many contemporary 'elite' novels with which it might be compared, highlights the process of a novel's creation: how to structure a beginning and an end, how to repress or emphasize stylistic quirks. It includes debates on the use of symbols and concerns itself about whether or not to leave in or take out all punctuation: 'Take out the commas, the periods, the semicolons, all the signs of punctuation, of interrogation, of exclamation and allow the interior discourse to flow. Make the reader work a little. Forgive me…I think in periods and commas.' At the same time, it plays with these postmodern obsessions, these eminently readable confections of a nowestablished, and highly stylized, tradition of unreadability, the contemporary novelist's verbal equivalent of the Conceptual artist's make-up. By insisting on this saturation of fictional techniques, this dizzying declension of narrative possibilities, Campos underlines the constitutive importance of the process of reading to the creation of the fiction, as well as the unretrievability — or ultimate irrelevance — of any kind of originary or founding statement.
One of the most exciting new developments in Latin American literature today is the attention paid to 'testimonios.' Partly, such -645- works respond to our recognition of a major lack in traditional literary studies that 'indigenista' literature does not even begin to fill. The increasing critical attention to such works has raised a number of methodological and procedural problems, however. Black, mestizo, and Indian peoples tend to be poor and illiterate. To understand their 'literature' it is generally necessary to go beyond books; poetry may be sung, rather than written, stories often pass from village to village in oral form. The extraordinary campesino, mine worker, or guerrilla fighter may, in extraordinary circumstances, dictate his/her testimonial to a more privileged, politically compromised poet, anthropologist, or novelist, but frequently in such cases the unlettered person is stripped of agency. Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal has made the striking observation that the Spanish edition of Rioberta Menchú's testimony — Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983; I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984) — is credited to Elizabeth Burgos, the ethnographer who took the Guatemalan woman's testimony and edited it with her; in contrast, the English edition lists Menchú as author and Burgos as editor, a telling shift. A similar displacement takes place in relation to Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1968) where in the Spanish original Miguel Barnet is listed as the author, and in the English translation he is cited as the editor of Esteban Montejo's testimony. The shift in the title from 'biography' to 'autobiography' reflects this transformation, but also disguises Barnet's very real creative function in adapting Montejo's story to his narrative purposes.
Feal comments not only on the loss of agency implied in this cooption of authorship but also on the political significance of such power plays, which in effect counter the testifiers' appeal to immediacy and authenticity by screening their words with a veil of art: 'To call the speakers subject or object denies the creative, autonomous act they perform when they recount their lives; to call them characters confines them to a fictive world.' It is also significant that in English translation the reference to the revolutionary struggle, for Rigoberta Menchú the sole reason for providing her testimony, is muted in favor of a general ethnographic reference. Rigoberta Menchú's is not the only case of such, often well-meaning, appropriation; other examples include Domitila Barrios de Chungara's Si me permiten ha-646- blar…Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (1976; Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, 1978), dictated to Moema Viezzer; Leonor Cortina's Lucia (1988; Mexico); Claribel Alegría's No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en la lucha (1983; They'll Never Take Me Alive, 1986) (El Salvador); Patricia Verdugo and Claudio Orrego's Detenidos-desaparecidos: Una herida abierta (1983; DetainedDisappeared: An Open Wound) (Chile); or Elena Poniatowska's nonfiction novel, Hasta no verte Jesúsmío (1969; Until We Meet Again, My Jesus), recreating the life of a Mexico City laundrywoman and ex-soldadera pseudonymously named Jesusa Palancares in (more or less) her own words.
Well-meaning ethnographers who appropriate authorship of the 'testimonios' in effect reproduce a noxious class-gender system they consciously reject, even while deploying the rhetoric of liberation. Even worse: the use of the rhetoric of liberation sounds like bad faith. It is not surprising, then, that, from the other side of the power axis, the maids and factory workers look on such scholars with suspicion, as yet another imperialist weapon. One of the responses to this oppression is a violent rejection of all that privileged class members are, and all they represent. Thus, for example, Bolivian Domitila Barrios de Chungara, in a famous altercation, confronts the chair of the Mexican delegation to a 'Tribuna del Año Internacional de la Mujer' (Steering Committee of the International Year of the Woman). Domitila's rejection of the privileged woman derives from a long history of silencing and oppression; of being spoken about and spoken for, as if her needs were subsumed in the demands of the upper-class women who oppress women like her. Their differences, says the Bolivian mine worker's wife, are so salient as to constitute almost another species; even to say both are 'women' is a grave misnomer.
Despite these caveats and concerns, however, it is important to reiterate that all of these testimonios demonstrate a signal lucidity, all represent important contributions to the still nascent emergence of majority voices into the public forum, with all of the revisionary resonances implicit in the unstifling of radically different perspectives. Regardless of the in-fighting and the rejection of similarities between classes, and notwithstanding the real concerns raised, for example, in the problematic attribution of testimonial authorship, the greater at-647- tention given to literature of/by the oppressed majorities in Latin America has specific implications that are more than trite ones: (1) literature by Latin Americans involved in the revolutionary struggle (the main group of testimonios) can clearly not afford the luxurious autobiographical impulses besetting middle-aged Anglo-European men; the record that needs to be set straight is always a more than personal one; the threat, in countries where intellectuals regularly 'disappear,' is not existential angst or encroaching senility but government security forces; (2) for the critic, assertions made about these texts have to be accompanied by readings made cumbersome through the need to introduce, even to a knowledgeable audience, a group of works that barely circulate, even (or especially) within their own countries; (3) the critic feels an uneasy suspicion that s/he may be behaving, in her own context, in a way parallel to that Gayatri Spivak uses to describe Kipling in India as the unwitting, and therefore all the more culpable, participant in a questionable cultural translation from a colonial to a metropolitan context that enacts a literary structure of rape. Well-intentioned mistranslation or misapplication of theory, like the equally unintended misrepresentation or oversimplification of primary texts, is a specter that looms large in the minds of dedicated cultural critics.
Debra A. Castillo
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Colonialism, Imperialism, and Imagined Homes
A historicized account of the movements of peoples from one geographical area to another as immigrants, expatriates, or exiles reveals that, in our contemporary world, writers' origins and locations are often at variance. The conditions of expatriation and exile carry particular configurations at different historical times. Our contemporary world has seen migrations of peoples on a scale as never before in human history. For colonized peoples, migrations by 'choice' and/or by economic necessity are rooted within a colonial and postcolonial history and within continuing imperialist dominations today. Postcoloniality itself overdetermines the 'choice' to migrate. In their journeyings as exiles and expatriates, postcolonial peoples embody a hyphenated condition of identity: for example, Indo-American, Jamaican-Canadian, Indo-PakistaniBritisher — the phenomenon of having too many roots, too many locations, both to belong to and to un-belong in, negotiating indigenous and Western languages. These predicaments necessitate a type of tightrope walking where, even as we travel with relative ease on supersonic jets, we cannot with as much ease step out of our skins and assume identities and kaleidoscopes of colors as we step off the plane into the humid air and tropical smells of Bombay, or into the brisk coolness of jetway corridors and the whitewashed efficiency of Heathrow or Kennedy.
In this chapter I will explore the complex terrain of the politics of representations of contemporary writers of different racial origins living in North America — United States citizens of different ethnici-649- ties, exiled and/or expatriated writers whose identities are mediated by a historically necessitated self-consciousness. Autobiography
