Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Arts (MA)
Major/Program
English
First Advisor's Name
Ana Luszczynska
First Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Chair
Second Advisor's Name
Anne Castro
Second Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Member
Third Advisor's Name
Michael Grafals
Third Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Member
Keywords
Anzaldua, Deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma, Chicano/a, affect, self
Date of Defense
3-24-2020
Abstract
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer.
Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about.
This thesis sketches frameworks appropriate to the task, employing phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and theories of trauma and testimony alongside Anzaldua. Connections between each intellectual movement are uncovered in juxtaposition with Anzaldua’s texts, and novel readings arise with respect to Anzaldua’s worldview and the internal logic of death, pain, and rebirth unique to her experiences.
Identifier
FIDC008949
Recommended Citation
Riley, Richard Edward, "What's Past is Prologue: Transforming Trauma, Rewriting Identity in Gloria Anzaldua's "Borderlands/La Frontera" and "Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro"" (2020). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4399.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4399
Included in
Chicana/o Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Latina/o Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Modern Literature Commons
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