Resumen de Writing the Other: Rhetoric and Gender in Testimonial Writing. A Review of Joanna R. Bartow's Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina PP, 2005)

Aarti S. Madan

• In describing mid-nineteenth century reception of Sarmiento’s now institutionalized masterpiece Facundo, Julio Ramos effectively indicates that issues of veracity within the historico-literary sphere have traumatized Latin America for nearly two centuries. With his declaration that “[t]hesplit between poetry (as well as fiction) and true social history generates a foundational tension,” we note that literature is relegated to what might be demarcated the left side of the split, whereas authoritative forms of historical truth reside comfortably on the right. It is precisely this split-cum-tension that Joanna R. Bartow attempts to analyze and overcome in her Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women’s Testimonio for Truth, Fiction, and Theory.