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Traveling the Soil of Worlds: Haunted Forgettings and Opaque Memories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2020

Ege Selin Islekel
Ege Selin Islekel*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, The Bronx, NY10458
*
Corresponding author. Email eislekel@fordham.edu
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Abstract

This essay works on the role of trauma and forgetting in the subjective formations of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza. I investigate how forgetting affects the resistant capacities of these figures. I argue throughout that the memory of the world-traveler is an opaque memory, which is unintelligible for the hegemonic demands of transparency, and which forms the silt upon which the resistant possibilities of the world-traveler rest. The first part elaborates María Lugones's conception of world-traveling in relation to Gloria Anzaldúa's New Mestiza consciousness and Mariana Ortega's multiplicitous self. Here I draw attention to the role of opacity and forgetting in the ways in which one can inhabit a world. The second part develops the notions of trauma and haunting to establish the experiential memory of the world-traveler not as a traumatic rupture, but rather as a haunted memory that accompanies her travels. The last section turns to Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity as a resistant mechanism, which works not through the traumatic rupture of experience but rather through sedimentation of experience.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 3: Toward Decolonial Feminisms: Tracing the Lineages of Decolonial Thinking through Latin American/Latinx Feminist Philosophy , Summer 2020 , pp. 439 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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References

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