“Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics: Testimonial Literature” in Literary Studies in India: Genology. (Kolkata: D.S.A. Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, 2004). Transcultural Politics and Aesthetics : Testimonial Literature Kavita Panjabi Historically the university has always privileged lettered knowledge over narrated experience as source of understanding..….At the same time, on a global scale, marginalized groups are insisting on entering into dialogue with lettered knowledge, from alternative epistemological grounds. Metropolitan academies quite likely have power to repress or dismiss these interlocutors, or to intimidate them into silence. But if they succeed, we all lose. Marie Louise Pratt In the last four decades the testimonio has emerged as a critical site for the generation of women's collective and oppositional consciousness in Latin America – and of late in India too. Through the political practice of recording historical memory and eye- witness accounts, the testimonio foregrounds a critique of oppressive state rule. While the entire genre of North American Slave Narratives can be considered to be a precursor of the testimonio, the difference lies in the fact that most of these were recorded or written after the emancipation of slaves, while the testimonio records current struggles from below. From the point of view of literary study, it inhabits the zone of indeterminacy between historiography, autobiography and the novel. It narrates history but is distinct from historiography in terms of its foregrounding of hitherto silenced voices, and its nurturing of collective identity and consciousness; it is not autobiography in that it comprises eye-witness accounts of collective struggle; and while possessing literary quality in terms of its ability to interweave aesthetic and narrative dimensions, it is not exactly fiction in that it represents lived experience, and does make claims to “truth”. Finally, the genre of the testimonio is not to be confused with testimonies delivered by witnesses in courtroom trials either, as will become evident in the rest of this essay.