Introduction: The Genres of Post-conflict Testimonies

Conflicts and wars are fundamental collective experiences for the construction of memory; they constitute cutting-edge events, caesurae which mobilize different strategies to confront discontinuities, triggering the emergence of a discursive field characterized by opposing memories and historical narratives, feelings of victimization and revenge. Post-conflict cultures are, supposedly, defined by the different ways (practices, texts, behaviours, rituals) in which they re-write, re-constitute, and work through their contrasting, abused, competing memories and traumas. However, testimony it is not only a timely topic when studying post-conflict cultures, but also a rather fashionable and thus potentially dangerous one, around which the debate has been wide and controversial. Hence, the article confronts some straightforward questions. What else can really be said about testimonies of collective violence and traumas that has not already been elaborated and commented upon, perhaps even excessively so, in a decade that the historian Annette Wieviorka (2006) has labelled “the era of witness”, characterized by the explosion of Trauma and Holocaust Studies, whereby the locus of testimony stands as the crucial nexus in the dynamics between individual, collective and public memory and justice? How to write and speak about the dead