Oct. 26 - A Cannibal Writes Herself: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera
21 September 2026
Join us on Monday, October 26 from 2-3:30 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "A Cannibal Writes Herself: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita.
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on the violent gaps of the archive and on relational approaches to subjectivity, I explore Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) as a form of anarchival self-writing, in which individual and collective selves may emerge through encounters with different languages, histories, bodies, and epistemologies, against the logic of the colonial archive. Borderlands/La Frontera’s poetics of mestizaje may thus be understood as experimenting with models of relating to alterity in which incorporation does not require the erasure of difference and can therefore configure a creative resistance to dispossession. This possibility brings the text into productive conversation with the figure of cannibalism developed within Amerindian thought, while also foregrounding the literary and political stakes of Anzaldúa’s multilingual practice. It thus raises a question about anarchival practice as a writing of the self: whether writing against the archive might also involve unsettling the systems of division through which subjects and histories become archivable in the first place.
Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), supported by a FAPESP grant, and currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada. A translator and writer, she holds a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of São Paulo (USP) and conducted doctoral research at Columbia University in New York, where she worked with the manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s diaries at the New York Public Library.