Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence

Steven High

mar 2015 · UBC Press

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Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, Argentinian torture camps, the Yugoslav Wars, and Jewish emigration from the Maghreb.

The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as an insightful afterword. They demonstrate that – through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design – it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of “testimony” to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.

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Steven High is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Oral History at Concordia University in Montreal. He co-directs the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and was principal investigator of the Montreal Life Stories Project, a community-university research alliance that recorded the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide, and other human rights violations. He is the author of a number of books including Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement (2014) and the co-editor of Remembering Mass Violence: Oral History, New Media and Performance (2013).