Gloria E. Anzaldúa, best known for her books Borderlands/La Frontera and This Bridge Called My Back, is one of the foremost feminist thinkers and activists of our time. As one of the first openly lesbian Chicana writers, Anzaldúa has played a major role in redefining queer, female, and Chicano/a identities, and in developing inclusionary movements for social justice.
In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldúa's powerful voice speaks clearly and passionately. She recounts her life, explains many aspects of her thought, and explores the intersections between her writings and postcolonial theory. Each selection deepens our understanding of an important cultural theorist's lifework. The interviews contain clear explanations of Anzaldúa's original concept of the Borderlands and mestizaje and her subsequent revisions of these ideas; her use of the term New Tribalism as a disruptive category that redefines previous ethnocentric forms of nationalism; and what Anzaldúa calls conocimientos-- alternate ways of knowing that synthesize reflection with action to create knowledge systems that challenge the status quo.
Highly personal and always rich in insight, these interviews, arranged and introduced by AnaLouise Keating, will not only serve as an accessible introduction to Anzaldúa's groundbreaking body of work, but will also be of significant interest to those already well-versed in her thinking. For readers engaged in postcoloniality, feminist theory, ethnic studies, or queer identity, Interviews/Entrevistas will be a key contemporary document.
Biography
Gloria E. Anzaldúa is the author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado, and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la Llorona, editor of Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, and co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Anzaldúa has played a pivotal role in redefining US feminisms, cultural studies, Chicano/a issues, US American literature, ethnic studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory.
AnaLouise Keating is Associate Professor of English at Aquinas College. In addition to Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde, she co-edited Perspectives: Gender Studies and has published articles on critical "race" theory, queer theory, Latina writers, African American women writers, and pedagogy.
"The book brings together difficult-to-access materials that provide considerable insight into an unusual life." -- Publishers Weekly
"For the prolific lesbian Chicana author, interviews are another kind of oral writing that provides an immediacy, an openness, and a self-exposure greater that that of any spontaneity in her meticulously revised publications. These dialogues and conversations give Anzaldua's perspectives on her work, the multiple and overlapping realities of her life, her beliefs about fluid sexual identities and desires, and her theories on convergence--a way of writing that combines the sexual, the mental, the emotional, and the psychic-supernatural in a written stream-of-consciousness." -- Booklist
"This impressive collection of interviews offers us a sustained look at Gloria Anzaldua's insistence on theorizing the personal and on infusing the political with the poetic--words which have shaped feminist theories and practices over the last two decades." -- Angela Davis
"All of [Anzaldua's] writing draws upon intensely personal sources, which makes interviews with her so enlightening." -- San Antonio Express-News
"This memoir-like collection will appeal especially to the author's longtime fans." -- Curve
"Gloria Anzaldua's boundless generosity of spirit glows throughout these interviews. I especially enjoy her ideas about space/time and the nature of reality (or the many realities...)." -- Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Almanac of the Dead
