Latina Feminist Intercultural Epistemologies

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I’ll be traveling to Harvard Divinity school this fall for the ‘Ways of Knowing’ Conference.  The following panel was accepted for inclusion at the conference, a panel that two other Latina colleagues and I created.  I wanted to share it with you.

Panel Title: Latina Feminist Intercultural Epistemologies

Panel Description: The landmark First Inter-American Symposium on Feminist Intercultural Theology gathered together scholars from across the Americas in Mexico City during the summer of 2004 to re-envision knowledge production as a liberatory, inclusive, pluralistic, and transcultural praxis. Their experience of crossing language, borders, class divisions, race, ethnicity, and position within the academy resulted in a clarion call to reclaim excluded sources of wisdom, embracing multifaceted understandings of truth. Our panel responds to their call for a contemporary intercultural dialogue that undermines hegemonic theoethical constructions by proposing a range of Latina Feminist Intercultural Epistemologies. We seek to re-imagine wisdom through embodiment, Diaspora, and the queer(y)ing of spiritual practices.  With this in mind, this panel seeks to engage in the intersections of interculturality and epistemology.  We believe that space is a feature to understanding interculturality, and that the ways in which we produce knowledge and come to know are often dictated by the spaces in which we engage.

 

This panel creates an opening for adding voices to the existing work in Latina Feminism’s Interculturality.  The first paper seeks to theorize mestizaje as both body and place, and identifies it as the ‘cusp’ of interculturality.  The second paper looks at epistemological approaches, which include the composition of the “hard nucleus” of the Mesoamerican cosmovision, allowing for the unfolding of multivalent meanings of gender. The third paper situates the intersections of Womanist and Latina Feminist particularist approaches to theoethical epistemology in Diaspora, reclaiming AfroLatina identities as the space where our MotherWit and Sabiduría (wisdom) are united. These three papers position themselves in the company of “Latina explorations for a just world.”

Archival Work & Doing Work that Matters

Anzaldúa Dissertation 1 Comment

Its been some time since I have blogged.  (I think to myself that I really should do this more often, so that folks could read what I’m up to.)  I have been writing the dissertation and doing so diligently.  I’m currently in Austin, Texas at the University of Texas reading the Gloria Anzaldúa archives.  It has been a productive week, and has energized me to continue to research this thinker–she has so much to offer.  The archive room is located in the Nettie Lee Benson Library, the Latin American Collection.  The room has been occupied by 2 or 3 people while I’ve been there, folks doing other archival work.  Just prior to my arrival, I connected with a Japanese woman who came from Tokyo to read the archives.  My partner and I took her to eat Mexican food for the first time!  It was a very nice visit.  I hope to travel to Tokyo to visit Rika and learn more what Japanese scholars are doing with Anzaldúa.  Its an exciting time to be working at the intersections of thought and theory.

Archival work is challenging, at least this archival work is.  Though challenging, I am enlightened by what I find and read.  It is a special treat to read Anzaldúa’s hand-writing.  I love how she attached a letter to each submission.  We live in such a digital age, how might I make my submissions much more personal?  Its certainly something to think about!  I am amazed, though, at how much she has written.  I am saddened by how little has been published.

The archival work has helped me see what is important though, in life.  It might be strange, but the time my partner and I have spent in Austin w/ our good friends has been the richest part of this trip.  Sure, the writing is important (and I have done a lot of writing), but the stopping, remembering to breathe, and spending time connecting has been the most satisfying (and likely has helped me get so much work done).

I continue to be moved by Gloria Anzaldúa, the theories she produced, her methodology that is always in movement, and is, in fact, a movida.  I am also moved by the intersections she worked at and the ways in which she moved the movement. I especially love how she wrote in a pluralizing way to intentionally not exclude and actively include multiple audiences.  This, in my opinion, is something we can all learn from her.  Sure, her creative prose, her affective poetic theory, are both features of Anzaldúan studies, but learning now how to NOT exclude and how to actively include will be a hallmark of good theory and transformative philosophy.

I shall write more as the dissertation progresses and hope to put up ideas I’m thinking about and mulling over.  Until then, I shall enjoy a nice family dinner at Lambert’s in Austin, TX and then return to the last section of chapter 2.

Til soon and siempre, contigo, -R.