Testimony in Literature

Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, Department of English, has published "Human Rights and Testimonial Fiction: Alicia Partnoy and the Case of Argentina's Disappeared," at 1 Icfai University Journal of Commonwealth Literature 61-78 (2009). Here is the abstract.

This essay explores a particular genre in postcolonial literature: the literature of human rights. It uses a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical narrative, the Argentinian Alicia Partnoy's account of her incarceration. The essay begins by proposing, following contemporary theorists of human rights, that a narrative tradition of human rights exists. It then moves on to discuss the 'literature of trauma'. Partnoy's work, it argues, demonstrates two strategies - the enumerative narrative of witnessing and self-witnessing. Partnoy produces a 'fiction of trauma', or 'testimonial fiction'. This fiction, the essay concludes, works at the level of a 'moral imagination', where the act of imagination is a performative through which the subject is formed, but also one that allows Partnoy to speak of the victims who did not survive the camp. This becomes the 'fiction of human rights' because it constructs the subjectivity - which includes agency - of Partnoy. If the focus of human rights discourses is the protection of the subject's agency, then the construction of subjectivity in The Little School makes it a narrative of human rights. It concludes by proposing, via Ashis Nandy's argument that the (postcolonial) Third World can become the 'collective representation of man-made suffering', that such narratives fit into a global history of trauma and human rights.

Download the article from SSRN here.