High Fidelity: Pedagogy and Postatomic Japanese Chronicle

With the 75th anniversary of 1945 barely in our cultural rearview mirror, the generations who experienced World War II firsthand have ceded their stories to the generations that follow. This article focuses on the 1945 bombings of Japan, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who experienced the bombings, known generally and collectively as hibakusha, worked to preserve accounts of their experiences in acts of transmission across generations that were intended to prompt particular kinds of praxis. Now the accounts—at least those for public consumption—are collected in a variety of memorial archives and exhibitions, available in translation and via a range of media. This article asks, How can we think about the ‘afterlives’ of these accounts, or how might we understand the body of archived testimony in a way that is available for engagement by subsequent generations at temporal, geographic, and linguistic remove? To address this question, I frame witnesses’ acts of memorial transmission as teaching acts. I argue that their lingering power is a pedagogical power, meant to lead the audience, the students, toward care, attention, and action. I argue that the “lesson” takes the form of Benjaminian chronicle and its activity is one of appeal and response prefigured by Japanese ritual actions of irei, or making amends with the dead. The form and activity of these lessons frame a memorial relationship with testimonial literature that moves beyond moment of production and transmission into an enduring and accessible space of critical pedagogy.

Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

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.

4. Shoah and memory

“Shoah and memory” looks at the Holocaust through the lens of Jewish literature worldwide, focusing on the differences between the works of Anne Frank (Diary of a Young Girl), Elie Wiesel (Night), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), and others, studying the reception each of these works received in Jewish and non-Jewish milieus. There is a connection between memory and testimonial literature, which can especially be seen in fiction as it intersects with the anti-Semitic trend known as “Holocaust denial." We have cases such as “invented” memoirs, for example, The Painted Bird by Jerzy Koziński. There are also a number of nonliterary Holocaust narratives such as the films Shoah and Schindler’s List and the graphic novel Maus.

Simulacra of the Victim “Mythological machine”, Violence and Power in the Testimonies of Alfredo Meza and Nancy Guzmán

This article analyses the testimonies Así mataron a Danilo Anderson by Alfredo Meza and Ingrid Olderock. La mujer de los perros by Nancy Guzmán, stressing facticity, that is the symbiosis between verifiable and imagined elements, which implies a renewal of the character of testimonial literature and enables a reading of these works beyond the format of journalistic investigation. This factitious receptacle allows to evince the common direction of both texts: in dissimilar contexts of politic violence, such as the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Hugo Chávez Frías regime in Venezuela, power sets in motion a “mythological machine of the victim”, with the aim of creating subjectivities related to their ideology and with the its purpose of making eternal a truth that ends up being a simulacrum of it.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala

The Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno stand at the intersection of the study of the Andean world of the past and that of Latin America in the present. Written in the early 17th century, the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno is both colonial and postcolonial: created in the Spanish colonial past of the Peruvian viceroyalty it reflects on the society of its day; read from the postcolonial perspective of the present, its concerns have never been more current. As a long-ago antecedent of the testimonial literature of today, Guaman Poma combines the resonances of Andean oral traditions and European written sources. As a testimony to the lifeways of the Andean past and Guaman Poma’s Spanish colonial present, there are few sources like it. Its 399 full-page drawings speak louder than its 800 pages of Quechua-inflected prose, and its images of Inca-era history and practices are followed by a unique pictorial account of life in the Peruvian viceroyalty that depicts the activities of all the castes and classes of colonial society. The life of Guaman Poma has been a topic of considerable interest. His presence in the archival documentary record as well as his work as an artist for the first version of the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s history of the Incas are key points of access to his experience. The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno offers new and ongoing challenges to research and teaching in such fields as history, art history, environmental studies, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies in Andeanist, Latin Americanist, and postcolonialist perspectives. Guaman Poma’s account reveals how social roles and identities could evolve under colonial rule over the course of a single individual’s lifetime. As a speaker of indigenous languages who learned Spanish, and thus called an “indio ladino” by the colonizers, Guaman Poma’s Quechua-inflected Spanish prose may present reading challenges but his 399 drawings welcome casual as well as scholarly and student readers into the rooms and onto the roadways of the multiethnic—Andean, African, Spanish, and Spanish creole—society that he inhabited.

Dostoievski și literatura Gulagului

This paper aims to describe and analyze the references and allusions made by the authors who write about the Soviet Gulag to Dostoevsky and to his text written after his imprisonment in the tsarist prison in Omsk, The House of the Dead (1860- 1862). Starting from the premise that The House of the Dead has a special status as it is a text that makes the transition from the classical and vaguely defined genre of prison literature (i.e. literature written in prison or related – however not always explicitly – to the prison experience) to that of testimonial literature (i.e. literature related to a traumatic experience of a collective nature that is able to testify on behalf of those who remain to suffer in prisons or concentration camps), I will emphasize the testimonial character of Dostoevsky’s writing. Subsequently, I will analyze how the authors who write about their experiences in the Soviet camps (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, A World Apart, Julius Margolin, Journey into the Land of Zeks and Back, Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, Within the Whirlwind, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago) relate to Dostoevsky’s text. At first, the references to Dostoevsky highlight the continuity between the two repressive systems: the tsarist katorga and the Soviet Gulag (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński). Later, however, the differences between them become apparent, as the Gulag writers all highlight in their writing the extent and intensity of the suffering experienced by those who lived through the hell of the repressions in the Gulag. In this way, they enter in an ironic and polemical dialogue with the nineteenth-century Russian writer. In the end, this polemical separation from Dostoevsky shows how the Gulag writers abandon the messianic and humanistic innocence of the nineteenth-century prison literature in the context of the totalitarian and repressive system of the twentieth century.

Doomed Youth

The chapter opens by noting the recurrence of depictions of disillusioned young executives, products of France’s elite business schools, in films by Cantet, Moutout, Corneau and Kim Chapiron and in testimonial literature by Sophie Talneau, Jonathan Curiel, Alexandre des Isnards and Thomas Zuber. In their different ways, all of these texts depict France’s young academic elite as being doomed to disillusionment by the nature of the education they receive and the realities of the contemporary labour market. In this, these privileged individuals betray an unexpected similarity with what might seem more obvious candidates for the moniker ‘doomed youth’, namely France’s ethnic minority banlieue inhabitants, whose fate is also understood to reflect problems in the interrelationships between education and employment. This chapter will therefore examine films and novels that seek to represent the ways in which shifts in the labour market have been mirrored in the adoption of post-disciplinary pedagogies and business-oriented curricula that challenge fundamental republican notions of meritocracy and social integration through education and employment.

Testimonies in The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: Images of Food in Gilead

In The Testaments, Margaret Atwood takes readers deeper into her dystopian world of Gilead, also through the imagery of food and eating. The oppressive patriarchal regime enforces its power through dietary restrictions, reducing women into edibles. The Testaments (2019), moreover, creates the impression of a highly individual and authentic narratorial perspective. Thus, Atwood’s characters’ daily lives in a nightmarish theocracy are illustrated with images of dystopian food that reflect the limitations, constant control, and abuse of human rights in the Republic of Gilead. This article explores how Atwood employs the literary form of testimony to create fragments of individual lives in a dystopia brought closer to us through food metaphors and metaphors of cooking, or rendered shocking through metaphors of cannibalism. Since food (and lack of food) has emotional as well as political significance, it pervades the testimonial literature of oppressive regimes.