The Genres of Post-conflict Testimonies

The status of testimony and of its main protagonist, the witness, has been recently widely discussed, beginning with the question which historically has accompanied the act of witnessing, in all its declinations (scientific, theological, jurisprudential, historical), that of its reliability and therefore its authenticity and “truth”. In order to avoid generalizations and repetitions, the risks and dangers of dealing with such a subjects, the volume locates testimony both in a broader (interdisciplinary) and more specific contexts and specific case-studies, in order to study and document various forms of representation, perception and memory of conflicts and trauma. The many essays it presents take into account the range of discourse types and genres of such representation: memories, visual texts, legal case materials, political and historical discourses. All this in order to investigate the construction of identities of the enemy and the self, the victim and the perpetrator, the representation of trauma, its contextualized nature and its historical, social, economic, ethnic, religious and gendered roots.