This Palgrave Handbook examines the ways in which researchers and practitioners theorise, analyse, produce and make use of testimony. It explores the full range of testimony in the public sphere, including perpetrator testimony, testimony presented through social media and virtual reality. A growing body of research shows how complex and multi-layered testimony can be, how much this complexity adds to our understanding of our past, and how creators and users of testimony have their own complex purposes. These advances indicate that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited. The purpose of this Palgrave Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

This handbook provides the first systematic integrated analysis of the role that states or state actors play in the construction of history and public memory after 1945. The book focuses on many different forms of state-sponsored history, including memory laws, monuments and memorials, state-archives, science policies, history in schools, truth commissions, historical expert commissions, the use of history in courts and tribunals etc. The handbook contributes to the study of history and public memory by combining elements of state-focused research in separate fields of study. By looking at the state’s memorialising capacities the book introduces an analytical perspective that is not often found in classical studies of the state. The handbook has a broad geographical focus and analyses cases from different regions around the world. The volume mainly tackles democratic contexts, although dictatorial regimes are not excluded.

The Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture will be an essential reference point, providing international coverage and thematic richness. The chapters examine the real and imagined spaces of the prison and, perhaps more importantly, dwell in the uncertain space between them. The modern fixation with ‘seeing inside’ prison from the outside has prompted a proliferation of media visions of incarceration, from high-minded and worthy to voyeuristic and unrealistic. In this handbook, the editors bring together a huge breadth of disparate issues including women in prison, the view from ‘inside’, prisons as a source of entertainment, the real worlds of prison, and issues of race and gender. The handbook will inform students and lecturers of media, film, popular culture, gender, and cultural studies, as well as scholars of criminology and justice.

The trope of humans being ‘replaced’ by ‘AI’ is one of the most familiar examples of the rhetoric of replaceability. Not only have questions about what is unique and what is replaceable gained momentum in digital culture, but notions of ‘fungibility’ have emerged in many other contexts as well such as ecology, management theory, and, more sinisterly, in racist and conspiracist thinking. This volume argues that there is a ‘replaceability paradigm’ at work throughout the culture of modernity, from the European Renaissance, through Freudian psychoanalysis, Chinese science fiction and postcolonial theory, all the way to neural network programs such as Google’s DeepDream. This collection will be of interest to anybody engaged with the conceptual architecture of contemporary culture, whether through film, literature, or new digital media.

This book focuses on the testimonial evidence of traumatised witnesses in trials of international crimes, which deal with acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Such trials often involve the testimonies of those who experienced or witnessed extremely traumatic events, which can make it hard for these witnesses to recall specific details. Testifying during trial may in itself also pose challenges to their well-being. Yet the legal process of determining whether someone can be held criminally responsible for the alleged crimes needs to be fair, in accordance with the right to a fair trial of the accused, and the facts need to be determined as accurately as possible. This book argues that to ensure fair and accurate fact-finding when in particular traumatised witnesses testify, a balance needs to be struck between the needs of witnesses who testify about traumatic experiences, the fair trial rights of the accused and the objective of the court to establish as accurately as possible the responsibility of the accused. This is crucial throughout the stages of selecting, preparing, presenting and assessing the testimonial evidence of traumatised witnesses. The methodology involves an analysis of transcripts of proceedings and case law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court and Dutch courts prosecuting international crimes. The research demonstrates that it is often difficult to strike a balance between the competing objectives during proceedings when traumatised witnesses testify due to the current lack of regulations and guidelines applicable during investigations and prosecutions. This book shows that this balance can, and should, be achieved when traumatised witnesses testify during criminal proceedings for international crimes. The work is an invaluable resource for researchers, academics and practitioners in criminal law, criminology, legal psychology, legal psychiatry, social anthropology and forensic sciences.

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with colonialism and postcolonialism. With essays on literature, film, drama, graphic novels, and more, the book addresses migration and media, hostile environments, migration and language, migration and literary experiment, migration as palimpsest, and figurations of the migrant. Each section is introduced by one of the handbook’s contributing editors and interviews with writers and film directors are integrated throughout the volume. The essays collected in the volume move beyond the discourse of the “refugee crisis” to trace the historical roots of the current migration situation through colonialism and decolonization.