Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives: Responding to the Pain of Others

by Kimberly A. Nance

Overview

Inspired by Susan Sontag’s examination of the impact of “photography of conscience” in Regarding the Pain of Others, Kimberly A. Nance’s Responding to the Pain of Others: Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives takes as its point of departure Sontag’s speculation that in combatting human rights abuse, “a narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image.” Building on her own earlier research on Aristotelian rhetorical theory and testimony, along with other interdisciplinary approaches, Nance analyzes the socio-literary narratives of Elvia Alvarado, Medea Benjamin, Peter Dickinson, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Clea Koff, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers, Uwem Akpan, and Alicia Partnoy. Each of them, she finds, confronts a human rights discourse in which words—and witnesses—have become disconnected from actions. Recognizing that the genre’s own conventions have become an obstacle to its projects, these testimonialists draw on humor, irony, satire, parody, and innovative literary techniques, alongside strategies rooted in real-life organizing, in an effort to reactivate the discourse of human rights. They seek to persuade readers to exchange a solidarity of sentiment, a state Michael Vander Weele calls “an aesthetics in which the engine revs but the clutch is never engaged,” for actual social action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498598880
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	12/09/2019
Series:	Reading Trauma and Memory
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.36(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Kimberly A. Nance is professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Better Off Going Out on the Town? Addressing the Witness in Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo

Chapter 2: Choose Your Own Testimonial Adventure? Witnessing Alternative Futures in Peter Dickinson’s AK

Chapter 3: Border Testimonies, Restricted Crossings: Questioning the Act of Witness in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Exile: El Paso, Texas” and “Alligator Park”

Chapter 4: Hundreds of Bodies on Two Continents, Telling a Single Story: Witnessing the Testimonial Uncanny in Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo

Chapter 5: Use Beginning, Middle, and End: Witness and the Work of Reintegration in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me

Chapter 6: Survivors Tell the Stories that the Sympathizers Want: Countering the Comfort of Lost Boy Narratives in What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng

Chapter 7: You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: Ethics Lessons for Beginners in Uwem Akpan’s “What Language Is That?”

Chapter 8: My Life Is Based on a Real Story: Recursive Witness in Alicia Partnoy’s “Rosa, I Disowned You” and “Disclaimer Intraducible: My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story”

Conclusion: Deliberative Testimonio and the Reactivation of Human Rights Discourse

Editorial Reviews

In her latest book, Kimberly Nance continues to expand upon her deep knowledge of testimonios, marked by an essential shift to a transnational framework and offering an in-depth, thoughtful, and examined engagement of power-laden audience receptions to this political life writing form. Nance offers a particularly nuanced engagement with the deliberative strand of testimonio while refusing to offer romanticized account of the texts and fiercely insisting upon their radical potential.

Patricia DeRocher

Responding to the Pain of Others: Ethics of Witness in Global Testimony by Kimberly Nance is a timely contribution to testimonial studies and a worthy sequel to Nance’s Can Literature Promote Justice: Trauma Narratives and Social Action in Latin American Testimonial Literature (Vanderbilt, 2006). While the earlier volume addressed the relationship between rhetoric and affect in widely studied Latin American testimonios from the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, the current work explores the potential of contemporary testimonial literature to effect social change. Arguing that there is a future for testimonial writing as a genre capable of promoting social justice, Nance expands her scope to include not only those genres commonly associated with testimonial narratives but also literary ethnographies and works of biofiction, most written after 2005. The volume reflects a global grasp as well, as the stories she examines take place across nations and continents: Honduras, Kenya, the U.S. Mexico-border, Croatia, Los Angeles. Her decision to include authors who appeal to young adult readers is an inspired one, as is the inclusion of works by lesser known authors (Elvia Alvarado, Benjamin Alire Sáenz) along with works by popular writers (Dave Eggers, Peter Dickinson). While Nance anchors many of her observations to well-known testimonial and trauma theory (e.g. Jean-François Lyotard, Susan Sontag, and John Beverley, the volume is free of jargon and eminently readable.

Dianna Niebylski

Presenting diverse testimonial texts from around the globe, Responding to the Pain ofOthers, attends to the expansive ethical dimensions of a proliferating genre. Kimberly Nance, building upon her ground-breaking study Can Literature Promote Justice?, astutely reveals narrative and rhetorical strategies of persuasion in deliberative testimonios, works that seek engaged social action from reader-witnesses. From a wide range of divergent case studies—including traditional life stories, fictionalized works that incorporate magical realism and the fantastic, even YA novels—Nance identifies the convergence of compelling narratives, attractive to readers, that cajole and demand pragmatic responses. Clearly written and persuasively argued, Responding to the Pain ofOthers revitalizes testimonio studies by drawing attention to underlying processes intended to foster alliances with readers.

Janis Be Breckenridge