Cristina Rivera Garza

The Restless Dead

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Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as the center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality—a term used by anthropologist Floriberto Díaz to describe modes of life of Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor—permeating all writing processes.
Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.
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288 printed pages
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
Translator
Robin Myers
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Quotes

  • Aída Naxhiellyhas quoted4 years ago
    Disappropriation, in short, describes the kind of writing that, in an era marked by the spectacular violence of the open war on populations dubbed the War on Drugs, would open itself up to include the voices of others in evident and creative ways.
  • Aída Naxhiellyhas quoted4 years ago
    Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, the critical renunciation of what capital-L Literature does and has always done: appropriating others’ voices and experiences for its own benefit and its own hierarchies of influence.
  • Aída Naxhiellyhas quoted4 years ago
    greater harmony with nomadic conceptions of space as a de-territorialized or segmented entity, necropolitical war machines recognize that “military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states and the ‘regular army’ is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions.”

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