The Venues of Storytelling

Abstract

In chapter one we surveyed some of the historical and sociocultural formations affecting the rise in publication of life narratives in the last several decades. We were particularly interested in the motivations prompting stories of displacement and exile and stories of mass genocide and traumatic loss for which the Holocaust has served as a paradigmatic event. We briefly canvassed some of the factors contributing to a broad readership for personal narratives, among them the rise of global capital and the cultures of fear and suspicion. Since our project is about storytelling in the larger field of human rights, we rehearsed some of the ways in which local and global transits of storytelling interpenetrate and are enfolded within the evolving human rights regime, as exemplified by the controversies surrounding I, Rigoberta Menchú. Turning from the domain of published life narratives, we now consider in more detail seven additional 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.