Sam Stuart-Booth
ISSN 2516-8045
The second volume of Studies in Testimony returns to the theme of Latin American testimonial literature (testimonio). Examined by Anna Forne in the first volume, in this issue Laura Webb addresses the definition of testimonio as well as ‘the reasons for the assumption of hybridity in Latin American literature and the problems created by this assumption when discussing testimonial production, and the wider issue of labelling testimonio as a genre. Clíona Hensey, in her article ‘“Ghostly encounters”: Haunting as postcolonial testimony in Zahia Rahmani’s Moze and Saliha Telali’s Les enfants des harkis’, examines these two texts by daughters of harkis (‘indigenous Algerian men who served as auxiliary soldiers in the French army during the Algerian War of Independence’) in order to highlight the ‘multivocal nature of these works’, which ‘ultimately positions the reader as an active witness who is called upon to take up the dialogues which are often foreclosed or interrupted within the confines of the texts.’
The third and fourth articles of this issue examine the subject of rape memoirs. Firstly is Marta Bladek’s ‘Moving On by Going Back: Spatial Figuration of Trauma and Recovery in Susan J. Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self’. Bladke’s article ‘[i]nformed by a close reading of Aftermath […] puts forward a spatial figuration of trauma as the paradox of simultaneous departure and return, taking leaving of and coming back to the site of a violation, metaphorically and literally.’ Amanda Spallacci in her article entitled ‘Rape Testimony in Contemporary Memoir’ argues that there is a need to nuance the methodology used to read trauma narratives. Ultimately suggesting that: ‘Testimonies about rape in memoirs demonstrate that memoirs about rape unsettle and dismantle hegemonic narratives, as well as create alternative ways of talking about and understanding testimonies about rape.’ The two book reviews by Katherine Burn are written about Professor Alexander Laban Hinton’s monologues ‘The Justice Façade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia’ and ‘Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer’.
The journal would not be possible without the editorial board and the generous help of the reviewers, all of whom are greatly thanked and gave their time freely.
The full version of this issue is available to download from the link below: