Zoe Norridge

Perceiving pain in African literature

Acknowledgements Introduction: Pain, Literature and the Personal Painful Encounters in Yvonne Veras The Stone Virgins Between Minds and Bodies - the Location of Pain and Racial Trauma in Works by Bessie Head and J.M. Coetzee Womens Pains and the Creation of Meaning in Francophone Narratives from West Africa Writing around Pain - Personal Testimonies from Rwanda by African Writers Responding to Pain, from Healing to Human Rights: Aminatta Forna, Antjie Krog and James Orbinski Epilogue: Literature and the Place of Pain Works Cited Index

The Future of Testimony

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the ground breaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

“Professional Witnessing in Rwanda: Human Rights and Creative Responses to Genocide”

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the ground breaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

From Wellington to Bougainville: Migrating Meanings and the Joys of Approximation in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip

First published in 2006, Lloyd Jones’ novel about village life on the Pacific island of Bougainville has been the subject of enthusiastic critical reception by the international media. However, it has rarely been discussed in the academic context of Papua New Guinean literature. This article will examine how the New Zealand-born novelist empathizes with his principle character, a young girl from the island, and what role this gesture of identification plays in the literary response to the Bougainville secession struggle. Highlighting the novel’s colonial and postcolonial context, I argue that Mister Pip is less a narrative about the specifics of life on the island and more a story about other stories and their potential to allow us into the lives of others, even when that invitation is politically complex and fraught with ideological implications.

Photography, Film and Visibly Wounded Genocide Survivors in Rwanda

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda have been represented by an increasingly varied range of photographers and filmmakers. International photographers responding to the aftermath of this violence have tended to focus on bearing witness to a genocide that the world failed to acknowledge at the time. One strategy for doing this has been to foreground a relatively small number of visibly wounded genocide survivors who recur in work by different artists. This article analyses representations of six such disabled survivors to explore the strengths and limitations of varying artistic strategies and trace their evolution across time. In doing so it draws on disability theory, contextual material and interviews with Rwandan artists. Whilst some photographers continue to instrumentalize the visible wounds of survivors as metaphor, this is often complicated when the visual image is accompanied by extended text or dialogue. More recent work, including work by Rwandan artists, further prioritizes the survivor’s perspective and ongoing lived experiences rather than solely the events of genocide in 1994.