New Oral Histories

Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan by Nyla Ali Khan

I have chosen to deploy oral evidence in my book, which has allowed me to approach events, notions, and literatures about which there was meager evidence from other sources. The use of oral history has empowered my interviewees/correspondents, people of Jammu and Kashmir, in significant ways, bringing acknowledgment of hitherto disregarded opinions and experiences.

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art by Debra Blake

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers' radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicana women. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of the U.S. Mexicanas with the fictional and artistic representations of academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists including Alma M. López and Yolanda López.

The Oral History Project at the Zayed Center for Heritage and History, United Arab Emirates

In the back room of an old villa in Al Ain, 500 voices speak of a forgotten world and a lost way of life. They tell simple tales of making charcoal, ploughing the land with oxen and of how they thought the United Arab Emirates would remain a land of sea-fringed desert and dunes forever.

The Lost World of Communism: An Oral History of Daily Life Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Molloy

Peter Molloy, producer of the accompanying BBC series, collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals an astonishingly rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption - in fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as 'perfectly ordinary' and even hanker for the 'security' that it offered.