| Abstract: | This essay frames issues of historical truth, interpretation, and translation in reading I, Rigoberta Manchu in terms of the analysis of qualitative data. Using Walter Benjamin's work on translation and historiography, posited lessons include: to read for difference rather than the same; to focus on what is becoming in the data; to probe the price people pay to tell the truth about themselves; to attend to how stories are told; and to situate interpretation as supplement rather than mimesis, both inadequate and necessary. Such lessons are endorsed toward the goal of what Gayatri Spivak terms a "knowledgeable Eurocentrism" rather than a naive one in first-world dealings with third-world texts. |
