BiblioVault - Books about Bearing Witness

Bearing Witness

Memories of Arkansas Slavery

George E. Lankford

University of Arkansas Press, 2006

The first edition of Bearing Witness brought together for the first time 176 slave narratives from the state of Arkansas. Now, this new edition adds ten previously undiscovered accounts. No one knew the truths of slavery better than the slaves themselves, but no one consulted them until the 1930s. Then, recognizing that this generation of unique witnesses would soon be lost to history, the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project acted to interview as many former slaves as possible. In a continuation of the project's interest in the life histories of ordinary people, writers interviewed over two thousand former slaves, more than a third of them in Arkansas. These oral histories were first published in the 1970s in a thirty-nine-volume series organized by state, and they transformed America's understanding of slavery. They have offered crucial evidence on a variety of other topics as well: the Civil War, Reconstruction, agricultural practices, everyday life, and oral history itself. But some former Arkansas slaves were interviewed in Texas, Oklahoma, and other states, so their narratives were published in those other collections. And more than half of the testimonies in the Arkansas volume were interviews with people who had moved to Arkansas after freedom. Folklorist George Lankford combed all of the state collections for the testimonies properly belonging to Arkansas and deleted from this state's collection the testimony of later migrants

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Bearing Witness

The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

Thomas A. Kerns

Oregon State University Press, 2021

Fracking, the practice of shattering underground rock to release oil and natural gas, is a major driver of climate change. The 300,000 fracking facilities in the US also directly harm the health and livelihoods of people in front-line communities, who are disproportionately poor and people of color. Impacted citizens have for years protested that their rights have been ignored.

On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned.

The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including searing eye-witness testimony, groundbreaking legal testimony, and the Tribunal’s advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis.

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The Border of Lights Reader

Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic

Megan Jeanette Myers

Amherst College Press, 2021

Border of Lights, a volunteer collective, returns each October to Dominican-Haitian border towns to bear witness to the 1937 Haitian Massacre ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. This crime against humanity has never been acknowledged by the Dominican government and no memorial exists for its victims. A multimodal, multi-vocal space for activists, artists, scholars, and others connected to the BOL movement, The Border of Lights Reader provides an alternative to the dominant narrative that positions Dominicans and Haitians as eternal adversaries and ignores cross-border and collaborative histories. This innovative anthology asks large-scale, universal questions regarding historical memory and revisionism that countries around the world grapple with today.

"By bringing together in one volume poetry, visual arts, literary analysis, in-depth interviews and historical analysis this volume will provide its readers with a comprehensive view of the causes and the aftermath of the massacre." —Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez, University of British Columbia

Contributions by Julia Alvarez, Amanda Alcántara, DeAndra Beard, Nancy Betances, Jésula Blanc, Matías Bosch Carcuro, Cynthia Carrión, Raj Chetty, Catherine DeLaura, Magaly Colimon, Juan Colón, Robin Maria DeLugan, Lauren Derby, Rosa Iris Diendomi Álvarez, Polibio Díaz, Rana Dotson, Rita Dove, Rhina P. Espaillat, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Saudi García, Scherezade García, Juan Carlos González Díaz, Kiran C. Jayaram, Pierre Michel Jean, Nehanda Loiseau Julot, Jake Kheel, Carlos Alomia Kollegger, Jackson Lorrain “Jhonny Rivas”, Radio Marién, Padre Regino Martínez Bretón, Sophie Maríñez, April J. Mayes, Jasminne Mendez, Komedi Mikal PGNE, Osiris Mosquea, Megan Jeanette Myers, Rebecca Osborne, Ana Ozuna, Edward Paulino, John Presimé, Laura Ramos, Amaury Rodríguez, Doña Carmen Rodríguez de Paulino, The DREAM Project, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Ilses Toribio, Deisy Toussaint, Évelyne Trouillot, Richard Turits, William Vazquez, Chiqui Vicioso, Bridget Wooding, and Óscar Zazo.

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Hemingway’s Second War

Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War

Alex Vernon

University of Iowa Press, 2011

In 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary film The Spanish Earth. Hemingway’s Second War is the first book-length scholarly work devoted to this subject.

Drawing on primary sources, Alex Vernon provides a thorough account of Hemingway’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, a messy, complicated, brutal precursor to World War II that inspired Hemingway’s great novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Vernon also offers the most sustained history and consideration to date of The Spanish Earth. Directed by Joris Ivens, this film was a landmark work in the development of war documentaries, for which Hemingway served as screenwriter and narrator.

Contributing factual, textual, and contextual information to Hemingway studies in general and his participation in the war specifically, Vernon has written a critical biography for Hemingway’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War that includes discussion of the left-wing politics of the era and the execution of José Robles Pazos. Finally, the book provides readings ofFor Whom the Bell Tollsboth in historical context and on its own terms.

Marked by both impressive breadth and accessibility, Hemingway’s Second War will be an indispensible resource for students of literature, film, journalism, and European history and a landmark work for readers of Ernest Hemingway.

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Reframing Bodies

AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image

Roger Hallas

Duke University Press, 2009

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.

Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

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