Description
When survivors of terrible events share their stories they risk becoming one-dimensional symbols of an historic event – usually tragic victims or unsung heroes. Too often, their testimony is understood singularly as an individual act of witness, ignoring the contexts in which these first-person accounts are invited, recorded, heard, and diffused. Nor is enough heard of their important place in social movements and within survivor communities themselves. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, Argentinian torture camps, the Yugoslav Wars, and Jewish emigration from the Maghreb. The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as an insightful afterword. They demonstrate that – through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design – it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of “testimony” to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.