Sidonie Smith

Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights

In the fifty years during which human rights have gained an international currency, personal narratives have become a potent vehicle for advancing human rights claims. This article considers the importance of storytelling within an emerging and increasingly fractured human rights discourse as the circulation and reception of stories result in unpredictable readings and outcomes that both make visible and also forestall new rights claimants, subjectivities, and futures.

Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony

One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore how the effect of authenticity is produced by certain “metrics,” and how differing “I”-formations—here, composite, coalitional, translated, and negotiated—generate the aura of authenticity a text projects, as well as the imagined relation of readers to personal stories of witness. After tracking the metrics of authenticity in four exemplary texts—“Souad”’s Burned Alive, the Sangtin Collective’s Playing with Fire, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, and Dave Eggers’s What is the What?—we suggest an alternative reading practice to “rescue” the reading often associated with testimonial narratives.

Indigenous Australian voices : a reader

Indigenous Australian Voices presents artwork, prose, and poetry of thirty-six contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and artists from the offshore islands, the Northern Territory, and all six states of Australia. It brings together, for the first time, little-known writings by men and women who capture the diversity of their lifestyles and perspectives in a far more compelling way than better-known accounts of anthropologists and travellers.

'Land of the free'? Circulating human rights and narrated lives in the United States

Abstract In the 50 years during which human rights has gained an international currency, personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. This is particularly true in the United States where personal narratives attesting to human rights violations frequently gain wide exposure through mass publication and publicity, media circulation, and global information flows. This article explores the circulation of human rights narratives in the United States, examining some of the ways that stories enter into public discourse through published life narratives, television talk shows, news reports, campus lectures and publicity tours, websites, and the like, and are taken up by popular and academic audiences, spurring debates within the fields of legal and political theory, international relations, religion, morality and ethics, often far removed from the originating event or site of human rights violation. The article considers the many intended and unintended effects of this circulation on storytellers, their audiences, and the campaigns they represent.

Post-Tiananmen Narratives and the New China

In the late twentieth century, student protest movements sparked massive campaigns for human rights across the world. None, however, would eclipse the June 4 Movement in China. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the event was monumental.

Life Sentences: Narrated Lives and Prisoner Rights in The United States

On September 8, 2000, Nelson Mandela stood before a cheering crowd of young Australians in Melbourne’s Colonial Stadium to address the World Reconciliation Day tribute concert. World Reconciliation Day had begun as a social studies project of ninth graders at Melbourne’s Trinity Grammar School. Here was grassroots activism in practice, a human rights initiative spearheaded by local teenagers who had studied Mandela’s life and decided to enlist him in their effort to promote reconciliation between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Belated Narrating: “Grandmothers” Telling Stories of Forced Sexual Slavery During World War II

On March 11, 2001 Korean “grandmother” Kap Soon-Choi walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at the University of Michigan in the United States and sat down between two younger women, one her interlocutor, the other her translator. After leaning toward her interlocutor for the first question, she began her testimony, translated into English as “We were so very poor.” For over an hour Kap Soon-Choi told her harrowing tale of abduction and forced sexual slavery in a Japanese military “comfort station” to a hall full of hushed college students. She told her story; she wept; she resumed. After her formal testimony, Kap Soon-Choi responded to audience questions for another hour. Throughout the two hours of testimony to her radical degradation, the Michigan Daily photographer shot photos for the next day’s paper.

Indigenous Human Rights in Australia: Who Speaks for the Stolen Generations?

On January 26, 1988, the Australian government staged a grand Bicentennial celebration to mark two hundred years of continuous European settlement. On that day, two separate but interconnected events drew the nation’s attention to the disparities between the lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and their very different investments in the nation’s history. While (mainly white) officials and crowds gathered at Sydney Cove to watch a reenactment of Captain Arthur Phillip’s arrival and landing of the First Fleet, delivering officers, soldiers, and convicts to the shores of Botany Bay to establish a penal colony in Britain’s far-flung outpost of Empire in 1788, Indigenous Australians and their supporters began a march through the streets of Sydney to protest against what for them was Invasion Day.

Truth, Reconciliation, and the Traumatic Past of South Africa

On February 11, 1990, tens of thousands of jubilant well-wishers lined the streets and squares of Cape Town. On that momentous day, the seventy-one-year-old Nelson Mandela left Victor Verster Prison, Paarl, after spending over twenty-seven years in prison there and on Robben Island. Mandela remembers the scene as “a happy, if slightly disorienting, chaos” (1994, 553). The huge crowds waited for hours for a first sight of their hero, frequently erupting with the shouts “Viva! Viva! Viva Nelson Mandela!” (DeVeaux 49). Finally, near dusk, Mandela appeared before a rally on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. His raised fist brought a roar from the crowds that swelled above the ululations of the women and thunderous sounds of feet pounding the toyi toyi on the pavement as supporters sang and danced to celebrate the return of Mandela, Prince of the Madiba clan.

The Venues of Storytelling

In chapter one we surveyed some of the historical and sociocultural formations affecting the rise in publication of life narratives in the last several decades. We were particularly interested in the motivations prompting stories of displacement and exile and stories of mass genocide and traumatic loss for which the Holocaust has served as a paradigmatic event. We briefly canvassed some of the factors contributing to a broad readership for personal narratives, among them the rise of global capital and the cultures of fear and suspicion. Since our project is about storytelling in the larger field of human rights, we rehearsed some of the ways in which local and global transits of storytelling interpenetrate and are enfolded within the evolving human rights regime, as exemplified by the controversies surrounding I, Rigoberta Menchu. Turning from the domain of published life narratives, we now consider in more detail seven additional sites: fact-finding in the field; handbooks and websites; nationally based human rights commissions; human rights commission reports; collections of testimonies; stories in the media; and other scattered venues through which narratives circulate.