Heteroglossia and indigenous feminist writing and theory.

1. Introduction

Alternative knowledge and literary production by Indigenous feminists from the Latin American region has only recently gained access to international audiences and received scholarly review (Dulfano 2015; Hernandez Castillo 2010; Bastian Duarte 2012; Alvarez et al. 1998, Suzack et al. 2010). As Gaytri Spivak contends, "within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced ... the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow" (1998, 28). Thus Indigenous females, triply marginalized, have struggled from within their minds, native communities, as much as against external forces to find a voice and outlet for their ideas. Academic review of Indigenous feminism identifies it as a "nascent field of scholarly inquiry" (Suzack et al. 2010, 4), yet burgeoning category within feminist epistemologies of the South. This raises the question of why are they making inroads now? Are there distinct tactics or techniques employed that have allowed for this altered reception? What is different in the intellectual and political global landscape such that it opens a space and opportunity to articulate and be heard? Have they adopted new strategies to differentiate themselves and carve out a distinctive niche? Compared to their predecessors, what has shifted to allow for this ascendency? Probing their interpolation into international consciousness through the lens of Bakhtin's theories, on heteroglossia and discourse in the rhetorical genres, may be a fruitful means to comprehend the transcendence of these new voices. Indigenous feminist theorists have consciously chosen to employ the scaffold of the rhetorical genre in speaking about their consciousness and formulating a sense of identity. Given the exhaustive scrutiny of language and discourse Bakhtin undertakes in the chapter "Discourse in the Novel" (1941 originally) his conceptual framework may be useful in shedding light on the discourse of Indigenous feminist intellectuals at this juncture.

2. Methodology

In this paper I define and apply the theories proposed by Bakhtin on the salience and functioning of the rhetorical genres in relation to speaker and her discourse (1981, 353). Contemporary Indigenous feminist knowledge producers adopt specific discursive strategies related to the rhetorical genres in their auto-ethnography and epistemological reflections. The highly self-conscious aspect of the speech utterances of these alternative knowledge producers as they articulate their Indigenous feminist epistemology can be understood through the lens of Bakhtin's concepts referring to the dialogic and social nature of discourse and utterances. I will position Indigenous feminism and elaborate on the transformation of their discourse from a highly mediated (asymmetrical, colonized) testimonial form in the 1980's I, Rigoberta Menchu to twenty-first century affirmations on identity, subjectivity, egalitarianism, and sustainable development. Indigenous feminist epistemology has found unmediated form only recently. Although the examples I present here are not drawn from a novel, elements of the interconnectivity of form and content postulated by Bakhtin and the "fundamentally social modes in which discourse lives" (269) are manifest in their literary expression. Thus I am motivated to explore the correlation in this paper between their verbal art as it is voiced today and Bakhtin's theory expounded originally in the Dialogic Imagination (1941; cited here 1981 edition). In addition, I describe the shifting international intellectual debates, in particular regarding the intellectual and role of the public intellectual, that have created an aperture at this time.

3. Situating Indigenous Feminist Epistemology

Indigenous feminist epistemology endeavors to interrogate and articulate the ways in which being at once Indigenous and female informs and shapes our conception, acquisition, and production and/or validation of knowledge. Without privileging gender or ethnicity in one's identity or cosmovision, rather acknowledging the intersectionality of these contending categories, Indigenous feminist epistemological practice examines the discriminatory, denigrating and annihilating beliefs and behaviors of patriarchy, governments, collective political or economic agents, and individuals towards Indigenous women. These Indigenous feminist alternative knowledge producers make patent exclusionary methodologies, how gender influences and shapes knowledge production, and they seek to right the scales toward less vertically-oriented hierarchical power structures and more-horizontal enunciations of identity and subjectivity. An Indigenous feminist epistemology prioritizes a gender/tribal (Nation=tribal) Nation/gendered perspective in confronting and formulating practices of inquiry and subjectivity in any discipline. It is inclusionary, revisionist, and renders women's activities and frame of reference as hub for the transformation of society and knowledge production at this exact moment of historical development.

4. Relevant Post-colonial and Bakhtinian Theory on Spaces for Negotiation of Identity

Several post-colonialist theorists identify the literal and figurative space where identity is negotiated in subaltern decolonizing practice. The theoretical space denominated as a borderlands for Gloria Anzaldua (1987) where a colonized identity sought to attain and institute liberation originally hailed from the specific geographical location of the Southwest US, though extended to other frontiers. Concomitantly it traversed the metaphorical, psychological, sexual, linguistic, and the spiritual borderlands (Anzaldua, 1987: preface). As she states:

   The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado,
   mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo,
   Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are
   populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner,
   and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation
   must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes
   in society. Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first
   happens in the images in our head. (1987 preface)

Homi Babha (1990) posited another form of a liminal/interstitial space, like a contact zone, where:

   in the emergence of the interstices--the overlap and displacement
   of domains of difference--that the intersubjective and collective
   experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value
   are negotiated. How are subjects formed 'in-between,' or in excess
   of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/
   class/gender, etc.)? How do strategies of representation or
   empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of
   communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and
   discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may
   not always be collaborative and dialogical ... (p. 2)

Bakhtin also envisions liminality where there is a unique utterance, and identity formation occurs through language. His discussion on heteroglossia as a double-consciousness, and location of linguistic identity in that liminal space can be taken to apply to more than novelistic genre, and is not necessarily restricted to the disciplines of literary and linguistic theory. The instability and itinerant nature of heteroglossia, its elaboration as a social construct, and its power to open metaphoric spaces may allow the transgression of hegemonic constraints.

Bakhtin's theory about the stratification, yet unitary nature of heteroglossia (1981, p. 270) opens a host of contingencies for subaltern agency as well. Boundlessness is implicit while the utterance is tied continuously to both past and future, and unstable.

Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another ... Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word 'response' here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account ... Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91).

Thus utterances are tied to past and future by the chains of responses as affirmation, refutation, supplementation or dependency. Though the framework at once paradoxically circumscribes and limits the extent of agency, the primacy of context over text and the rigidity of any particular set of conditions from "social, historical, meteorological, to physiological" guarantee an utterance pinpointed by location and time will have a unique meaning. In that sui generis resides the contingency for unprecedented subterfuge.

Utterances are heteroglot because they are subject to a matrix of forces virtually impossible to reproduce. In that implicit attribute of heteroglossia, alternative discourse and even social transformation find an aperture. For utterances to shape and transfigure reality, we must allow for the power of language and the word to be the catalyst for change, when conditions are right. Supporting this notion, bilingual education scholar Luz Maria de la Torre Amaguana Kichwa asserts that the process for an Indigenous female author to transcend her imposed impediments or perceived set of constraints is initiated by crossing the threshold from oral to written; that act of interlocution in the present transgresses academic and societal norms, making Indigenous woman visible at this time and in this place, chained to the previous iteration. Moreover if we accept that language is constitutive (we mold and are molded by language), acute consciousness of the rhetorical dynamic of written language further allows for self-awareness and external projection of the subject at a particular moment or with the convergence of forms of subordination or privilege. Indigenous feminist theorists bear a heightened awareness of the utterance and the limitations that must be overcome.

4. Heteroglossia and the Reframing of the Terms "Intellectual" and "Knowledge Producer" in the Contemporary

Bakhtin claims we must negotiate the contradictory nature of heteroglossia. It is the locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide (1981 p. 270), potentially becoming a target of suppression in his theory. Conversely I hold that heteroglossia may also be a site for promulgating emancipatory scripts that articulate a language of progressive politics. We have seen challenges to the primacy of the unitary Occidental/ Northern hegemonic epistemology (Spivak 1988, p. 271) inciting an intense effort to conserve the subject of the West and subjective sovereignty of the center. Concurrently, a revalorization of the category of intellectual, beyond the elite--i.e. whose speech act we take into account as the purveyor of knowledge, has chiseled away at, and undercut the authority of one system, one set of nouns, and substantive concepts, or one enunciation as the sole legitimate voice or vocabulary to master in the debates on democracy, development, globalization, cosmopolitanism, patriarchy etc. (Santos 2012; Chomsky et al. 2010). This permutation in socio-political discourse as much as the concomitant imaginary and insertion of fourth or other principles can be coupled with Bakhtin's views on the liminality of heteroglossia, which underscores the unstable nature of the utterance. This convergence may provide the crutch for some initial overtures toward social change. I would like to explore briefly the aforementioned points as they relate to writings and utterances emerging by Indigenous feminist theorists from North and Latin America.

As a corollary, I want to keep in mind the transformation taking place around the term intellectual that has shifted from exclusive entrenchment in the hands of White male elitist academics and intelligentsia toward the notions of inclusivity implicit in the Gramschian public intellectual (1971) leading in the public sphere for the public good. A new subject is emerging with a distinct discourse. When we allow for the opening up of knowledge diffusion to include non-Western, non-patriarchal or colonial, non-exclusively scientific based forms of knowledge originating in the metaphoric "South," the cognitive injustices that sustain the constraints of the hegemonic perspective may be surmounted. Paramount in this process is the movement toward agency and subjectivity by the periphery, members of the infinite diversity of our world.

Among the rising voices of interest are Indigenous alternative knowledge producers presented here. What we find with these writers is that they are infusing their cosmovision, giving aspect and meaning to the utterance of Indigenous woman, who formerly was unseen or heard. To do so they are utilizing certain genres, rhetorical discourse, and strategies that we will consider. Their outlook coalesces theory and praxis/activism, East and West, alternative and hegemonic allowing for new ways to see the world and engage from a non-Eurocentric/ Northern, and presumably more global, horizontal position. It is a reconditioning that sets in motion Ashish Nandy's contention that colonized as much as colonizer--those who have internalized colonialism--move toward being psychologically decolonized by decentralizing control of epistemological production. Stated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bolivian mestiza Aymara intellectual, "internal and internalized violence, domestic violence as a product of an invasive mentality installed in the conscience of the invaded. The 'intimate enemy' (Nandy) who has been interposed reproduces the hegemonic validation in the subjectivity of the subaltern" (2014, 13). One way to decolonize may be the promise of Bakhtin's view of the "invigoration in renewed form" and context (1981, 170) of the dialogue's subsequent development--bringing new enunciations by hitherto silenced subjects or knowledge producers and the confluence of voices.

What do I mean by Indigenous public intellectuals? In some cases they are those emerging from local settings, incited by "activist aspirations to pursue either political or cultural activities. Their task, based on training from within indigenous organizations, is to produce a cultural discourse and educational infrastructure to operationalize this discourse" (Rappaport, 2005, 11). They ensure the efficacy and vitality of rhetorical discourse by cultivating what Bakhtin calls "semantic depth and flexibility, the capacity to expand and renew their meanings in new living contexts--... for the signifying word lives beyond itself, that is, it lives by means of directing its purposiveness outward" (1981 p. 354). The subaltern subject, particularly woman, realizes the urgency of giving language significance beyond the linguistic or aesthetic realm, tying it to material conditions and her own cultural identity. Put into practice, De La Torre Amaguana for example emphasizes the (re)signification and a (re)semantization of the nomenclature Runa--Kichwa word for human being. In her redefinition and appropriation of its original semantic value, human beings are understood to include women and men, poor and wealthy, North and South. Likewise, many practitioners of Indigenous feminist epistemology aim to dismantle and challenge the hegemonic, canonical production of theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and only useful if they attend to the male agenda. By moving past the derogatory connotation of Runa as dirty, calumnious subhuman, her goal is to position indigenous woman as cardinal element of the term and reinstate an original semantic value as inclusive of two equal genders in harmony with their human and natural world.

The objectives of organic Indigenous intellectuals are consonant with their existence as autochthonous peoples, and honed inextricably in service to the Indigenous movement. Charles Hale (1997) mentions in relation to the cultural politics of identity in Latin America in the late twentieth century that one area that had become problematized is that of "the entanglement of the analyst's lens and topic of study" (p. 569). That interface is relevant as the Indigenous women writers are self-designated analysts of their own lives, inscribers, and protagonists. Academic knowledge for the alternative knowledge producers serves to "promote local activism infused with a contestatory and culturally-oriented indigenous ideology" (Rappaport, 2005, p. 11). They repudiate the elitist epithet of traditional intellectual, so denominated by Western governing thought, and self-label as "activists engaged in intellectual concerns."

Nonetheless one can differentiate a taxonomy of discourse unique to each group of alternative knowledge producers: for instance, one group may be more leftist-oriented addressing grassroots development, or others, aimed at bilateral or cross-regional exchange between the "subordinated minorities." In terms of content, some are engaged in culturalist projects, and others dedicated to a discourse of sovereignty (Rappaport, 2005, 15). I would add that for Indigenous feminists a prevailing branch of autoethnography is commonly honed at intercalating a portrait of self into the previously negated academic, social and political arenas. As Luz Maria de la Torre Amaguana states few are the Indigenous women who have taken up pen and paper, particularly in the hallowed academic sphere (2015). Indigenist feminism exploits the heteroglossia of discourse to construct, insert, and promote a gendered, ethnic, cultural identity.

These alternative knowledge producers, speaking from a site outside of the hegemonic domain, are finally able to insinuate non-Western epistemologies into the debate. Why now? Just as Bakhtin refers to the instability of the system caused by the collision of centrifugal and centripetal forces (1981), contemporary theorists appear to have found this constant tension creates a need and space for articulating other worldviews at the moment. Sousa Santos (2012) claims the sociopolitical context of our time is difficult to define because it depends on the position one holds within the system. Yet he posits mindfulness of "alternative epistemologies" as sources of constancy and potentially, of survival. Because of the acute asymmetries in terms of class, geography, economic resources and political stability that are not fixed, and in fact shifting, depending on who is speaking where and when, the current system is a site of "complexity." Sillitoe et al. ask the pointed question of "who has a right to know what?" whereas Mignolo queries who says what to whom and where? The twenty-first century currency exchanged in all of the literature by sociologists, anthropologists and others about our dysfunctional and asymmetrical geopolitical system is "intricacy" and "complication" unlike the clarity of the previous century. Simultaneously we note a recurring slide toward the strategic option of a "third" space of multidimensional subjectivity that is portended as viable, aligned with sustainability, and conceivably less contentious.

However, Sousa Santos cautions us about the inability from within the current system to imagine a post-capitalist world, to ascertain the meaning of terms like "governance," or to ride out the capitalist tendencies that are eviscerating the social democratic dream, environment, and public goods.

Sousa Santos is not a lone voice seeking solutions or alternative positions or fourth world objectives. Other publications surfacing characterize the globalizing process as asphyxiating. Chomsky and the authors in New World of Indigenous Resistance (2010) espouse the need for scholarship and direct action in their critique of the cultural homogenization occurring in the American hemisphere. They respond with myriad examples of existing sites of contestation and highlights of "Other campaigns" protagonized by the Indigenous struggling in the Latin American region. Jaime Martinez draws on a historic and "latent" form of resistance--comunalidad--as a bridge between ancestral and contemporary civilizing epistemological notions. He proposes comunalidad as a fourth guiding principle of education, which if implemented, will serve as the foundational knowledge and basis for constructing all other knowledge (85). Bakhtin speaks of the importance of positioning, and the inevitability of fluctuating meanings, as central to societal transformation. These "other" campaigns may be positioned and serve as constitutive elements for the "reconstructing, formulating, and legitimizing" (Sousa Santos, p. 14) of alternative conceptions for a more sustainable, just and equitable world.

5. Utterance and Indigenous Feminist Discourse

Indigenous women involved in the project of decolonization and the realignment of the very boundaries of the utterance, as determined by a "change of speech subjects" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 91), begin with the insertion of gendered perspectives into the global struggle for social justice. Their discussion will disarticulate homogenizing perspectives of the Indigenous that make the Indian synonymous with terms like past, rural, good, noble (Escalante, 2012) and locate them within the contemporary context of a complex social structure inclusive of rural, urban or transnational viewpoints. These women writers bring to light the internal physical and psychological subjugation endured by Indigenous women as well as that protagonized by dominant communities' towards women, what Cusicanqui calls "unveiling the interstitial scenes of epistemological violence" (2014).

In part this epistemological violence incites patriarchy to reject and criticize indigenous feminism's emerging form of theorization as illegitimate. Elizabeth Archuleta (2006) argues against the manner by which the academy denigrates their feminine, tribal cognitive styles and modes of knowledge production, misleading Indigenous feminists into believing that the ways they use language to interpret the world or produce knowledge is wrong or antithetical to Western, hegemonic acts of theorizing (p. 88). The inevitable aftermath of colonization and patriarchal oppression is the internalization of precisely these notions of inferiority vis-a-vis subject, style and form of expression. "This colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds" (Nandy, 11). Moreover what is referred to as the knowing subject --the West--has created the third-world idea and in the creation the creator a God-like hegemonic power--locates itself at the apex of power, with concomitant forms, types and areas of knowledge promulgated, canonized, controlled and manifested by the first world hegemon (Mignolo 1991, 1). Therefore, Indigenous woman must overcome internal colonization and external oppression, writing herself, and rewriting the dominant scripts in much the same way Chicana Gloria Anzaldua summarizes this idea:

   Why am I compelled to write? ... Because the world I create in the
   writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By
   writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp
   it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger ...
   To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to
   preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To
   dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul.
   To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is
   not a pile of shit ... Finally I write because I'm scared of
   writing, but I'm more scared of not writing. (1987)

Her words find echo in Indigenous feminist thinkers around the globe. At this time and place, the concept of who is an intellectual, what knowledge production is valid, how the change in speech subjects and their utterances craft a metaphoric arena to imagine subjectivity and realize it in material form is taking place. The examples I present here offer subject matter and articulation of "Indigenous Woman's subjectivity" in relation to globalization and development that dispels colonization of their minds.

Bakhtin extrapolates on several other useful concepts regarding the relationship between language, society, and meaning that expand the space for subjectivity. "Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language, a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound" (1981, p. 288). The notion of historical becoming involves these alternative concrete worlds or verbal-ideological systems being made known--not only the Occidental hegemonic language that reverberates so loudly and predominates.

The question is how to make the different sounds and content heard. For Kichwa Ecuadorian Luz Maria de la Torre and K'iche Quetzaltenango Guatemalan Irma Velasquez Nimatuj the need to forge an imaginary of a world where "everyone both male and female fit in as well as Nature" (Estermann, 2008, p. 7) is paramount. Dismantling stereotypes and averting stereotype threat--the internalization of a negative stereotype such that it influences future outcomes, which is the effect that negative stereotypes have on real life outcomes (Aronson & Steele, 1999) is another goal. Taking a different tact, Rivera Cusicanqui (2014) responds to the question of historical becoming by suggesting the hegemonic world needs to be indianized; primary in that process is the examination of the problem not as that of the "Indian problem" rather the "hegemon problem." Her prolific portfolio of sociological analysis deconstructs the epistemological violence, revealing the internal enemies and forms of subjugation as well as the barrage of images--the sociology of the image--that perpetuate self-abnegation within both oppressed and superciliousness in oppressor.

The emerging discourses written by Indigenous feminists of their process of historical becoming traverses barriers of language, gender, socio-economics, and culture. Inclusivity is an essential premise of Indigenous feminist epistemologies. They imagine new spaces, roles and dimensions of indigenous women within social and material relations. They assert themselves as protagonists in their own struggle, fashioning a feminism that speaks to their reality and the specificities of their own situation. Some indigenous women turn to the land/Nature as Moira Millan, Mapuche theorist says for expressing their identity, culture, spirituality, health, and transforming land/nature into a place we inhabit, not simply live in. Appropriating the thousand-year-old traditions of their cultural heritage and the Indigenous people's ties to the land, their goal is to propose a way to forge an equitable social order for the Indigenous, humans and nature, that includes both genders and all people North and South, East and West, subaltern and hegemonic in nature. If the Western development model excludes Nature, and is one that exploits and destroys the environment, here the paradigm changes the vertical hierarchy with Occidental male on the summit to a horizontal plane, human (man and woman) on a par with Nature. In the redefinition and formulation of land as a space not limited exclusively to production, rather reinvesting the signifier of land as a public good that must be protected and included in our equation of the formula for determining

well-being, land comes to signify source of survival, flourishing, spiritual regeneration, and cultural identification instead of materialist, economic pillage. Nature reclaims a place in the pecking order. Indigenous women also rewrite the connotation of hu(man) revisiting the exclusive participation of men in the construct of human being and progress, as well as positing a rebalanced horizontal schema of wo(man) as constitutive of hu(man).

Many Indigenous women have taken up the rhetorical genres in order to insert their ideas and designate their identity within the context of the broader globalized world. The construction of their identity is tightly interwoven with the Indigenous millennial cultural heritage and rights to territory, autonomy, peoplehood, sustainability and equity. Their consciousness is tied to "the development of an indigenous identity based on other forms of associated identification with cultural, geographic, political or religious" [Escalante, p. 4]. Some speak through a hybrid genre of auto-ethnography, acutely aware of its transformative character and relation to self-birth. Primary to the utilization of rhetorical discourse is the power to transmit another's speech as much as one's own. However they will at once be the transmitter and transmitted. By producing autoethnographic works that maximize the potential of a rhetorical discourse seeking to "outwit possible retorts to itself' (Bakhtin, 1981), the earlier obstacles confronted by Rigoberta Menchu in the seminal controversial testimonial I, Rigoberta Menchu no longer are impediments to self-expression.

In 1982 anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos Debray published transcribed interviews conducted with Menchu while in exile in Paris. These narrated her life in the Guatemalan highlands and denounced the atrocities committed against the Indigenous during the civil war. Part of this testimonial was discredited, after Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, by anthropologist David Stoll, who criticized the veracity of the narrative details. Compelled to defend or attack Menchu's story, critics fell on either side of the controversy, and were forced to ignore the analyst's lens or mediated aspects of the text, in favor of facts and registered records. Conscious of this calamitous outcome from the mediated anthropological production of ethnographic knowledge, contemporary Indigenous feminists seek to anticipate criticism and solidify their authorial intention and autonomy in auto-ethnographic, biographical, and epistemological analyses of the indigenous issues and their life stories.

6. Irma Velasquez Nimatuj--Anthropology Dissertation/Autoethnography

One example of this writing follows. Uncharacteristic of discourse for a doctoral dissertation, in the introductory chapter to her activist-anthropology thesis that analyzed the socio-economic effects of disenfranchisement endured by the indigenous/campesino workforce during the aftermath of the early XXI century coffee crisis in Guatemala, Irma Velasquez Nimatuj (2008) subjectively positions herself as Indigenous woman reflecting on her geopolitical-socioeconomic situation. She unifies in her literary expression praxis and theory--roles as activist and researcher--autobiography and (auto)/ethnography. Initiating the sociology/anthropological dissertation with this key chapter dedicated to revealing her bias beforehand, she averts the pitfalls of Menchu's controversial 1982 text. By enmeshing personal and professional, as well as crossing over, even neutralizing other binaries endemic to Occidental thinking--"I present an autoethnography in which I demonstrate the process of consciousness raising is not vertical or horizontal"--a distinct way of reframing the issue emerges. She confesses the limitations confronted albeit as a K'iche woman "with relative privileges," as she comprehends that even this status does not confer or ensure seamless open access to operating with the indigenous/campesino organizations or with the women she will study. Ironically her consciousness is born from realizing the inherent conflict between her own roots of origin, which shaped her sensibilities versus the tools of the Western academic world of UT Texas that ineluctably are interpolated into the analysis. Bringing up the key accusations thrown in the face of Menchu about fabrication, authenticity and legitimacy of her narrative to represent the collective Other, even if the Other is one's self-reported demographic, Velasquez Nimatuj anticipates critique through rhetorical discourse and sets the stage for a personal, socioanthropological/activist analysis. Paradoxically she is conscious that selfidentification as member of a cultural heritage, one that initially rejects Nimatuj's authority to research, ends up being the precise key to her ability to "confront history and structural racism of the Guatemalan elite or the State" (2008).

The meta-examination of the speaker and his/her discourse is, as Bakhtin points out, "indisputably, one of the most important subjects of rhetorical speech and all other themes are inevitably implicated in the topic of discourse" (1986, 354). Self-examination/articulation offers a means to not only tackle, but also resolve the predicament of authority, legitimacy and validity of her discourse. She consciously chooses to utilize the persuasive, inward looking idiosyncratic rhetorical speech, like other contemporary Indigenous women writers, specifically highlighting the way written, spoken, cognitive, and visual language and images frame identity as much as the role socio-economic factors and ethnopolitics play. She, like linguist/anthropologist De la Torre Amaguana, undertakes a deconstruction of the impact of linguistic asymmetry, specifically of how language is used to organize and maintain social entities, mediate power, constitute meanings and identities, systematize behavior, and foment change. However in so doing, the polarity of two irreconcilable parallel universes--the indigenous family unit, indigenous community and indigenous culture in juxtaposition to the foreign, academic Western hegemonic looms unresolved, still in contention. Several voices reign at once disrupting unitary language, creating the dialect for change.

Velasquez Nimatuj's autoethnography subtly manifests what Bakhtin calls rhetoric of the courts, publicist discourse and political rhetoric that allows for the signifying word to live beyond self, "by means of directing its purposiveness outward" as a sort of testimonial/memoir/charting of the reading for the audience of this activist-anthropology study. Her discourse assumes a double-voicedness (Bakhtin 1981, 324) and is keenly aware of the need to fix the gap between aesthetic and social forms of discourse, dismantle the structural and psychological barriers limiting her access to her study group and her authority to speak about the subject. The introductory chapter to her dissertation, entitled "Memoir, challenges and anthropology," intercalates an eclectic array of genre forms and structures, such as memoir; autobiography; bildungsroman; objective scientific research report; firstperson testimonial account of personal challenges like sexual abuse, divorce, or mothering. The narrative identifies structural obstacles to her research as an Indigenous professional and activist. The chapter further enmeshes methodological/theoretical approaches (gender, race, subaltern, and class studies), style (literal and figurative/objective and intensely subjective), content (autobiography, ethnography, economics, sociology history and anthropology), and professional disciplines/roles (journalist, academic, activist, maternal). The goal of the narrative is to identify areas for structural and institutional change; the writing is directed foremost at shaping and revamping attitudes and conditions of impoverishment and oppression.

7. Conclusion

Contemporary Indigenous feminists are writing strategically--expressing their worldview, rupturing and dismantling that which circumscribes them in passivity and submission. That strategic rewriting and penetration into the hegemonic domain of epistemological thought exemplifies aspects of the theories Bakhtin developed in 1941. He hardly could have envisioned these theories might be axial to the historical becoming of Indigenous feminists, even if he understood the power implicit in heteroglossia and discourse. One cannot determine to what degree this is a conscious appropriation, rather more likely, an exemplification of the possibilities of the utterance purported by Bakhtin. In order to imagine a transformed world order, more equitable and sustainable, those utterances emerging from the instability of our world must loom larger and find their way into historical becoming.

ISABEL DULFANO

id2@utah.edu

University of Utah

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Author:	Dulfano, Isabel
Publication:	Knowledge Cultures
Article Type:	Report
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Jul 1, 2015
Words:	5927
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