Hacia un paradigma comunitario en el campo testimonial argentino y chileno

Abstract

Since its institutionalization in 1970, testimonial writing in Latin America has developed along two main lines: on the one hand, texts in which an intellectual collects and organizes the words of subaltern subjects; on the other, accounts from the victims of the military dictatorships that took power across the continent during the twentieth century. This article seeks to lay the foundations for an analysis of a new configuration of testimonial praxis emerging in contemporary Argentina and Chile, which occupies an intermediate position between these two categories. In this context, there is no longer a single witness recounting their experience, or an intellectual acting as mediator; rather, subjects come together to engage, either directly or indirectly, with victims of state violence and its aftermath. This dynamic fosters a space of intersubjective relations that ultimately reveals its fundamentally communal nature.