Wednesday, May 24, 2006

"Whether her [Menchú's] book is true or not, I don't care."

Professor Marjorie Agosin, Spanish department head at Wellesley College.

As John Leo points out in his editorial for U.S. News & World Report, January 25, 1999, "Nobel Prize for Fiction?" there are some disturbing components to the 1983 book Rigoberto Menchú.

Or as he puts it succintly, "the book presents us with two problems: 1) huge portions of it are apparently untrue and 2) a lot of professors who teach it on our campuses don't want to hear objections to the book, or they just say that the truth doesn't matter," aka the so-called UTEP SYNDROME, as appears to be the case with Wellesley College's Professor Agosin in her statement from the same article cited above.

As Leo shrewdly observes, Menchú's "book has strong appeal because it stresses indigenous rights, feminism, identity politics, Marxist class analysis -- virtually the entire bundle of concerns of the campus left."

Enter one David Stoll, "a Middlebury College anthropologist who interviewed over 120 people in Mechú's hometown. According to Stoll's book, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Menchú was right about the savagery of the Guatemalan military. But people in the village were just as terrified of the guerillas, who introduced political assassination to the area."

As Leo quotes Stoll, who describes himself as a lefty, "When I began to talk about my findings, some of my colleagues regarded them as sacrilegious. I had put myself beyond the pale of decency."

Examples:

Professor Michael Berube, University of Illinois. "... says he will continue teaching Menchú's autobiography just as he will continue teaching The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin."

Professor Joanne Rappaport, "president of the Society for Latin American Anthropology, told a reporter that Stoll's book is an attempt to discredit one of the only spokespersons of Guatemala's indigenous movement."

Professor John Peeler, "a professor of political science at Bucknell, says that the Latin American tradition of the testimonial has never been bound by the strict rules of veracity that we take for granted in autobiography."

Professor Magdalena Garcia Pinto, "director of women's studies at the University of Missouri, says what Menchú is offering is not mendacity. Rather, it is a narrative about how large communities in the region are/have been oppressed."

Then John Leo makes this provacative statement:

"Why is it not mendacity? Because our campus culture puts more emphasis on voice, narrative, and story than it does on the truth. A growing number of professors accept the postmodern notion that there is no such thing as truth, only rhetoric."

Perhaps a little something to ponder, as UTEP's academic reputation continues its slow, downward spiral.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of mendacity: John Leo is wrong about Berube, who (as he pointed out in a later essay) has never taught Menchu. This is what Berube actually said about the controversy:

"Despite the fact that some of the events narrated in the book are either untrue or impossible to verify, and despite the fact that the author engages in what many historians have found to be whitewashing, self-aggrandizement, and outright falsehood, I think the book remains important to the history of anti-imperialist nationalism in this hemisphere, and I think its considerable intellectual and emotional appeal is not contingent on its status as a factual record. For these reasons I will continue to teach the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin."

His point, obviously, was that there are plenty of "compromised" autobiographies in which writers don't tell the full truth. Even worse, there are plenty of hack journalists like Leo, who are too lazy or stupid to read carefully. And if you take your information from people like Leo, well, you get what you deserve.

11:01 AM  
Blogger World of UTEP said...

Yo!

You got me cold on that one: friend Leo is well worth the watching.

Thanks for the input!

"D."

5:47 PM  

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