Slave narratives, testimonio, and the representation of subaltern voices in literary canon

This dissertation studies how nineteenth-century slave narratives and twentieth-century Latin American testimonio represent 'subaltern voices' that testify to a condition of oppression and disenfranchisement and that through the testimonial act challenge hegemonic power structures. The study approaches the topic by analyzing some testimonial narratives as well as the critical discourses surrounding them. The first two chapters of the dissertation explore the different critical positions that have characterized the formation of slave narratives and testimonio as epistemological categories. Chapter one discusses the importance of writing within Enlightenment discourses in affirming the humanity of slaves and traces the debates regarding the documentary and literary value of slave narratives. Chapter two analyzes how the critical formation of testimonio similarly revolves around issues of truth versus fiction to define testimonio as a practice that opposes the ideological and aesthetic principles of modernity.;The second part of the dissertation carries out close readings of particular testimonial accounts. Chapter three applies Paul Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic to the study of two narratives from the Caribbean: The History of Mary Prince (1831) and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiography (1840). Discussion of these texts emphasizes their testimonial value in relation to economic, social and political circumstances under colonialism. Chapter four delves further into the dynamics of testimonio discourse in Latin America and its relation to ethnographic practices by analyzing two texts: Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarron (1966) (Autobiography of a Runaway Slave) and Ruth Behar's Translated Woman (1993). Chapter five explores how a Cuban movie, El otro Francisco (1974), and Dessa Rose (1986), a contemporary African-American novel by Sherley Anne Williams, recreate a slave agency absent from historical records and texts.;Whereas the scholarship on slave narratives invokes the transformative power of autobiography as a discourse of agency from the margins, the critical discourse on testimonio critiques the discipline of literature in claiming a space for the communal voice of the disenfranchised. However, as textual inscriptions, both slave narratives and testimonio foreground a poetics of identity that displaces the praxis of the testimonial act.