Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women's Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory (review)

Reviews  bartow, joanna r. Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. 252 pages Joanna R. Bartow ends her book Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, & Theory (2005) with a reference to the testimony of a Mapuche Indian woman. What makes this testimonial narrative noteworthy for Bartow is that it closes with the transcription of a conversation between the testigo and her transcriber. In this exchange, the testigo, Mapuche feminist activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef, both acknowledges the desire of the Mapuche to preserve their own culture and ‘‘places herself as an actor at the present turn of the century’’ (238). For Bartow, this uncommon fusion of twentyfirst -century activism with indigenous traditions marks a significant moment in the evolution of the genre of testimonio because it denotes a shift in the agency of the testimonial subject. Paillalef’s position, Bartow asserts, does not have to be analyzed or justified by an ‘‘expert’’ in this context. We are instead presented with ‘‘a demystified, truthful representation of the testimonial subject’s evolving agency’’ (238). Here we have the underlying interest that fuels Bartow’s book, which asserts that as ‘‘[t]estimonial subjects evolve [. . .] they shift strategies and negotiate their identity in context. Therefore, those who listen will also have to allow their theories and ideologies to be subject to change’’ (238). Thus, those who listen to the testigo must transform as the testigo transforms. Those who wish to take part in the process of testimonio in the twenty-firstt century must acknowledge that as the testigo evolves, the transcriber/listener must also evolve with him or her. The subject of the ‘‘subject’’ is in crisis in Bartow’s book, which is in itself nothing new, and has been at the center of debate on testimonio since its induction into the academy as a topic worthy of study. Yet it was particularly after the publication of Georg M. Gugelberger’s The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (1996), which included such fundamental essays as ‘‘The Aura of Testimonio’’ by Alberto Moreiras and Doris Sommer’s ‘‘Rigoberta’s Secrets,’’ that the shift from first wave to second wave criticism finally made its indelible mark. Accordingly, in the mid-1990s the crisis of the testimonial subject in Latin America was brought into the limelight of the critical stage. Though now, ten years later, the spotlight seems to have dimmed a bit on the ‘‘aura,’’ and the genre and its controversial ‘‘subject’’ still remain to be defined. Nonetheless, there is certainly no lack of new scholars attempting to ‘‘name the nameless’’ and negotiate what exactly is that slippery relationship, associated with testimonial literature, between the testigo and the transcriber. 222  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) In Bartow’s critical study, which focuses on women’s writing and woman as a subject, the author uses a mere 230 pages to make her way through an assortment of readings of well-known narratives of testimonio and the now commonly known ‘‘anti-testimonio.’’ Paying due attention to the balance between testimonio and subject, Bartow emphasizes that Subject to Change offers a reading of ‘‘mediated testimonios’’ alongside both ‘‘narrative and theoretical texts’’ that either ‘‘reflect or should see themselves reflected in testimonial narrators’ negotiations of the testimonial process and consequent critique of its efforts to cede authority to its narrators’’ (16). In saying this, Bartow calls attention to how she does not read testimonio as a one-sided discussion, but rather as a reciprocal dialogue between the narrators of the testimonial and the relevant theoretical texts. In particular, Bartow aims to respond to North American and European feminist theory’s history of ‘‘homogenizing women’s experience’’ and turns to Latin American feminism, which she maintains ‘‘has from early on been divided along class lines between grassroots movimientos de mujeres and middle and upper-class feminism’’ (17). Although it has been a ground-breaking movement, testimonio is still unable to escape the societal structures that constrain it and still ‘‘carefully reinforce[s] control on female sexuality, even as the women who tell their...