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

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