In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio
  • Eleni Coundouriotis (bio)
Kimberly Nance , Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006); ISBN 0826515231 (cloth : alk. paper) 082651524X (pbk. : alk. paper), 212 pp.

Kimberly Nance begins her study of Latin American testimonio by pointing out that although the genre retains an association with the margin politically, as literature it is widely recognized as distinct and influential.1 Nance sets out to explore what this influence means and where the congruence of the literary and the political lies. Her study can also serve as a useful introduction to the genre, with an appendix that provides a narrative history. Nance addresses the contradiction between testimonio's self-proclaimed intent to bring about political change, its insistence on the instrumental use of literature, and its avoidance in most cases of deliberative rhetoric.

Deliberative rhetoric is the rhetoric of persuasion. Testimonio, Nance argues, is most frequently cast in either forensic or epideictic language. Forensic rhetoric, she explains, seeks to judge whether certain actions in the past were just or not. Epideictic rhetoric accords praise or blame. Both forensic and epideictic forms of speech, therefore, stress the documentary, backward glance of testimonio. The hardship accounted for in [End Page 533] most testimonio stands as accusation against the system or individual, but does little rhetorically to persuade them to change. However, when testimonio is written in the deliberative, persuasive mode, Nance argues, it is characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. Those writing in the deliberative mode are often victims of torture who feel overwhelmed by their experience and, although they are looking for solutions, are uncertain of what future direction to take.2 In her discussion of torture and language, Nance evokes Elaine Scarry's Body in Pain to show that although there might be an expectation by the reader of "heroic invulnerability" in the narrative of torture, the deliberative account of testimonio usually shows a subject struggling to hold it together.3 The difference from forensic and epideictic writing is clear, therefore. Forensic and epideictic rhetoric "offer transcendence—a language of clarity, straightforwardness, certainty."4 In the deliberative mode, testimonio becomes a "genre without a strategy," a phrase posed by Nance as a question that becomes the title of her first chapter. It seeks to persuade of the truth of the victim's experience, although the breakdown of self that is part of the experience of torture makes the narrative of it uncertain and difficult.

In assessing the political effectiveness of testimonio, Nance poses the question from the point of view of the genre's presumed audience. Who do the authors of testimonio address? This is a defensive question that reveals a sense of embarrassment, perhaps best articulated by Ariel Dorfman's mockery of the "armchair reader" that Nance refers to.5 Comfortable middle class readers consume testimonio yet in the process aestheticize it instead of turning to action. Nance explores the reasons for a reader's resistance through Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the "testimonial contract," which she explains as "the relationship between reader and witness that must exist if testimony is to result in social action."6 Nance follows Lyotard's discussion of the many ways in which the contract can fail because of the reader's refusal to read the text as prescribed. From the point of view of literary studies, this is a curious expectation. It has become commonplace in literary theory that readers are powerful shapers of the text.7 Nance is on surer ground when she makes the distinction between an imagined addressee (often someone the text accuses directly) and actual readers, who are then put in the position of "spectator" of the performance of this accusation.8 The reader as "spectator" is another common trope in literary theory perhaps best exemplified in the theories of realism which rely on the metaphor of visual recognition as understanding.9 [End Page 534]

Nance takes a different theoretical approach when she turns to the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for a model of how to read narratives of suffering. Her analysis begins with this passage from...

pdf

Share