Suspending Humanity from Humanitarian Crises: A Case of Testimonial Injustice

In conditions of humanitarian crises, self-recorded testimonies are recognized as valid narratives, empowering the voice of the colonized. The paper argues that these testimonies can be taken as speech acts that form a narrative in oral history. These testimonies aim at inducing an obligation of solidarity and change on the end of the hearer. Oral history in crises holds a unique ethical value, serving as a form of epistemic and discursive salvation for individuals and their communities. This paper examines the epistemic and discursive aspect of oral testimonies, in order to denote two different ethical challenges that give priority to the narrative of the colonizer over that of the colonized. These ethical challenges are based on the authoritative discourse's dehumanizing terminology that reduces the native's ethical subjectivity on the one hand and the distortion of narrator's uptake that gives power to the colonizer's narrative on the other hand. The analysis in this paper employs qualitative method in analyzing oral testimonies, conceptual critique and argumentation grounded in speech act theory, focusing on how illocutionary forces are shaped and distorted by ethical, discursive, and historical factors.