ABSTRACT
How do we enter a discussion of “human rights narratives”? Cautiously and respectfully, acknowledging Paul Farmer’s observation about the complexity of “the social fi elds in which human rights are violated” and, I would add, in which that violation is witnessed and made public. Do we start with an emphasis on “human rights” as a contemporary regime for addressing radical suffering and injustice? Witness testimony provides an evidentiary ground for recording, naming, and intervening in conditions that are framed and presented as human rights violations by survivors, activists, and institutional players in the United Nations and member states. To approach human rights narratives from this perspective is to apply a narrow defi nition: they are narratives told by fi rst-person witnesses enduring the aftereffects of terror and trauma who
explicitly invoke human rights discourse. Produced and circulated within human rights institutions and contexts of activism, they include fi eld reports, testimony transcribed from truth and reconciliation hearings, child soldier narratives, and the journals of political prisoners smuggled out during or published after incarceration. As sites/scenes of witnessing to radical injury and harm, they can be organized, informally orchestrated, or feral. Some narratives may gain global attention, as did Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984); others may remain relatively obscure, tucked away in commission reports. They may also be incorporated into collective genres, such as web-based archives and recuperative arts projects (Schaffer and Smith 2004 , ch. 2). Reading or listening to these human rights narratives, we might attend to the material conditions of witnessing to injury and harm; or to the structural conditions of giving testimony within networks of human rights activisms; or to the conventions of story forms emerging from particular histories of violation, the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa, the cultural revolution in China, the Tiananmen resistance movement in China, or the Rwandan genocide.
