Towards a feminist reading of Hispanic literature as a foreign text

Very often, we Indian Hispanists run the risk of reducing ourselves to the status of mere informants or interlocutors, faithful to a complete surrender to the Hispanic habit. Do we need to read like “them”? At the same time, any claim to Indian Hispanism as a precariousness around which to organize ourselves runs the risk of falling into a vacuum of a certain habit of identity that could privilege one (us) over other colleagues (them) without empowering anyone. Our struggle, therefore, has to be constantly informed by this contradiction. It is in the recognition of multiple points of power that our efforts towards a democratization of knowledge through epistemic disobedience can be placed. This month we have the participation of the Hispanist Prof. Indrani Mukherjee. Her experiences with Hispanicism spans more than 30 years, and includes teaching and publications in the disciplines of language, literature, film, art and translation, from the perspectives of decolonial feminism and new materialism. Her focus on gender and space from her doctoral thesis on La Celestina and Juan Rulfo continues to this day, although her theoretical perspectives have shifted from postmodernist philosophy to Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. In the Hispanic world, she finds parallels in the theorizations about frontiers of Fernando Ortiz, Roberto Fernández Retamar and Juan Goytisolo. These borders become even more complicated with Gloria Anzaldúa, Luisa Valenzuela, María Lugones and Ochy Curiel. In this context, her last two published books are Transcultural Negotiations of Gender: Studies in (Be)longing (Springer, 2016) and Post-Humanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedipal Spatiality. Wilmington and Malaga: Vernon Press, 2021.