Enunciating Alleged Truths: A Response to Ana Forcinito

In her chapter, Ana Forcinito claims that testimonio is “a narrative that accounts for the construction of collective subjects.” She then adds that “testimonio is generally associated with the term subalternity, and thus, is understood as an attempt to undo the erasure, within official narratives, of the existence of a social group and its culture.” Yet, in my understanding, these claims are reductive. I see Forcinito’s position as a US-centric understanding of this critical category, one that evidences more debates that took place in US academia than what testimonio’s emergence and maturation actually looked like in Latin America itself. If, as many US critics claim, the moment of testimonio is over, this is mainly because the politics with which it was invested were conceived in the United States in complete disregard of the real status of testimonial writing in the continent. In the following response to Forcinito I will develop the latter, by first establishing a genealogy from which one can trace an alternative understanding of what was at stake, and then indicate some of the epistemological crossroads that mark the sociohistorical and geocultural specificity of Latin American testimonio, while also trying to recapture the freshness of the articulations between culture and politics, elements that became stale when reread from a US-centered perspective.