Cristina Rivera Garza is the M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor and director of the Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. The author or translator of over a ...

Holtzbrinck Lecture
The Breath Archives: Affective Documents, Collective Memory, and the Afterlives of Femicide
In her new book Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth Press, 2023), Cristina Rivera Garza tapped family documents to tell the story of her younger sister’s femicide, which occurred on July 16, 1990, at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. In this talk, Rivera Garza explores the ways in which her sister’s personal papers—their diction and punctuation, repetitions and playful renditions of form—breathe new life into what critic Christina Sharpe has called the “archives of breathlessness” that undergird state and patriarchal violence. Such writerly practices have proven key in the collective memory-making traditions that can turn Liliana, and other victims of femicide, into a material presence among us.
May
04
2023
Literature
04.05.2023
19:30
- 21:00
American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17-19
14109 Berlin-Wannsee
Am Sandwerder 17-19
14109 Berlin-Wannsee
Speaker: Cristina Rivera Garza
This event took place on May 4, 2023.