We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights
edited by Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly foreword by Mary Robinson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014 eISBN: 978-0-299-30013-5 | Paper: 978-0-299-30014-2 Library of Congress Classification JC571.W3 2014 Dewey Decimal Classification 323
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Personal testimonies are the life force of human rights work, and rights claims have brought profound power to the practice of life writing. This volume explores the connections and conversations between human rights and life writing through a dazzling, international collection of essays by survivor-writers, scholars, and human rights advocates.
In We Shall Bear Witness, editors Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly assemble moving personal accounts from those who have endured persecution, imprisonment, and torture; meditations on experiences of injustice and protest by creative writers and filmmakers; and innovative research on ways that digital media, commodification, and geopolitics are shaping what is possible to hear and say. The book’s primary sections—testimony, recognition, representation, and justice—evoke the key stages in turning experience into a human rights life story and attend to such diverse and varied arts as autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater. The result is a groundbreaking book that sensitively examines how life and rights narratives have become so powerfully entwined. Also included is an innovative guide to teaching human rights and life narrative in the classroom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Meg Jensen is the director of the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University and the author of The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers. Margaretta Jolly is the director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex. She is the author of In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK Book Prize.
REVIEWS
“Of use and appeal to a broad range of readers wherever they might be situated: the prison, the field, the court, the stage or gallery, or even the classroom. No other volume does this kind of work.”—Laura Lyons, University of Hawaii
“This volume aims to correct cultural, scholarly, and pedagogical tendencies to see human rights from a legalistic perspective by drawing attention to the deeply important, but also contradictory and complex, role that life narrative plays in the practical realization of human rights.”—James Dawes, author of Evil Men
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword: Life Stories in a Human Rights Context
Mary Robinson
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Life/Rights Narrative in Action
Margaretta Jolly
Part One. Testimony
(I)-Witness
Annette Kobak
Beyond Narrative: The Shape of Traumatic Testimony
Molly Andrews
The Golden Cage: The Story of an Activist
Emin Milli
The Price of Words
Nazeeha Saeed
Out of the Inner Wilderness: Torture and Healing
Hector Aristizábal and Diane Lefer
Part Two. Recognition
Recognition
Eva Hoffman
Protection
Gillian Whitlock
The Justice of Listening: Japanese Leprosy Segregation
Michio Miyasaka
Reimagining the Criminal/Reconfiguring Justice
Finola Farrant
Part Three. Representation
"I Hear the Approaching Thunder": The Lyric Voice and Human Rights
Patricia Hampl
The Fictional Is Political: Forms of Appeal in Autobiographical Fiction and Poetry
Meg Jensen
Enter the King: Martin Luther King, Jr. "Human Rights Heroism" and Contemporary American Drama
Brian Philips
Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières
Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Representing Human Rights Violations in Multi-Media Contexts
Katrina Powell
Part Four. Justice
Sugar Daddies or Agents for Change? Community Arts Workers and Justice for Girls "Who Just Want to Go to School"
Julia Watson
Witnessing in the Digital Age
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
"Facebook Is Like a Religion Around Here": Voices from the "Arab Spring" and the Policy Making Community
Brian Brivati
The Importance of Taking and Bearing Witness: Reflections on Twenty Years as a Human Rights Lawyer
Mark Muller
Part Five.
Using Life Narrative to Explore Human Rights Themes in the Classroom
Brian Brivati, Meg Jensen, Margaretta Jolly, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Contributors
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights
edited by Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly foreword by Mary Robinson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014 eISBN: 978-0-299-30013-5 Paper: 978-0-299-30014-2
Personal testimonies are the life force of human rights work, and rights claims have brought profound power to the practice of life writing. This volume explores the connections and conversations between human rights and life writing through a dazzling, international collection of essays by survivor-writers, scholars, and human rights advocates.
In We Shall Bear Witness, editors Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly assemble moving personal accounts from those who have endured persecution, imprisonment, and torture; meditations on experiences of injustice and protest by creative writers and filmmakers; and innovative research on ways that digital media, commodification, and geopolitics are shaping what is possible to hear and say. The book’s primary sections—testimony, recognition, representation, and justice—evoke the key stages in turning experience into a human rights life story and attend to such diverse and varied arts as autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater. The result is a groundbreaking book that sensitively examines how life and rights narratives have become so powerfully entwined. Also included is an innovative guide to teaching human rights and life narrative in the classroom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Meg Jensen is the director of the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston University and the author of The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers. Margaretta Jolly is the director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex. She is the author of In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK Book Prize.
REVIEWS
“Of use and appeal to a broad range of readers wherever they might be situated: the prison, the field, the court, the stage or gallery, or even the classroom. No other volume does this kind of work.”—Laura Lyons, University of Hawaii
“This volume aims to correct cultural, scholarly, and pedagogical tendencies to see human rights from a legalistic perspective by drawing attention to the deeply important, but also contradictory and complex, role that life narrative plays in the practical realization of human rights.”—James Dawes, author of Evil Men
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword: Life Stories in a Human Rights Context
Mary Robinson
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Life/Rights Narrative in Action
Margaretta Jolly
Part One. Testimony
(I)-Witness
Annette Kobak
Beyond Narrative: The Shape of Traumatic Testimony
Molly Andrews
The Golden Cage: The Story of an Activist
Emin Milli
The Price of Words
Nazeeha Saeed
Out of the Inner Wilderness: Torture and Healing
Hector Aristizábal and Diane Lefer
Part Two. Recognition
Recognition
Eva Hoffman
Protection
Gillian Whitlock
The Justice of Listening: Japanese Leprosy Segregation
Michio Miyasaka
Reimagining the Criminal/Reconfiguring Justice
Finola Farrant
Part Three. Representation
"I Hear the Approaching Thunder": The Lyric Voice and Human Rights
Patricia Hampl
The Fictional Is Political: Forms of Appeal in Autobiographical Fiction and Poetry
Meg Jensen
Enter the King: Martin Luther King, Jr. "Human Rights Heroism" and Contemporary American Drama
Brian Philips
Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières
Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Representing Human Rights Violations in Multi-Media Contexts
Katrina Powell
Part Four. Justice
Sugar Daddies or Agents for Change? Community Arts Workers and Justice for Girls "Who Just Want to Go to School"
Julia Watson
Witnessing in the Digital Age
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
"Facebook Is Like a Religion Around Here": Voices from the "Arab Spring" and the Policy Making Community
Brian Brivati
The Importance of Taking and Bearing Witness: Reflections on Twenty Years as a Human Rights Lawyer
Mark Muller
Part Five.
Using Life Narrative to Explore Human Rights Themes in the Classroom
Brian Brivati, Meg Jensen, Margaretta Jolly, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Contributors
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE