Facing the Past

Through a consideration of three film works—Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls (1919), Testimony (2007), and Remembering (2019), which all represent the testimonies of Armenian women to form truths of the catastrophe—this article problematizes how such portrayals might, contrary to their best intentions, resonate with the logic of genocide. By discussing specific woman figures in the three works, published at three times in the postgenocidal era—one just after the events, the other two recently—this article aims not only to mark the evolution of the representational regime with which the Armenian woman is surrounded but also to show that this phenomenon is a key component in a transformation of the lexicon developed around the recognition politics, which ought to involve something other than feverishly chasing a representation of the events of 1915–17 and using women’s witness narratives to this end.

Features and significance of narration in the witness literature

Witness literature is an important and significant factor in the historical memory formation. Third-person witness narratives are well-known, and 1-person fictional descriptions are equally well-known. However, first-person factual narrative evidence is of particular interest. They represent the initial reflection narratives of personal experience. In addition, this reflexive narration contains the meaningful being picture dynamics, including changes in the content of this picture. The article contains the results of a value-normative analysis of little-known sources of witness literature, which presents the experience of the repressive practices in the USSR in 1920 1980. Generalization of the analysis results allows us to speak about two cycles of radical performance of the semantic picture of the world. In turn, each such cycle includes two phases. The first phase is associated with strangeness of familiar experience and the liminality of new experience. The second phase expresses the subsequent reaggregation of a new understanding of social life. These dynamics are very close to the dynamics of the conceptual narration of war experiences. The main differences are related to the greater emphasis on victimization, different attitudes towards actors and the reasons for victimization. Over the years, witness literature has become an important material for the socio-cultural engineering of building ideas about the sad events of the past – their oblivion (as meaningful unoblivion) in order to prevent their repetition in the present and in the future. A simple hush-up of such circumstances forms the enduring trauma of public consciousness, its «neuroticism», the inability to distance oneself from the past, to live confidently on, causing obsessive associations, or even repetitions, it becomes a source of internal and external conflicts. Constructive oblivion provides not suppression and deletion, but a systematic comprehension of historical experience.

Less Time in Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis’s “flash fictions” shift our attention from narrative to verbal craft, evident in her resolute choice of words, syntax, and sentence rhythms. An abbreviated style compels readers to focus on fully stopped moments, an effect that defies narrative progression much as do Joy Williams’s and Alice Munro’s discontinuous stories. Like them as well, the development of a later style is a matter of branching into new directions—in her case, continuing a microscopic fascination with individual words and their resonances, but now shifting toward found objects (Flaubert’s letters), or letters of complaint, or grammatical puzzles: all as “witness” narratives revealing the ways in which the mundane minutiae of life is transformed into art. The borders between fiction and nonfiction become less clear, as Davis presses on the boundaries of what a short story can be.

‘No ordinary crowd’: Foregrounding a ‘hooligan schema’ in the construction of witness narratives following the Hillsborough football stadium disaster

This article examines the linguistic appropriation and deflection of blame in the witness testimonies and evidence-gathering processes of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) following the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster. It specifically focuses on patterns of stylistic features, such as negation and syntactic foregrounding, which, it is argued, function to encode alternative institutionally congruent stories. It employs schema theory to explore how a ‘hooligan’ narrative was readily invoked and accepted by the SYP. Moreover, it addresses instances of both self-incrimination and the upgrading of police efficacy within statements produced by the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service (SYMAS), and offers a linguistic analysis that points to police involvement in the construction of the SYMAS testimonies.

Orality and the Archive: Teaching the Partition of India through Oral Histories

This article is a reflection on how select oral histories and witness accounts about the partition of India and Pakistan, especially those by Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das were used in a graduate seminar in Bengaluru. The article explores the strength of oral archives as repositories of radical enquiry that may be used in classrooms to understand the complex nature of history, historiography, and interrogate the State’s archival processes. The article explores how students began to see the potency in oral archives as a space that embodies the victimhood of partition victims as opposed to an effacement of the sufferers in most state archives of the event. It observes how the memorialisation of Partition is different in the State’s construction of partition: to the victims who recount their stories, it is the ‘everyday’ that becomes predominant as opposed to State archives that seek to represent the differences between the two nations as paramount in its processes of memorialisation. The note concludes by emphasising the need to put such oral histories to use in classroom, especially to understand the nature of suffering. Through a reading of such stories, it is proposed, an affective literacy is enabled in students’ modes of enquiry about trauma, memory and suffering. Keywords: Partition of India, affective literacy, archives, oral histories, witness narratives.

Analysing Deception in Written Witness Statements

Written witness statements are a unique source for the study of high-stakes textual deception. To date, however, there is no distinction in the way that they and other forms of verbal deception have been analysed, with written statements treated as extensions of transcribed versions of oral reports. Given the highly context-dependent nature of cues, it makes sense to take the characteristics of the medium into account when analysing for deceptive language. This study examines the characteristic features of witness narratives and proposes a new approach to search for deception cues. Narratives are treated as a progression of episodes over time, and deception as a progression of acts over time. This allows for the profiling of linguistic bundles in sequence, revealing the statements’ internal gradient, and deceivers’ choice of deceptive linguistic strategy. Study results suggest that, at least in the context of written witness statements, the weighting of individual features as deception cues is not static but depends on their interaction with other cues, and that detecting deceivers’ use of linguistic strategy is en effective vehicle for identifying deception.