The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)
TL;DR: Do social struggles give rise to new forms of literature, or is there more a question of the adequacy of their representation in existing narrative forms like the short story or the novel as in, for example, Gayatri Spivak's articulations of the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi or the debate around Fredric Jameson's notion of national allegory in Third World writing?
Abstract: Do social struggles give rise to new forms of literature, or is there more a question of the adequacy of their representation in existing narrative forms like the short story or the novel as in, for example, Gayatri Spivak's articulations of the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi or the debate around Fredric Jameson's notion of national allegory in Third World writing?2 What happens when, as in the case of Western Europe since the Renaissance, there has been a complicity between the rise of \"literature\" as a secular institution and the development of forms
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TL;DR: The potentialities of online technology to foster and disseminate counter-hegemonic discourses are examined through three case studies in which girls and women have used various online platforms to make extrajudicial allegations of sexual violence and abuse.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the impact of online technologies on public representations of sexual violence. Drawing on Habermas's theories of the public sphere and Fraser's associated critiques, it argues that the Internet has become host to 'counter-publics' in which allegations of sexual violence are being received, discussed and acted upon in ways contrary to established social and legal norms. The potentialities of online technology (and social media in particular) to foster and disseminate counter-hegemonic discourses are examined through three case studies in which girls and women have used various online platforms to make extrajudicial allegations of sexual violence and abuse. Where alleged perpetrators of sexual violence are publicly named, it has been argued that such action represents an invasion of their privacy and a subversion of their right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial. In online contexts such allegations can be received and understood very differently, and these understandings are then circulated in ways that can directly influence 'old media' coverage and court outcomes. However, as the paper notes, the principles upon which online counter-publics operate are not radically discontinuous with those of the hegemonic public sphere and not all girls and women have equal access to the support of online networks and activists. Language: en
144 citations
Cites methods from "The Margin at the Center: On Testim..."
...In this regard, the blog operated as a form of digital ‘testimonio’, a testimonial narrative provided by those ‘excluded from authorized representation’ (Beverley, 1989: 13)....
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TL;DR: 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 as discussed by the authors, and such ideas are ideologically powerful because they assert that, for example, men are naturally superior to women or that white people are natural superior to dark people.
Abstract: All forms of political domination depend on the 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 subject 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 the conditions of domination that they reflect so that ideas dialectically create difference. Naturalized ideas are hegemonic to the 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 the 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 the centers of empire. Writing from this skewed "subject position" within the 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 the forms of the cultural construction of difference, is better seen not as representation, but as an epistemological and political misrepresentation. From the vantage point of the late twentieth century it is easy to appreciate the ideological dimensions of colonialism that flowed from the quest for "God, gold, and glory," or in the words of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "the Bible,
92 citations
TL;DR: Hesford explores the documentation of rape warfare and ethnic violence as human rights violations and the ethical challenges such representations pose for us as witnesses, and as scholars, teachers, and members of the international community as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: If one of the prominent rhetorical features in human rights documentaries is to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity—of bearing witness—how to account for ruptures in identification? Hesford explores the documentation of rape warfare and ethnic violence as human rights violations and the ethical challenges such representations pose for us as witnesses, and as scholars, teachers, and members of the international community.
77 citations
Journal Article•
59 citations
Cites background from "The Margin at the Center: On Testim..."
...Pacheco (2009) urged us to allow students to tap into their political–historical knowledge; testimonios would also permit students to be at the center of knowledge, producers of culture with recognition that they are the margin at the center (Beverley, 1992)....
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Book•
01 Jan 1986
TL;DR: The authors explore the ways in which writing culture has changed the face of ethnography over the last 25 years. But they do not discuss the role of writing culture in the development of ethnographies.
Abstract: This seminal collection of essays critiquing ethnography as literature is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, exploring the ways in which Writing Culture has changed the face of ethnography over the last 25 years.
5,353 citations
1,166 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that the third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development.
Abstract: Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to "us" and what we have to do and how we do it, to what we can't do and what we do better than this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to the level of the "people." This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing "America," and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is nothing but that old thing called "nationalism," long since liquidated here and rightly so. Yet a certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world (and also in the most vital areas of the second world), thus making it legitimate to ask whether it is all that bad in the end.' Does in fact the message of some disabused and more experienced first-world wisdom (that of Europe even more than of the United States) consist in urging these nation states to outgrow it as fast as possible? The predictble reminders of Kampuchea and of Iraq and Iran do not really seem to me to settle anything or suggest by what these nationalisms might be replaced except perhaps some global American postmodernist culture. Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of noncanonical forms of literature such as that of the third world,2 but one is peculiarly self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary: the strategy of trying to prove that these texts are as "great" as those of the canon itself. The object is then to show that, to take an example from another non-canonical form, Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoyevsky, and therefore can be admitted. This is to attempt dutifully to wish away all traces of that "pulp" format which is constitutive of sub-genres, and it invites immediate failure insofar as any passionate reader of Dostoyevsky will know at once, after a few pages, that those kinds of satisfactions are not present. Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to conclude that "they are still writing novels like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson."
1,095 citations
Book•
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01 Jan 1961
TL;DR: Mao Tse-tung's pamphlet on guerrilla warfare has become the basic textbook for waging revolution in underdeveloped and emergent areas throughout the world as mentioned in this paper, where Mao's pamphlet is used as a starting point for many guerilla campaigns.
Abstract: Mao Tse-tung's pamphlet on guerrilla warfare has become the basic textbook for waging revolution in underdeveloped and emergent areas throughout the world
477 citations