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Georg M. Gugelberger, ed. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 328 pp. $17.95; ISBN 0-8223-1851-2.
The self-proclaimed purpose of The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg Gugelberger, is to reassess not only Latin American testimonial literature itself but also the reception of such works by U.S. Latin Americanism. The essays collected here accomplish this purpose with intelligence and insight, and taken as a group provide a virtual snapshot of the current status of Latin Americanist testimonial discourse. Included in the volume are both the most well-known and key critical works from the first phase of writing about testimonio (essays by John Beverley, George Yudice, Margaret Randall, Barbara Harlow, and Marc Zimmerman for example) and in Part II, a second phase of writing that reflects metacritically on these initial articles. The result is a stimulating collection of essays quite literally in dialogue, leading Gugelberger to comment in his introduction that "while not necessarily making the subaltern visible, testimonio has helped to make ourselves visible to ourselves" (3). Whether or not this should be the focus of testimonio criticism, or whether the "subaltern" can ever be truly "visible" through a writing that necessarily passes through the hands of an elite, are matters of rigorous debate in this volume.
So what is testimonio? One oft-quoted definition of the genre is offered by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman, for whom a testimonio is
a novel or novella-length narrative told in the first person by a narrator who is also the actual protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. The unit of narration is usually a life or a significant life episode (e.g., the experience of being a prisoner).... The production of a testimonio generally involves the recording and/or transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is a journalist, writer, or social activist. (86)
In another essay, John Beverley traces the history of the testimonial, finding that its roots go back to the chronicles of colonial times and that it draws on other narratives such as the work of social scientists and revolutionaries of this century. As various authors included in this volume point out, testimonio is both similar to and different from...