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In order to explore the theme of connecting histories in personal narratives from the francophone Caribbean, it is important first to examine some of the scholarly debates surrounding history, memory and trauma in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Many studies–including those by Caribbean writers themselves–have emphasized themes of lack, rupture and discontinuity in relation to Caribbean history. For Martinique and Guadeloupe, this loss is primarily explained as a result of slavery and its persistent psychological influences, combined with an ongoing and problematic relationship with France. In the case of Haiti, the loss relates more closely to the political and natural disasters that have plagued the country since independence and have left it in a state of crippling poverty. While it is impossible to deny the impact of these traumas, the present book aims to view the traumatic legacy through a paradigm characterized instead by connection and connectivity.

Witnessing can assume many different forms including religious, literary, and legal versions. This chapter begins by focusing on examples of textual witnessing such as the sourcebooks of Tcherikower and Dubnow mentioned in Chapter 2 in which the compilers assembled troves of documents as a form of historical proof. The focus then shifts from the first to the second half of the twentieth century by discussing instances in which historians are called upon to take the stand in legal cases. The chapter explores a range of cases related to the Holocaust in which historians played important roles as witnesses, particularly the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 in which historian Salo W. Baron was a key witness. The chapter concludes by discussing the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000 in which a “dream team” of historians, including Richard Evans and Christopher Browning, served as defense witnesses. The victory of Lipstadt’s side proved to be a vindication for memory, as well as history, and, as such, an indication of the somewhat porous boundary between them.

This introductory essay provides a theoretical and historical overview of how the notions of memory and history have been conceptualized in relation to China. In Pierre Nora’s view state-led memory sacralizes the past, whereas history, as produced by civil society, tends to rationalize it; in authoritarian settings, an additional distinction is often drawn between “official history” and “popular memory,” construed as more “authentic.” This essay further historicizes the notion of popular memories of the Mao era by arguing that they have followed a three-tiered evolution: the first stage in the 1980s gave rise to the expression of mainly traumatic but closely controlled narratives, the second stage in the 1990s was dominated by nostalgia and social protest against marketization of the economy, while the third stage investigated in the present volume evinces a turn toward public debate and critical memory.

This chapter examines an example of how minjian memories and minjian historiography transform our knowledge of the history of the Cultural Revolution. In the case of the end of the Rustication movement, many unofficial sources contradict the official version, represented by the press of the time or by the recent TV series Deng Xiaoping. In February 1979, while the People’s Daily published a speech criticizing the Yunnan educated youth who had come to Beijing to demand the right to return to their native cities, on the ground in Yunnan, the educated youths were in fact packing up and going back home by the thousands, after a victorious petitioning movement. This movement of historical importance was never officially acknowledged. In the TV series, the sudden end of the rustication movement is attributed to the wisdom of Deng Xiaoping and the petitioning movement (including strikes, hunger strikes and the sending of delegations) is replaced by the individual petition of a female educated youth wanting to go back home to take care of her gravely ill father who succeeds in touching the heart of a good cadre. The contribution of unofficial sources is thus particularly obvious in this case.