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Venues of Storytelling: the circulation of testimony in human rights campaigns

2004; Routledge; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10408340308518258

1751-2964

Kay Schaffer, Sidonie Smith,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Abstract Personal storytelling has become critical in contemporary human rights campaigns. Personal stories are narrated to remember a past that has been forgotten; to begin a healing process between tellers and listeners; to bring rights violations to a global audience; to put a human face on suffering; to mobilise and fund activism. Global audiences gain access to the suffering and struggles of people elsewhere through published life narratives, narratives such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian woman in Guatemala or Australian Jan Ruff-O'Herne's 50 Years of Silence. Yet, personal storytelling takes place not only in the form of published life narratives but also in multiple and diverse venues where readers and listeners become witnesses to human rights violations and campaigns, ‘in the second person’. In this essay, we consider in more detail seven such 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.