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  • Rigoberta

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    LauraZapata
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    This document discusses the authority and agency of testimonial narratives like Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu". It notes that the epistemological and ethical authority of these narratives is believed to depend on appealing to personal experience. It then quotes a definition of "testimonio" which describes it as a first-person narrative told by a witness or protagonist of events they experienced, with a sense of urgency to communicate issues of repression, poverty, or struggle.

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    rigoberta

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    This document discusses the authority and agency of testimonial narratives like Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu". It notes that the epistemological and ethical authority of these narratives is believed to depend on appealing to personal experience. It then quotes a definition of "testimonio" which describes it as a first-person narrative told by a witness or protagonist of events they experienced, with a sense of urgency to communicate issues of repression, poverty, or struggle.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    25 views1 page

    Rigoberta

    Uploaded by

    LauraZapata
    This document discusses the authority and agency of testimonial narratives like Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu". It notes that the epistemological and ethical authority of these narratives is believed to depend on appealing to personal experience. It then quotes a definition of "testimonio" which describes it as a first-person narrative told by a witness or protagonist of events they experienced, with a sense of urgency to communicate issues of repression, poverty, or struggle.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    3 Our Rigoberta?

    I, Rigoberta Menchú,
    Cultural Authority,
    and the Problem of Subaltern Agency
    The epistemological and ethical authority of testimonial narratives like
    I, Rigoberta Menchú is said to depend on their appeal to personal experience.
    Thus, for example (in my own account of the form):

    By testimonio I mean . . . a narrative . . . told in the first person by a nar-


    rator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she
    recounts. . . . The word testimonio translates literally as testimony, as in
    the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense. . . .
    The situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to
    communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprison-
    ment, struggle for survival, and so on, implicated in the act of narration
    itself. The position of the reader of testimonio is akin to that of a jury
    member in a courtroom. Unlike the novel, testimonio promises by defi-
    nition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness. 1

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