Testimonio: On The Politics Of Truth

These four germinal essays by John Beverley sparked the widespread discussion and debate surrounding testimonio--the socially and politically charged Latin American narrative of witnessing--that culminated, with David Stoll's highly publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchu's celebrated testimonial text. Challenging Hardt and Negri's "Empire, Beverley's extensive new introduction examines the broader historical, political, and ethical issues that this literature raises, tracing the development of testimonio from its emergence in the Cold War era to the rise of a globalized economy and of U.S. political hegemony. Informed by postcolonial studies and the current debate over multiculturalism and identity politics, "Testimonio reaches across disciplinary boundaries to show how this particular literature at once represents and enacts new forms of agency on the part of previously repressed social subjects, as well as its potential as a new form of "alliance politics" between those subjects and artists, scientists, teachers, and intellectuals in a variety of local, national, and international contexts.

• The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy
• Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
• ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Chicana Matters)
• Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio
• I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography
• Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise)
• The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America
• Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latin America Otherwise)