Reading And Writing Together: Notes on Reading the Present Through Cristina Rivera Garza’s Work

Abstract

This text, traversed by the personal experience of grief and by the persistent question of how to write today, brings together a series of reflections that emerged during the writing of a master’s thesis on the critical work of Cristina Rivera Garza and its relationship to the Latin American present. Rather than proposing a comprehensive reading of her work, the text develops a set of critical and autobiographical approaches to questions related to politics, grief, the archive, and community, which constitute central axes of Rivera Garza’s project. Drawing on books, lectures, interviews, and other materials that make up the writer’s archive, the essay examines the ways in which her literary project displaces the modern idea of sovereign authorship in order to conceive literature as a relational and collective practice, traversed by other bodies and memories.