We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights ed. by Meg Jensen, Margaretta Jolly (review)

We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights is very much a book by life-narrative practitioners for oral historians and others who work with life texts. The contributors to this volume take a sometimes self-reflective, sometimes brutally self-critical look at their work with life narratives and, in particular, at what they do with stories of trauma. In this way, the book is often very inward-focused on the ethical and methodological challenges of this narrative work; the contributors, however, also look forward to where we should be aiming as practitioners. The volume is one of the recent releases from the publisher’s Wisconsin Series in Autobiography and makes a substantial and timely contribution to the evolving scholarship on critical approaches to life-narrative studies. In particular, We Shall Bear Witness takes up and responds commendably to some of the challenges within this scholarship regarding testimony of trauma, its cultural force and interpretation, and its centrality for human rights advocacy.

All contributions hinge around the central topic of life-narrative texts in social justice projects. The editors of the volume, Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly, have assembled a multidisciplinary cast of contributors, who approach the topic from a range of backgrounds, including survivors, scholars, and human rights advocates. The authors focus sharply on traumatic life narratives and particularly on what happens when stories are taken up in the search for truth, recognition, or justice and, significantly, on what happens when writers tell stories that are not their own. Several of the authors reflect critically on some of the common frames that we employ as oral historians for our work with personal stories of social suffering—telling “hidden stories” or “uncovering” dark pasts and the motivations for doing so when seeking justice. They also ask us to question carefully those motivations and to reflect on the empathy, compassion, or truth-seeking that motivates the interactions between survivor and witness and on what mediates and affects the circulation of stories to a community of witnesses. Although the authors approach these topics from considerably divergent angles, each makes a critical contribution to understanding that fraught relationship between life narrative and human rights.

The editors have organized the contributed chapters into five sections: testimony, recognition, representation, justice, and learning. There is quite a seamless progression through the first four of the five stages of the volume, as each considers a critical stage in the journey of testimonial witnessing. After Jolly’s introduction, which lays out the aims and core themes, part 1, “Testimony,” opens with a quite searing chapter by Annette Kobak. Kobak’s chapter is part warning and part insight into the strengths of testimony and the threat that it poses to those in power. She signals some of the themes raised in various parts of the volume about the uses and power of testimony in a globalized era of communication—particularly in an era of renewed censorship and looming authoritarianism; she ends the chapter with a caution that each new form of despotism will adapt to new technologies and, therefore, so must testimonial witnessing. Part 1 also features a well-rounded chapter by Molly Andrews that revisits and extends some of the critical literature on the form(ation) of traumatic life narrative and the dangers of conflating the telling of personal pain with social suffering and of seeking to impose order or coherence on those narratives. The other contributions to part 1 feature survivors’ personal narratives and reflections on witnessing: Emin Milli on his activism in Azerbaijan; Nazeeha Saeed on her journalism and its repercussions in Bahrain; and Hector Aristizábal (with Diane Lefer) on witnessing violence through theatre.

Part 2, “Recognition,” delves deeply into the ethical and moral task of witnessing to testimony and deconstructs how testimonies travel to different audiences with varying degrees of “success.” After a short essay by Eva Hoffman on the theme...