Latin American literary testimony: an endless dispute

Abstract

Despite the “institutionalization” and recognition of the testimony by literary criticism, the genre continues to be the target of disputes that (badly)treat it in the crossfire between literature and the social sciences. In an attempt to bring an update to these debates (main objective), within which varied and extensive edges are included, the author of the article has gone in search of some faithful believers and practitioners of the genre: the winners of the Casa Literary Américas Prize of the Americas in the modality of Testimony. The article thus proposes, initially, a brief theoretical approach to the subject and, in a second moment, a dialogical and reflective space sustained both by the criteria of the interviewees and by the analyzes suggested around his award-winning Works. Part of these unpublished interviews that are shared here show that such heterogeneous positions on the way of assuming testimonial writing vary, among other reasons, according to the academic discipline exercised by the professional. The debate, which includes journalists, writers, sociologists, anthropologists and filmmakers, proposes a renewed approach to the subject and confirms the idea that the disputes remain far from reaching their end.