Revisiting Latin American “Testimonio” in Literature and Human Rights: La Berkins. Una combatiente de frontera (2020)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15359/rldh.36-2.8Keywords:
human rights, literature, testimonio, narrativeAbstract
“Life narratives” have been a central focus of work in the field of literature and human rights. Since the emergence of this area of studies, which usually dates back to the turn of the millennium, “life stories”—including memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, or their Latin American projection, the testimonio—produced in the field of literature have been read as tools of activism, spaces for demanding justice when other spaces were closed, sites of agency, self-affirmation or enunciation for voices not yet authorized, means of denunciation, or forms of resistance. On the other hand, in the field of human rights, these same narrative forms became not only a vehicle but also an important part of human rights work itself (Sáenz, 2024), both in civil society campaigns and in institutional spaces that took the form of “truth commissions”. This essay explores a genre within “life narratives”, the testimonio, which emerged in the Latin American literary field with the explicit aim of leaving that terrain (and even questioning it) to enter other spaces linked to justice and human rights. The essay is based on a recent text, La Berkins. Una combatiente de frontera
(Fernández, 2020), which can be read both as a case of testimony and as a return or a reformulation of the genre, its problems, and tensions.
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