation at 1 week—repetition, non-consecutive chunks, and coherence—predicted PTSD severity at 3 months after controlling for initial symptoms. The results suggest both a strong concurrent and predictive relationship between narrative disorganisation and ASD/PTSD but that as people recover from ASD, their narratives do not necessarily become less disorganised.

Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction

This work describes twentieth-century survivor narratives and African American identity. With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography (review)

Reviewed by: Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography Maureen Perkins (bio) Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, eds. Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography. 2 vols.Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. 625 pp. ISBN 0-313-32737-8, $249.95. In a 1999 article entitled "On Reviewing and Being Reviewed" in the journal History Today, David Cannadine advises that it is desirable for the reviewer to do four things: "read the book; place the book; describe the book; judge the book." The reason for offering this advice is that, according to Cannadine, many reviewers of books take the opportunity of "venting their feelings and parading their prejudices," and the result is not so much a review as "an intellectual or (more usually) emotional spasm." Hoping to avoid such an emotional spasm, I will use Professor Cannadine's advice as a broad framework for this review of Greenwood's Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography, edited by Victoria Boynton (English, SUNY at Cortland) and Jo Malin (project director, School of Education and Human Development, SUNY at Binghamton). First of all, read the book. Well, in this case two books. The Encyclopedia is in two volumes, each of just over 300 pages. The editors are to be congratulated on setting an average length of entry that is long enough to be engaging, but not so long as to deter any but the specialist. However, should we think in terms of "reading" an encyclopedia? This is, after all, chiefly a work of reference, and the editors themselves acknowledge that their goal was to provide a starting point for research. Users of this encyclopedia are likely to be looking specifically for a particular kind of information to place the object of their interest within life writing and theoretically informed feminist discussion. As well as entries on authors, there are several entries on life writing genres, key words, and feminist theory, such as "Letters," "Survivor Narrative," "Alterity," "Identity," "Voice," and "Patriarchy." In fact, one of the Encyclopedia's strengths is to deal with autobiography as method—the theoretical and methodological questions that cross academic disciplinary boundaries. It is not, perhaps, for the general reader but for the life writing scholar, of whom there are increasing numbers. The tone of the entries is by and large fresh, self-reflexive, and political in the broadest sense of the word (that is, being about the way we understand our relationship to the material world). At times the balance is not quite right, with the positioning becoming a distraction, as if the contributor had only [End Page 338] recently discovered theory! For example, when there is such little material included about Arab women's writing, it seems unfortunate that two columns of introductory material on the "Middle East" should be devoted to Edward Said, Georges Gusdorf, and Shari Benstock. The intrusion of theory as a separate category was annoying when I was more than ready to accept its insights as an integral part of the analysis. The second task in the Cannadine school of reviewing is to place the book. The editors do that themselves, beginning by quoting Sidonie Smith's "seminal" 1987 text, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography. They place their own book within a "ferment of activity" around feminist theory and autobiography, and credit Smith with facilitating much of that ferment. This is, however, the only positioning of the editorial task that they do, and I would have liked more explanation about potentially controversial decisions (why no Jewish autobiography section, for example). The theoretical positions of the entries differ, and I was drawn most to those with expertise and experience outside the mainstream of white feminism. Violet A. Dutcher, for example, in her excellent entry on "Autoethnography," clearly understands the difference between writing as "I" and "we," something I wished all other contributors had also taken on board. To write, for example, that Middle Eastern women's writings in English and French "speak to us directly" (using the "we" voice) is to distance some readers of the Encyclopedia, as if none of the reading "we" were from the Middle East. The Encyclopedia is to be commended, of course, for even envisaging "minority" positions. A wide choice of geographical areas seems to...

Anger, guilt, and intergenerational communication of trauma in the interpersonal narratives of second generation Holocaust survivors.

The nature and expression of anger and guilt in sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors were studied by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of relationship narratives. Findings are discussed in relation to the reciprocal overprotectiveness between the surviving parents and their children in the context of intergenerational communication of trauma.

:Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors.

:Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors.

Discipline and dehumanization in a total institution: institutional survivors’ descriptions of Time‐Out Rooms

This article reports on interviews with 21 institutional survivors who lived until the mid‐ to late‐1980s in a total institution for the ‘training and care’ of ‘mental defectives’, operating in Alberta, Canada. The focus is on survivors’ descriptions of ‘Time‐Out Rooms’, used to discipline unruly and escaped inmates. Foucault’s theories about the disciplinary properties of modern society, the use of the gaze, technologies of the self and scientific discourse are both supported and complicated by survivor narratives. In addition, the work of Erving Goffman is examined in terms of the process of dehumanization in total institutions. Ties between institutional practices and eugenics are speculated upon.

Workplace Culture, Folklore, and Adaptation

In this humorous account, Farrow relates tales of sabotage and on‐the‐job heroism, overcoming obstacles, getting even and reeking revenge, being redeemed and walking out on the job. She reframes this workplace gossip as war stories, survivor narratives and folklore. While not completely verifiable, and often told with embellishment and dramatic flair, within such tales reside values, morals, cultural norms, and meanings. Herein lays their value, in helping workers understand the culture of their workplace. They provide, she argues, vital information about how to understand and adapt to your job and your co‐workers. To illustrate her point, Farrow relates her own story of descending from her dream job to complaining about the workload, the managers, the desks and the elevators. It is a tale of frustration and confusion turning to apathy and vindictiveness. Through listening to workplace gossip that was passed on, told and re‐told, she came to understand the way things work, and reclaimed her enchantment with her vocation. Farrow urges readers to vigorously engage in story telling.

Shifting Contexts, Shaping Experiences: Child Abuse Survivor Narratives and Educating for Empire

Shifting Contexts, Shaping Experiences: Child Abuse Survivor Narratives and Educating for Empire

Energizing the ordinary: Biographical work and the future in stroke recovery narratives

Historically, the life course has been constructed as an organized and linear temporal progression. This holds true in various disciplines from education, to psychology, to counseling. The foundation of a life unfolding through temporal categorizations is documented in textbooks and theories that straddle these disciplines as well as many others, including the sociology of health and illness, which has often conceptualized the illness experience as embedded in a recovery trajectory. Here, we take this to task. Using Gubrium and Holstein's [Sociol. Inq. 65 (1995) 207; Gubrium, J., & Holstein, J., (1997). The new language of qualitative method. New York: Oxford University Press] analytic vocabulary of biographical work, we analyze narratives of stroke survivors by emphasizing the ordinary resources used as discursive foundations for the narrative production of the future in illness. Ordinary resources focused on include God and spirituality, comorbidities, and activity and leisure. The discussion is embedded in overarching concerns with “healthy aging” in gerontology and geriatrics.

Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (review)

Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (review)

TO HEAL OR NOT TO HEAL? ON PROSTATE CANCER, PHYSICIAN-PATIENT COMMUNICATION, AND SEXUALITY

This fictional account is a composite narrative that emerges from my studies of (a)a social support group for prostate cancer patients and their loved ones, (b) the illness narratives of prostate cancer survivors, and (c) media portrayals of relationships between prostate cancer survivors and their physicians. As a consequence, the story centers on the relationships among illness, identity, and sexuality. The story specifically addresses the loss of sexual function, a significant cause of concern among prostate cancer patients, and then considers the importance of open physician-patient communication in achieving positive health outcomes.

The Process of Coping Following Child Sexual Abuse: A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT This research employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying the immediate and long-term coping strategies adopted by survivors of child sexual abuse, focusing on how strategies evolve over time. Qualitative findings showed that coping with child sexual abuse is not static, but changes over time. The narratives of these nonclinical survivors suggest that an adaptive outcome may be associated with a particular evolution of strategies across time, i.e., survivors reported coping predominantly by engaging in psychological escape methods initially, and then adopting cognitive appraisal and positive reframing strategies in the longer term. It appears that coping processes can affect psychological outcome following child sexual abuse. This study offers insight into the evolution of coping methods associated with an adaptive outcome.

Survivor of that time, that place: clinical uses of violence survivors' narratives.

Narratives by survivors of abuse offer compelling entries into the experiences of abuse and its effects on health. Reading such stories can enlarge the clinician's understanding of the complexities of abuse. Furthermore, attention to narrative can enhance the therapeutic options for abuse victims not only in mental health arenas, but also in other medical contexts. In this article we define the genre of survivor narratives, examine one such narrative in particular (Push by Sapphire, 1996), and explore the clinical implications of narrative in abuse victims' clinical care.

Teaching between the Cross and the Crescent Moon: Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Public Education in the Southern Philippines

Previous articleNext article No AccessTeaching between the Cross and the Crescent Moon: Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Public Education in the Southern PhilippinesJeffrey Ayala MilliganJeffrey Ayala Milligan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 47, Number 4November 2003 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/379494 Views: 318Total views on this site Citations: 23Citations are reported from Crossref © 2003 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Elgin Glenn R. Salomon The 1974 Battle of Jolo: testimonial narratives of survivors and intra-Tausug relations, Critical Asian Studies 60 (Jul 2022): 1–16.https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2022.2099438Jeongmin Eom, Kevin Kester Education for Peace and International Understanding in the Asia-Pacific: Trends and Issues, (Aug 2022): 1–19.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_9-1Jeongmin Eom, Kevin Kester Education for Peace and International Understanding in the Asia-Pacific: Trends and Issues, (Sep 2022): 1–19.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_9-2Jonamari Kristin Floresta Undoing a culture of violence in schools by hearing the subalterned students who experience war in Mindanao, Journal of Peace Education 18, no.33 (Jun 2021): 260–281.https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2021.1940113Jonamari Kristin Floresta Forming Views towards People of Different Faith: School’s Religious Culture and the Perceptions of Students who Experience Conflict in Mindanao, Religious Education 115, no.22 (Oct 2019): 129–144.https://doi.org/10.1080/00344087.2019.1675446Isyaku Hassan English Language Learning, Environment, and the Formation of Islamic Self-identity among Students in Selected Religious Secondary Schools, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2020).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3573443Razaleigh [email protected], Marlon Pontino Guleng, Abur Hamdi Usman RESPONSE OF MUSLIM MINORITY TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ARABIC LANGUAGE AND ISLAMIC VALUE EDUCATION PROGRAM IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE PHILIPPINES, Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews 7, no.44 (Sep 2019): 572–579.https://doi.org/10.18510/hssr.2019.7477Melanie Carol Brooks Southern Filipino school leaders and religious diversity: a typology, International Journal of Educational Management 31, no.55 (Jun 2017): 646–660.https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-08-2016-0164Dana Burde, Amy Kapit, Rachel L. Wahl, Ozen Guven, Margot Igland Skarpeteig Education in Emergencies: A Review of Theory and Research, Review of Educational Research 87, no.33 (Nov 2016): 619–658.https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316671594Mark L. Cabling, Fabrizio Drago, Amanda T. Andrei Exemplars in the coverage of the Bangsamoro framework agreement: using computational tools to compare Qatari and Philippine news framing, Philippine Political Science Journal 38, no.22 (Oct 2017): 104–122.https://doi.org/10.1080/01154451.2017.1365109Brad D. Washington Global Intersections of English Language Hegemony and Technological Innovation in the Republic of the Philippines, (Jan 2016): 151–167.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-405-3_9 조태영 Islamization in the Philippines: The Development of Islamic and Integrated Madrasah Education, The Southeast Asian Review 25, no.11 (Feb 2015): 157–200.https://doi.org/10.21652/kaseas.25.1.201502.157Alpaslan Özerdem, Sukanya Podder Mindanao, (Jan 2015): 140–183.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314536_6Menandro S. Abanes, Peer L.H. 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Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors

Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors

Impartiality, Storytelling, and the Seductions of Narrative: An Essay at an Impasse

I have been working on this article for some time now in hopes of writing my way out of an impasse. I think of this place as a deadlock that forms where feminist convictions about the transformative power of telling stories butt against the claims of literary theorists regarding the seductions of narrative. This term narrative sits at the joint of this abutment, helping at once to produce these fields as distinct domains and to set them at odds with each other. The article has been difficult to write because I found it disorienting to bring the two fields into conversation with each other. As the impasse metaphor suggests, their debates are both orthogonal to each other and intersecting. Whereas the principal concern in feminist work on narrative is to battle positivism, that of literary critics has been to analyze realism. Yet where they intersect--in the word narrative--they produce dissonance by using the term quite differently. After a time, I set the work aside, convinced that the dilemma it posed for me was not but an idiosyncrasy that would be dispelled if I simply read more. Two years ago, in spring 2001, I met my impasse in the flesh--and it gave me a story to tell. I was at a conference that, as director of the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, I had co-organized in collaboration with a colleague in Holocaust studies. The idea was to offer a feminist critique of the ways in which, in testimonials and feminist scholarship on the death camps, experience circulated. We noted that this often turned on relatively conventional notions of sex difference, emphasizing women's special survival skills (due to their orientation toward maintaining relationships) or their abject victimhood (due to the double jeopardy of being both woman and Jew). We announced our departure from these perspectives with the keynote address, delivered by a young feminist scholar who argued that the place of s ex difference in these stories might say more about narrative conventions than about difference itself: Myths and stereotypes of womanhood had affected the way women survivors told their stories and even remembered their experiences. Not two hours into the event, one of the participants approached me. A woman survivor and author of two influential Holocaust memoirs, she was deeply offended by the plenary session, which had opened for debate the question of whether claims about women's special status should be understood to produce gender as a self-securing fiction, rather than to validate that there exist real differences between men and women. As the session disbanded, she confronted me forcefully: Had she understood what we would be up to, she said, she would never have agreed to participate in the conference. Incisively, she explained that she had long remained silent about her camp experience, simply accepting the fact that the iconic survivor narratives were written by men and that anything a woman might have to say about that experience as a woman would necessarily trivialize the fact that the Nazis persecuted her as ajew. Women's studies had opened a space within which her story could count for something. It seemed to her n ow that careerist young feminists aimed to shut that space down with this talk of gender convention and unreliable narrators. She finished bluntly: Now you mean to tell me that we are lying? It is tempting to launch this article as my answer to her question. Tempting, but it would be misdirected, because her question affords no answer. It does not pose a question but rather sets the impasse that forms wherever a narrator hails you, whether in the flesh or from the page. I tell this story not to settle the question whether this article is worth writing, as if the fact that I can testify to this impasse would make it real. This story is, like any other, a solicitation. It is a bid for attention, a way to start a discourse that promises to arrive at a point. …