Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America

Abstract

All forms of political domination depend on human construction of social and cultural differences among persons and peoples, for without differences there would be no basis for distinguishing those who wield power from those who are to it. The most potent political ideas about difference are those that are naturalized such that they seem to be created not by humans themselves but by nature. Such ideas are ideologically powerful because they assert that, for example, men are naturally superior to women or that white people are naturally superior to dark people. Such ideas justify conditions of domination that they reflect so that ideas dialectically create difference. Naturalized ideas are hegemonic to degree that they pervade different areas of culture from figures of speech to formal education, religion, law, and literature. Literature is usually produced by members of dominant classes in society who tend to represent and naturalize difference as it is seen from their social and cultural position. In colonial situations major authors tend to write not only from positions of class superiority but also from centers of empire. Writing from this skewed subject position within global context, such authors presume to represent to write about and to write for subaltern peoples who are relatively powerless to represent themselves either symbolically or by more immediate political means.' Such literature, as one of forms of cultural construction of difference, is better seen not as representation, but as an epistemological and political misrepresentation. From vantage point of late twentieth century it is easy to appreciate ideological dimensions of colonialism that flowed from quest for God, gold, and glory, or in words of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Bible,