Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

Notes

1 Notes Introduction 1. When a published English version of a given testimonio is available , its title will be given in parentheses and all citations will be from that text. Square brackets will enclose translations of titles of works not available in English. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of titles in square brackets and quotations from texts for which no published translation is cited will be my own. 2. Nance, “From Quarto de Despejo,” 42–48. A complete version of the diaries was published as The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. For more on this proto-testimonialista, see Levine’s The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Levine and Meihy’s Cinderela Negra. Unless otherwise specified, all further references to the work of Carolina Maria de Jesus will be to Child of the Dark. 3. The terms compilador and gestante/gestor come from Miguel Barnet , “La novela testimonial” and “Testimonio y comunicación” in Jara and Vidal. English versions of Barnet’s theory on testimonio are available in “The Alchemy of Memory,” published as an afterword to the Hill translation of Montejo and Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (203–8), and Barnet’s “The Documentary Novel.” Coprologuist (an unfortunate coinage since “copro-” is a productive prefix meaning “excrement”) comes from John Beverley (Against Literature, 92). Autobiolocutor is Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal’s suggestion with reference to Montejo and Menchú, each as “one who speaks one’s life to another” (“Spanish American Ethnobiography,” 102). 4. Here again, the genre has been truncated in the process of both general and critical reception. Teaching and Testimony not only 10 Can Literature Promote Justice? limited its treatment to Menchú, a reasonable matter of focus, but also limited its definition of the genre to the collaborative. CareyWebb states in his introduction, “In Latin American studies testimonio has received a good deal of critical examination and has come to mean specifically a longer oral narrative connected to a collective historical experience of oppression, marginalization, or struggle created by an individual who, because of his or her circumstance , must collaborate with a second person for transcription and editing” (7). In contrast, collaborative text was the area that Ariel Dorfman bracketed out of “Political Code” in favor of testimonios written by their experiencing subjects. Further evidence that the boundaries between oral and written testimony and between the various testimonial subgenres tend to be porous includes Menchú’s venture into poetry (see Fechter) and Brazilian testimonial diarist Carolina Maria de Jesus’s expressly and quite conventionally fictional stories, to which she refers in her diary. 5. I am indebted to Danny Anderson for bringing to my attention Sáenz’s Flowers for the Broken and Sanmiguel’s Callejón Sucre y otros relatos. 6. Beverley classifies Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as “in effect autobiography” (Against Literature, 83). Neil Larsen’s chronicle of the reception of testimonio, in the introduction to Reading North by South, offers multiple examples of the responses of progressive critics. In Public Access, Michael Berubé provides an interesting account of some of the skirmishes between the two sides. In general , for reasons to be analyzed in this study, conservative critics came to grips with the persuasive rhetoric of testimonial texts earlier and in more depth than did progressive critics. For an example , see Dinesh D’Souza, “Travels with Rigoberta,” in Illiberal Education. 7. Two examples are Feal’s “Spanish American Ethnobiography” and Johnnie G. Guerra and Sharon Ahern Fechter’s “Rigoberta Menchú’s Testimony as a Required First Year Reading,” in Teaching and Testimony. In Proceed with Caution, Sommer also considers Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 8. Slavoj Žižek points out that revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg saw even failed movements as useful and perhaps necessary preliminaries to eventual change (59–60, 84). 9. For more on Benetton’s combination of politics and consumption, Notes 11 see Henry Giroux’s “Consuming Social Change”and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s, “From Art-Mageddon to Gringostroika,” (57). 10. Lerner’s The Belief in a Just World (1980) is the central text here. Lerner’s work has been extended over the years in a number of coedited volumes: Lerner and Lerner’s The Justice Motive in Social Behavior (1981); Montada, Filipp, and Lerner’s Life Crises and Experiences of Loss in Adulthood (1992); Lerner and Mikula’s Entitlement and the Affectional Bond...