Fragments in the Flesh: an Autohistoria-Teoría of Disability and Decolonist Rhetorics

This text is an Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría, a genre that blends the autoethnographic with poetry, fiction, visuals, and theories rooted in narrative identity. Specifically, this dissertation is modeled after Anzaldúa’s own incomplete doctoral dissertation, Luz en el oscuro/Light in the Dark. In Anzaldúa’s final text, she continues her exploration of the new mestiza, but she tempers it with nuanced views on the particulars of identity, alongside deeply personal explorations of her understanding of herself as a chicana, an academic, and a person in an aging body. As with much of her work, she blends creative elements with her theory, including poetry, memoir, and drawings she made to illustrate her theoretical concepts (the autohistoria-teoría). In addition to this, I use Cherrie Moraga’s theory-in-the-flesh (a concept wherein theory is built on particular experience) to provide theoretical justification. I also borrow from Jaques Derrida, Edward Said, Gayarti Spivak, and Roland BarthesBy using Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s ideas as a roadmap for my own writing, I place myself firmly within a feminist and queer framework, with a focus on decolonial and disability rhetorics. For this dissertation, I use autohistoria-teoría to explore historical traumas through a personal lens, as well as personal trauma through a historical lens. I propose four concepts in narrative identity in order to explore these ideas: los zorros (decolonial metis), pishtaco/Inkarri (decolonial hauntology), el tumi (disability metis), and el retablo (pedagogical concerns).