The Novel After Terrorism: On Rethinking The Testimonio, Solidarity, and Democracy in Horacio Castellanos Moya's El arma en el hombre

…since September 11 [2001], terrorism has become another major 'umbrella' concept that now subsumes a wide array of real threats, ordinary crimes, and societal annoyances.

What we are experiencing is a hijacking of criminal justice, as well as of wider governmental and financial institutions, to meet political and strategic ends.

—Margaret E. Beare, "Introduction"

In "The Aura of Testimonio," Alberto Moreiras seeks to put an end, once and for all, and yet again, to the desire to see in the testimonio genre a recuperation of the "real" in the face of fiction or the literary-as-such. Moreiras's persistent target in that chapter is, of course, John Beverley, whose work on the testimonio raises the most important challenges to post-structuralist critical perspectives skeptical of truth-claims, and who discovered for the testimonio a daring theoretical language that challenges literary critics (poststructuralist and otherwise) to reformulate their own critical apparatuses, even to reformulate their own positionality within "Literature." In the chapter, Moreiras takes specific aim at Beverley's idea that the revolutionary or "popular-democratic" potential of the testimonio resides in its capacity to elicit and/or produce a feeling or space of solidarity between the reader and the testimonial subject, a feeling that is largely based on, and therefore indexical of, the reality or realities of marginalization, pain, and/or physical exploitation suffered by the testimonial subject him/herself.

For Moreiras, who takes aim at all types of "tenuous fetishization[s]" of difference in testimonio criticism, the idea of solidarity, itself "in perpetual risk of being turned into [if not already or always-already] a rhetorical tropology" (215), may ultimately reproduce the hegemonic stratifications that have marked the relations (diachronic and synchronic) between U.S. academics and the "testimonial subject" or, mutatis mutandis, between the U.S. and Latin America. As Moreiras states,

As testimonio criticism grounds itself in the affirmation of the extraliterary dimension of the testimonial text, it unavoidably puts that extraliterary dimension at the service of a literary-critical performance that reabsorbs the extraliterary into the literary-representational system.

(225)

Or again,

[…] the canonization of testimonio in the name of a poetics of solidarity is equivalent to its reliteraturization following preassigned tropological and rhetorical registers. Thus, in the hands of testimonio criticism, testimonio loses its extraliterary force [sic], which now becomes merely the empowering mechanism for a recanonized reading strategy.

(226)

For Moreiras, in effect, the concept of "solidarity" in the hands of testimonio critics works exactly in the opposite manner in which Beverley would have it, actually decreasing or even eliminating the possibility of creating a "popular-democratic" sphere. This is because "solidarity," as a trope of materiality, ultimately reifies or freezes the hierarchical differentiations, or rather the "abjections" (to echo Moreiras), that would make "solidarity" as a structure of (congruent) feelings tenable.

Yet, as I assert, Moreiras's smart and sophisticated deconstruction of the "solidarity trope" ends up inadvertently giving up too much political capital, for even if solidarity ultimately remains merely "a trope," it is one that nonetheless nourishes the possibility of political and/or social action across or with difference. Stated simply, even simplistically, it is "solidarity" as a trope that makes possible the practice of solidarity, even if only by making it available to perception, or to our perception as critics. This is an important value in a world interconnected by globalization and divided by globalization forces. Even if Beverley can be accused of expressing the same "recanonizing desire" that, as Brett Levinson reminds us, "underlies not only Latin Americanism but Latin American studies in general" (174), I argue that we, who by definition belong to that very same desiring structure, must nevertheless maintain his (i.e. Beverley's) emphasis on "solidarity" as a trope of political action across difference, even when we may agree that Beverley's (well-intentioned) conception of solidarity must be rethought. In this essay, I will attempt to reconceptualize solidarity's value (and even to realize that "value") by offering an alternative conception of the relation between...