On Sebald’s “unbestimmt” Narrative: The Evolution of Testimonial Literature and Auschwitz

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 238-274
Author(s):  
Hui-sok Yoo
Keyword(s):  
Testimonial Literature

The Guatemalan Genocide Through Indigenous Mayan Literature Twenty Years After the Peace Accords: Rigoberta Menchú, Humberto Ak´Abal and Victor Montejo

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
David Caballero Mariscal
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Rigoberta Menchu ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peace Accords ◽  
Historical Truth

Guatemala experienced a cruel genocide in the early eighties, in the context of a repressive Conflict. Due to the different governments´ repressive policies, this terrible social situation was little known abroad, and even in the own country. Just after the Peace Accords, several organisms worked to uncover the historical truth. In any case, we cannot forget that testimonial literature is a privileged mean to know this dark period of the contemporary history of Guatemala. This genre is particularly relevant, because the main writers are originally Mayans, and have directly suffered both repression and social exclusion due to ethnic reasons. Rigoberta Menchú, Unmberto Ak´abal and Víctor Montejo represent a new and original point of view in the measure in which they describe feelings and situations from the perspective of those who experience them personally. Testimonial literature or the Testimonio becomes an ethnographic document that allows us to know not just a period but a people who have suffered from repression and exclusion for centuries.

scholarly journals As mulheres do império: uma leitura de Ana de Amsterdam / Women’s Empire: A Reading of Ana de Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (61) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Naira Almeida Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Work Narratives ◽  
The Way

Resumo: Enquadrado no bojo da produção identificada como “literatura dos retornados”, o interesse principal de Ana de Amsterdam (2016a), de Ana Cássia Rebelo, não recai nas imagens traumáticas do retorno ou na violência praticada entre colonizadores e colonizados, como é recorrente no gênero. De forma até sintomática, as lembranças de África são esporádicas na menina de cinco anos que deixou Moçambique junto à família. Em seu lugar, a exuberância de uma Índia portuguesa sonhada e projetada por ela ocupam as lacunas de um presente insatisfatório, dividido entre a criação dos três filhos de um casamento em crise e o emprego burocrático desempenhado numa Lisboa pouco atrativa. Em ambos, tanto na Goa portuguesa como no trajeto para o trabalho, despontam narrativas de mulheres que constituem a síntese entre o diário íntimo de Ana e a escrita testemunhal da diáspora. Numa primeira parte do estudo, recupera-se a gênese do romance no formato do blog assinado pela autora, evidenciando a “escrita do eu”, nos moldes dos estudos de autobiografias, diários e afins. O segundo momento volta-se para a escrita testemunhal no lastro da narrativa pós-colonial e também da pós-memória. Em comum, os dois planos tratam da perspectiva feminina, seja na batalha contemporânea da cosmopolita Lisboa, seja nos desdobramentos silenciados do pós-colonialismo, em meio às histórias duplicadas de outras tantas Anas.Palavras-chave: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diário íntimo; literatura de testemunho; blogs.Abstract: Framed in the center of the production identified as “literature of the returnees”, the main focus of Ana de Amsterdam (2016a) by Ana Cássia Rebelo, does not lie in the traumatic images of the return or in the violence practiced between colonizers and colonized, as it is usually the case in this genre. Somehow, even symptomatically, African memories are sporadic in the five-year-old girl who left Mozambique with her family. Instead, the exuberance of a Portuguese India, dreamed and projected by her, occupies the gaps of an unsatisfactory present, dividing herself to raise three children of a marriage in crisis and work in the bureaucratic employment situated in an unattractive Lisbon. In both, Portuguese Goa and on the way to work, narratives of women emerge and represent the synthesis between Ana’s private diary and the testimonial writing of the diaspora. In a first part of the study, the genesis of the novel is recovered in the form of a blog signed by the author, emphasizing the “writing of the self”, in the molds of autobiographies, journals and etc. The second moment turns to the testimonial writing in the basis of the postcolonial narrative and also of the post-memory. In common, the two plans deal with the feminine perspective, whether in the contemporary battle of cosmopolitan Lisbon or in the silenced developments of postcolonialism, in the middle of the duplicate stories of so many Anas.Keywords: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diary; testimonial literature; blogs.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eden Wales Freedman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

scholarly journals Modele świadectwa: "prze-pisywanie literatury Holokaustu"

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 250-256
Author(s):  
Joanna Nazimek
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status

Models of testimony: “re-writing the Holocaust literature”AbstractThe article is a critical discussion of Pawel Wolski’s treatise titled Tadeusz Borowski – PrimoLevi. Prze-pisywanie literatury Holocaustu (Warsaw 2013). It is setting out selected aspects oftraversing of the researcher from Szczecin by considering the status of testimony literature.Also there is an emphasis put on the phenomenon of profiling using forms of utterancesin Holocaust discourse. The article shows two distinct strategies (analyzed by Wolski) ofautomodeling of writers’ own utterances: “towards” (Tadeusz Borowski) and “accordingto” (Primo Levi) preferred model of testimony shaped under the influence of contemporarypublic debate.Keywords: Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, testimonial literature, Holocaust discourse

scholarly journals Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Adrian Taylor Kane
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Central America ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Central American ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Psychological Suffering ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Del Rio

In the introduction to Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (2013), Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis have argued that rivers in Latin American literature constitute a “locus for the literary exploration of questions of power, identity, resistance, and discontent.” Many works of testimonial literature and literature of resistance written during and about the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression would support their thesis. In the 2004 film Innocent Voices, directed by Luis Mandoki, Mario Bencastro’s 1997 story “Había una vez un río,” and Claribel Alegría’s 1983 poem “La mujer del Río Sumpul,” the traumatic events in the protagonists’ lives that occur in and near rivers create an inversion of the conventional use of rivers as symbols of life, purity, innocence, and re-creation by associating them with violence, death, and destruction. At the same time, the river often becomes a metaphor for the wounds of trauma, which allude to the psychological suffering not only of the protagonists, but to the collective pain of their countries torn asunder by war. Arturo Arias’s 2015 novel El precio del consuelo also features a river as the site of state-sponsored violence against rural citizens during the civil war period. In contrast with Bencastro’s and Alegria’s texts, however, Arias’s novel highlights issues of environmental justice related to the use of rivers in Central America that continue to plague the region to date. In the present essay, I argue that these works are compelling representations of the ways in which rivers have become sites of contestation between colonial and decolonial forces in Central America.

scholarly journals The ‘other’ side of history as depicted in Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows

Literator ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
M. Wenzel
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The Other ◽  
Isabel Allende ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
And Gender

The proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa have once again foregrounded the trauma involved in reconstructing a past fraught with political and personal violence and have, at the same time, also illustrated the therapeutic quality of testimony. Literature has always played a vital role in the process of coming to terms with reality. As a woman within a postcolonial context, Isabel Allende bears witness to political oppression and gender discrimination in her novels. They serve as examples of testimonial literature which focus on the plight of women as marginalized citizens and represent a collective conscience in testimony to the atrocities of the past. This is accomplished through the interaction of her fictional characters with a recognizable historical context. In Of Love and Shadows, her female protagonist, Irene, asserts her individuality through writing/reporting which questions the validity of the male-oriented and so-called “objective” historical reportage. By creating disparate and complementary perspectives which accentuate the female/personal as well as the male/public aspects of experience, Allende proposes a recognition of the personal and the peripheral in the documentation of historical events; she underlines the validity of the “other” side of experience and history.

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