We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299300145 ISBN 13: 9780299300142

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299300145
• ISBN 13: 9780299300142
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 313
• Editor: Jensen Meg, Jolly Margaretta