Power Of Testimony Research Articles

Review: Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, by Jonathan Sterne

Review: <i>Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment</i>, by Jonathan Sterne

The Power of Testimony: How narrative displaced invention

The Power of TestimonyHow narrative displaced invention Vivian Gornick (bio) Ionce wrote a book about the great nineteenth-century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I did that because I'd become embroiled in an argument over whether the women's movement could produce literature as well as testimony, and I'd gone looking for the poetry in the movement. In Elizabeth Stanton I found it. When that remarkable person sat down to explain women and equality to her government, testimony achieved poetry. She was born in 1815 in upstate New York into a rich and distinguished family of conservatives who opposed slavery but dreaded [End Page 176] social disorder. Elizabeth, alone among the Cadys, was possessed of a radical temperament. When at the age of twenty-four she fell in love with Henry Stanton, an impassioned abolitionist, she married him against her father's will, and the two went blithely off to England to attend the first international anti-slavery congress ever held. To her amazement the congress refused to seat her, as women were to be seen, not heard. Afterward, Stanton would often say that it was here in London in 1840 that for the first time in her life, she realized that in the eyes of the world she was not as she was in her own eyes; she was "only a woman." As an abolitionist she'd been a fellow traveler; now as a budding feminist she discovered that it was this cause that aroused her strongest feelings. She further discovered that for her, feeling strongly was associated—as it had been for men from time immemorial—not with falling in love but with agency: agency come to life through devotion to some large unmet human need that might have gone unaddressed for decades at a time but would not be permanently stilled. In 1848 Stanton, along with Lucretia Mott and three other progressive-minded women, held a two-day convention in Seneca Falls (the town in upstate New York where Stanton lived) calling for social and political equality for women. The event was life-changing. Thereafter she was defined by the intellectual excitement that the cause of women's rights aroused in her. She'd always known she had a good mind, but now, as the years after Seneca Falls wore on and she found herself writing petition after petition on behalf of equality for women, she discovered that she was a visionary thinker, one who saw hidden in the discrimination against her sex something of humanity writ large: its unholy predilection to aggress against itself, to inflict hierarchies of privilege and deprivation on one's fellow beings, to countenance with ease ourselves living contentedly in the light while others flounder and go under, living as they did in the dark. It was as though the human condition itself stood revealed in feminism's reawakened call for social justice. [End Page 177] As the decades wore on—the 1840s giving way to the '50s and '60s—and the feminist cause, long defined by the struggle for suffrage, made no real progress, the movement itself grew increasingly conservative. Stanton, however, remained unrelentingly radical and experienced a growing split between herself and her movement; very soon she found herself isolated. The more alone in the world she felt, the more philosophical she became. In 1892 she stood up to deliver her final public address, a speech that to this day remains one of the great entries in the canon of American personal essays. Its title: "The Solitude of Self." The thing she wanted her audience to consider, she said, was the individuality of a human being: that which Protestant American culture held as a first value. In one sense, the idea of the individual is a declaration of proud independence; in another, it is the recognition that we are, in fact, a world of Robinson Crusoes, all of us alone on the island of life, but none more so than women: No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an...

Remnants, Shame, and Bearing Witness in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman

According to Giorgio Agamben, the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification, and testimony is tied to shame. In fact, the survivors of catastrophic disasters often feel a heavy responsibility to remember and to testify about what really happened, usually out of guilt and shame for others who died (on behalf of themselves), and their faithfulness in carrying out this responsibility can determine or re-define the meaning of their survival. What Agamben notes in the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors like Primo Levy is the existence of the Muselmann, a zero-level humanity, a figure that other Holocaust survivors described as the “living dead” reduced to an apathetic vegetative existence. While existing ethics could not conceptualize of the Muselmann as human, Agamben established the foundation for a new ethics related to “bearing witness to the Muselmann.” To bear witness to the Muselmann is to be willing to fight to reveal the truth silenced due to Muselmann’s inability to speak, “to break with the violence of ethical silence,” and thus to establish the true meaning and power of testimony by making “the inhuman in the human be spoken.” This paper attempts to extend the meaning of the Muselmann not only to the absolute impossibility of bearing witness, but also to the “inhuman” condition in which survivors are forced to remain silent after a traumatic disaster. Survivors, who have lived like the Muselmann, can overcome such deadlocks and renew their lives by bearing witness to the dead/the drowned/the silenced in their stead, and thus prove that some degree of “humanity” remains within their grasp. If, metaphorically speaking, “bearing witness to the Muselmann” can be also a role of literature, it is in this context that this paper will examine the survivors’ shame and testimony in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and explore the meaning of “literary testimony” as performed by the novel.

Entrevista a Jorge Galán. La novela Noviembre reabre la posibilidad de justicia en El Salvador

Entrevista realizada al escritor salvadoreño Jorge Galán en Quito en el mes de junio del 2018 con motivo de su intervención en el “Congreso Internacional Libertad de Expresión: diálogos y reflexiones desde el derecho y la literatura”. En este diálogo se descubren los pensamientos del autor sobre su más reciente novela, Noviembre, una gran fotografía de El Salvador en uno de sus períodos más violentos e inciertos, los años 80. La novela profundiza en el famoso caso del asesinato de los jesuitas de la Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA). De hecho, la novela resuelve un caso que el sistema judicial salvadoreño dejó en la impunidad. Al tenor de este texto literario, esta conversación reflexiona sobre otras cuestiones: el impacto de la novela, el proceso de escritura, el encuentro entre la literatura y el derecho, la impunidad como forma de injusticia y el poder del testimonio como única manera de dar voz a aquellos que fueron acallados.

In Memoriam: The Power of Testimony: Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928-May 28, 2014)

In Memoriam: The Power of Testimony: Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928-May 28, 2014)

Ineffaceable Memories: The Truth of Testimony

The traditional approaches to evidence law are analysed through an investigation of claimant Lorna Cubillo's testimony in the historic Stolen Generations trial against Australia's Commonwealth government. The significance of Cubillo's testimony is the narration of an event that left an ineradicable impression on her, giving rise to her racialised status. The author argues that the true power of testimony is in its effect, its ability to destabilise dominant narratives and in the fact of the narrator's survival.

The Power of Testimony

A recent conference at the University of Cape Town that reflected on the dynamics of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa this past decade indicates some of the ongoing issues that call into question the communicative ethics for giving testimony and acknowledgement of trauma and guilt, and the place of those who testify and those who give witness. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s book, Human Rights and Narrated Lives, is a wide-ranging comparative analysis of that faith in (among other things) the power of testimony within discourses of human rights that emerged late last century. The methodology of the book draws attention to dynamics of life narrative that are useful for thinking about the production and reception of life narrative in the “War on Terror,” and its distinctive reconfiguration of the language of human rights discourse