This essay is chapter eight in in Displaced: Migration, Indigeneity, and Trauma from Routledge (Winter 2020).
This dissertation’s critical nexus—the intersection of archival theory, archival practice, and poetics—is directly concerned with the poetic original and its flowerings, with attention to their archival functions in a contemporary context. Reading the poetic as a type of Anzaldúian narrative nepantla allows for the exploration of cultural and sociopolitical tensions that force the creation of a transformative space. My use of the term narrative nepantla is drawn from Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the nepantla as a borderland in-between state which is the product of cultural and sociopolitical othering. I am relating narrative to nepantla space in order to situate my research on Latin American poetics within fringe, de-centered, border-oriented perspectives which articulate the violence of their own genesis. Critically reading hybrid texts which translate the poetic into variant mediums is part of the process of inscribing official history with a spectrum of counter-histories which have resisted erasure. Like an archival document or object in a museum or government office, the poetic is a part of a larger system of production and sociocultural reality—but the poetic does not depend on an institutionally mandated call for collection and cataloguing.
Ben Jonson Journal, Volume 21 Issue 1, Page 38-52, ISSN 1079-3453 Available Online Apr 2014
My contributions include the following pieces: “Spirituality & Spiritualism,” “Indian Wars,” “Louisiana Purchase,” “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” “Letter Writing and the Epistolary Form,” “Postal Service and Mail Delivery,” and “Transcendentalism.”
Clarissa Castaneda, PhD 