Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Beyond Testimony and Trauma makes a profound contribution to our understanding of the telling of stories of mass violence. It is provocative, timely, and extraordinarily valuable. -- Daniel Kerr, Public History Program, Department of History, American University

By challenging the ways that survivors of mass violence are typically understood as either eyewitnesses to history or victims of it, the contributors to this volume ask us to go “beyond testimony” to embrace sustained listening and collaborative research design.

Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. 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.