Testimonial Literature

Testimonial literature is autobiographical writing that presents a real-life account of trauma, oppression, or survival in order to bear witness to social injustice, and is considered a subgenre of both trauma literature and the non-fiction novel. Though often traced to the civil conflicts of 1970s and 1980s Latin America, where it grew out of the Spanish-language testimonio tradition associated with human rights tribunals and truth commissions in countries such as Chile and Argentina, the genre also includes English-language accounts of historical, political, and social injustice going back to the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass. Because testimonial works typically depend on transcription, editing, and marketing by someone other than the witness, the genre repeatedly faces questions about the authenticity of the resulting text. This atlas records the specifically Latin American testimonio tradition as its own separate genre entity; Testimonial Literature here denotes the broader English-language category built substantially on top of it.