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The dissertation is a study of the narrative works of Cuban author Miguel Barnet. Testimonial literature has been institutionalized by Cuba's state cultural bodies in the midst of an ongoing effort to rewrite national history after the revolution of 1959. As sources of historical information, revolutionary historiography has incorporated voices previously excluded from nationalist historical versions.
Any political break with the past, be it revolutionary or not, has to be legitimized. In the case of the Cuban revolution, historiography has played a key role in legitimizing the new government. Consequently historiography has accrued a considerable amount of social authority, becoming one of the dominant discourses in a culture that has become highly politicized. The demands placed by historiography on Cuban literary culture account for the criticism of fiction as a politically inexpedient discourse. They account as well for the desire for referentiality that permeates contemporary Cuban literature and has produced testimonial literature. Testimonial narrative is a hybrid writing that appropriates conventions of ethnographical, historiographical and literary writings.
However, as the first chapter hopes to show, testimonial literature is not only a function of revolutionary culture. It is also part of a discursive history structured by the relationship between the intellectuals, deforciants of written culture, and the "other", "object" of written culture.
The dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first one studies the "invention" of the "other" by those in charge of modernizing Cuba's sugar economy during the XIXth century. The second chapter studies Barnet's texts as a kind of medicinal writing desirous of healing the ruptures inflicted on the social body by slavery and modernization. The third chapter takes Esteban Montejo as a figure which allows for the deconstruction of white-dominated versions of Cuban history. The fourth chapter studies La cancion de Rachel and Gallego as texts that partially deconstruct Barnet's own initial testimonial project by fictionalizing it. Gallego, we claim, explicitly examines the role of the life-history--a narrative mode central to testimonial literature--as a vehicle for resisting hegemonic versions by creating communities for displaced subjects. The fifth chapter offers some theoretical-historical remarks on the relationship between historiography and literature in Cuba.