Abstract

GARCIA, Victoria. Latin American literary testimony: historical foreshadowing of gender in the revolutionary discourse of the sixties. Acta poét [online]. 2014, vol.35, n.1, pp.63-92. ISSN 2448-735X.

The foundation of testimonio in Latin American literary field, initiated at the end of the '60, makes part of the institutionalization of the Cuban revolution, process where its projection to the rest of Latin America constitued a central problem. This paper studies political preconditions of testimonio. In particular, it analizes certain aspects of Cuban revolutionary discourse that anticipate features eventually developed by the literary genre, in the ways the relation between literature and politics is represented, and in the subjects of discourse that are proposed as embodiments of such relation. The paper introduces the question of Cuban revolution, as regards the exemplary status it acquired in Latin America during the sixties. Then, it examines the literary positioning represented by testimonio, as the corollary of a reflexive reconsideration operated by some Latin American writers and critics, concerning their historical role. Finally, it considers three representative documents of Cuban revolution and its continental projection: History will absolve me, by Fidel Castro, and Reminiscences of the Cuban revolutionary war and Bolivian diary, by Ernesto Guevara. We show the textual configuration of a revolutionary subject whose legitimity emerges not only from a political experience which testimony enunciates, but also from particular ways of living and representing literature in the context of a revolutionary practice. In the end of the sixties, the continental literary field would reaffirm such features as its discourse legitimating criteria, during the institutionalization of testimonio as its privileged genre.

Keywords : testimonio; Cuban revolution; revolutionary discourse; literature; genre.

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