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Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands

Beyond Survival

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Authors:
  1. Adrianna M. Santos

    1. Department of Language, Literature, and Arts, Texas A&M University–San Antonio, San Antonio, USA

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  • Develops Chicana feminist literary trauma studies
  • Examines survival narratives as method for healing
  • Argues for a theory of cicatrix poetics

Part of the book series: Literatures of the Americas (LOA)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Introduction: Cicatrix Poetics: Chicana Literary Trauma Studies

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 1-37

  3. Liberating La Mujer Sufrida in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 39-68

  4. La Chingada and “The Silent Lloronas” in Lucha Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 69-107

  5. Coyolxauhqui and Coming of Age in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 109-142

  6. Survival Scars and Solidarity in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 143-174

  7. Conclusion: Beyond Survival

    • Adrianna M. Santos
    Pages 175-188

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 189-192
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Keywords

About this book

 This book explores how Chicana literature often represents gender violence while simultaneously presenting strategies of survival in response. Adrianna M. Santos aims to contribute to a broader conversation concerning the intersections between Chicana literature and decolonial trauma theory, one which questions the colonial matrix of power and the universality of Western knowledge. Santos argues that Chicana survival narratives arise out of colonial wounds and form scars that both mark and protect the violated body. Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands proposes a “cicatrix poetics” that makes bold gestures toward healing and narrative/storytelling as survival. The book contends that the cicatrix fashioned through artistic expression is a necessary component for Chicana communities—not just to survive, but to thrive. The books presents several case studies that examine transformative narrativity and by theorizing the texts as survival narratives, social protest works that bring attention to violence and erasure, the chapters explore how literature can be an effective catalyst for both social change and personal transformation, an orientation towards freedom, liberation through love.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Language, Literature, and Arts, Texas A&M University–San Antonio, San Antonio, USA

    Adrianna M. Santos

About the author

Adrianna M. Santos is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, USA, and advisor of the Mexican American Student Association. She has published in Aztlán, Chicana/Latina Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin and Latina Critical Feminism and is co-editor of The Bard in the Borderlands, and El Mundo Zurdo 8. 

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