First Take: A term applied to forms of journalism, much as in oral history accounts, which emphasize re-telling the testimony of persons caught up in events, at times verbatim. 

Deeper: Unlike the word “interview,” the phrase “testimonial” is usually associated with re-telling the words of common or marginal citizens, victims of traumatic experiences, or speakers of hidden or lost histories. As such, the form resonates with the secondary meaning of “witnessing” (see entry) as “standing as a witness,” or “bearing witness.” What is gathered up is treated as a form of evidence, much as we refer to “testifying” in court.
           In these ways, and in some of its original applications by journalists such as Margaret Randall (discussed in Chapter 5), this mode is thus related to a sub-genre of the Latin American novel and, to a degree, in some forms of ethnography, commonly known as testimonio. And yet, in such a comparative light, it also reminds us that classic forms of testimonial writing (e.g. the slave narrative) typically had a person acting as a “go-between”—either as a translator or a person who wrote up and sometimes edited the testimony of the subject at the center of the narrative.  Thus any reading of testimonial narratives should also draw us back to the presence of the reporter, and the potential effects of that presence: the nature of the “occasion” or telling occasion (see entry), for instance, or whose needs the testimonial transaction serves.     

 Recommended Reading:  Margaret Randall, “Reclaiming Voices: Notes on a New Female Practice in Journalism,” Latin American Perspectives 18 (Summer 1991): 103-113.