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Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson, editors Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xl + 248 pp. ISBN 978-3319749648, $29.99 paperback.
Every now and then, a book comes along that forces you-quite uncomfortably- to shift: to shift your focus, to shift how you understand your field or your perspective, your practices, or even yourself. Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers, edited by Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson, was such a book for me.
I am not a survivor of torture, as some of the contributors to this volume are. I am a researcher of torture and, for nearly twenty years, have worked with survivors of this violence in a country other than my own to record and analyze their experiences. Accordingly, I have spent these two decades doing what most readers of this journal would recognize as the work of oral history. As oral historians-and indeed, as biographers and others who work with life narrative-we reflect deeply on our practices and our roles. An essential part of this practice is thinking about the positions from which we speak, how we collaborate with the people whose lives we come into, and how we co-construct and shape life narratives. Every life narrative researcher I have ever met, I believe, has thought long and hard about their practice and its ethical dimensions. We care sincerely about these matters, not to navel-gaze but because our work is always about our relationships with people and their stories, and so it matters how we respect those relationships.
Some of the chapters in this book shifted my understanding of what I am doing as an oral historian, and in particular as an oral historian who primarily works with torture survivors. More than that, some of these chapters broke apart the frames that I had drawn around myself, the roles that I perform, and the people into whose lives and stories I intrude. I felt uncomfortable and upset for much of the time reading this book. I was upset not so much because of the book's theme, though the content of all the chapters speaks to the issue of torture, and this is- and should always...