Decolonial Witnessing

Examining the power of testimonios in illuminating political injustice in Latin America from the Cold War to the present.

During the Cold War, testimonio emerged as a powerful genre of political nonfiction in Latin America. Artists created first-person narratives of censorship and state violence, highlighting broader circumstances of oppression carried out by local right-wing oligarchies in collusion with the US empire. Decolonial Witnessing explores the continuing vitality of testimonio in the twenty-first century, as it has evolved into narratives contesting neoliberal dispossession and dispoasability.

Considering the cultural work of Ana Castillo, Regina José Galindo, Jayro Bustamante, Alberto Ledesma, Javier Zamora, Lila Downs, and others, Guadalupe Escobar shows how artists, authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using testimonial narratives to identify and resist the architecture of post–Cold War militarized democracy. Contemporary testimonios center migrant children, torture abolitionists, Indigenous land defenders—figures whose perspectives and, indeed, presence disrupt dominant paradigms of citizenship. Cast against the law, their stories—their memories—constitute a critical optic on the construction of belonging. In these acts of bearing witness, Escobar locates the possibility of a new, counterhegemonic political imagination.