The burden of memory

Victims, storytelling and resistance in Northern Ireland

Bibliographic Data

ID12905016
AuthorsClaire Hackett (0000-0002-0424-5406, Heritage Council, corresponding author), B Rolston (0000-0001-6266-7394, University of Ulster, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume2
Issue3
Pages355-376
Publication date2009-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMemory Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1750698008337560
OpenAlexW2105848419
LanguageEN
Citations received39
References cited27

The article examines the potential and limitations of storytelling for victims of political violence. It rejects the view that storytelling is unproblematic, a way for victims to ‘get things off their chest’. It examines a wide range of literature on storytelling and testimony, from the Holocaust through to contemporary transitional societies. In particular, attention is focused on the experience of victims and survivors telling their stories in formal settings such as truth commissions and trials in South Africa and the former Yugoslavia, as well as at unofficial storytelling processes in Northern Ireland. The authors look at the potential of storytelling as resistance to injustice and conclude that while unofficial processes of storytelling present opportunities for collective solidarity, the stories often go unacknowledged by the wider society. Conversely, they also conclude that, while official mechanisms of truth recovery can ensure wide legitimacy for the stories of victims, this is often at the cost of marginalizing the storyteller and the story

Art · Injustice · Legitimacy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Solidarity · Storytelling · The Holocaust · Transitional justice · Cambodian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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