Victor Montejo's Choral Testimonio: Appropriations and Critiques of Human Rights Discourses.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I analyze certain contemporary debates about human rights discourses through a close reading of Victor Montejo's Brevisima Relacion de la Continua Destruccion del Mayab . Written by a Maya intellectual, this text uses traditional Maya narrative and modern Testimonio conventions, and intersperses the voices of sixteenth-century Maya accounts of the arrival of Spaniards to describe the experience of the 1981-82 massacres in the Kuchumatanes region of Guatemala. The text uses contemporary human rights claims as a renewed version of anti-colonial discourse, seeking to impute obligations on the modern Guatemalan state's obligations, the text suggests, that have existed and remained unfulfilled since the beginning of the Spanish colony. In other words, the text shows how certain Maya intellectuals and rights advocates appropriate and deploy human rights discourse to interpellate the Guatemalan state. At the heart of the debate about the circulation of human rights discourse is a question of voice and agency: who speaks for whom, who establishes international human rights norms, who receives knowledge and who produces it. Yet even in the formulation of these questions, there is an implicit assumption about the lack of voice and agency of those whose human rights are violated. If the discourse of human rights is justifiably criticized as hegemonic, it is also a discourse appropriated, circulated and transformed by local populations who may see in this adherence to a set of international norms a way to interpellate history, a hostile state and the unequal local and global economic relations. This is what Victor Montejo's text illustrates, and it provides an avenue for an alternative reading of the limitations and potentialities of the globalization of human rights discourse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".