WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FEMICIDE?

 INSITE is pleased to announce the fifth issue of the INSITE Journal: Speech Acts. The publication, edited by Andrea Torreblanca, explores speech, language, and the performative as forms of political action. It includes the script and documentation of Speech Acts, a short play that was developed from fragments of writings and recorded dialog culled from the INSITE Archive, and presented in Mexico City (2021); a conversation between Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds and Andrea Torreblanca; a recent interview with the artist Andrea Fraser; a text republished and translated for the first time into Spanish by author, curator, and filmmaker AriellaAïsha Azoulay; and commissioned essays by theoretician and architect Keller Easterling and writer Cristina Rivera Garza. 

In “Art and Enactment” (2022), Andrea Fraser explains her interest in using the term enactment as a process that occurs and evolves from the psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the compulsory. In the essay “Another Part of Speech” (2022), Keller Easterling outlines forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile. In “Unlearning Our Colonial Languages, On Language and Belonging” (2021), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces in retrospect the complexity of her genealogy and identity that she describes as “impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of the colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.” Cristina Rivera Garza writes the text “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Femicide?” (2022), which departs from the infamous case of the murder of her sister in the 1990s, to speak about how narratives, which only recently were defined as femicides, have focused on the perspective of the perpetrators, including the grammar used to prosecute them, and on literature, where the stories fictionalize—if not justify—the motives behind a crime.

INSITE Journal 05 Speech Acts here.

--crg

PREMIO BBK GUTUN ZURIA BILBAO 2023

 

Bajo el piso transparente de la alberca que se encuentra en el edificio donde se entregó este premio que reconoce a la literatura vasca e internacional.

Gracias, Bilbao! 

Artículo completo aquí. 

--crg

LAS PANCARTAS DEL 8M MÉXICO

María Teresa Priego registró el lenguaje de las pancartas de este 8 de marzo, incluidas las que invocaron a #LilianaRiveraGarza. 

”La hermana asesinada de la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza está presente: “Liliana, tu verano es invencible”. Qué libro extraordinario el que Cristina escribió para ella/con ella: “El invencible verano de Liliana”. 

Artículo entero aquí.

--crg

8M

&

 

--crg

Review of LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER Boston Globe

By Hamilton Cane 

March 2, 2023

Just before the world locked down, Rivera Garza canvassed the capital, accompanied by her husband and friend as they tried to locate files connected to Liliana’s murder. Despite three decades her agony was — is — still raw, as is that of her aged parents, and her quest for justice is re-created in her punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent memoir, “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.”

Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure throughout “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” her first written in English without the help of a translator. (A Spanish edition, “El Invencible Verano de Liliana,” came out last year.) Each tightly drawn chapter showcases an array of gorgeous images or cadences; few authors deploy fragments as brilliantly, like grenades.

Full text by Hamilton Cane here

--crg 

Review of LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER New York Times

A SISTER´S MURDER AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE

New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 2023

 "This collaged portrait is one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read (and I have read many). Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance."

Katherine Dykstra 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/books/review/lilianas-invincible-summer-cristina-rivera-garza.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

--crg

LILIANA RIVERA GARZA GOES PLACES!

#JUSTICEFORLILIANA                  #JUSTICEFORALL

 LILIANA´S INVINCIBLE SUMMER (Hogarth press, 2023)

Special thanks to Marie Pantojan, editor extraordinaire.

Thank you everyone at Hogarth Press. 

--crg

WHAT IS THE KILLER LAUGHING AT?

[Translated by Max Granger]

In May 2021, only a few days after the publication of El invencible verano de Liliana – the book, available in English on February 28, in which I explore the femicide that claimed the life of Liliana Rivera Garza, my younger sister, on July 16, 1990 in Mexico City – I announced that I had created a Gmail account (elinvencibleveranodeliliana@gmail.com) with the intention of collecting any information on Ángel González Ramos, my sister’s ex-boyfriend at the time of her death, who still had (and still has) an arrest warrant out as her alleged murderer. I knew that Ángel González Ramos had evaded justice, but I had no idea how he had done it. In August of that same year, an email appeared in the inbox stating, plainly and succinctly, that Ángel González Ramos had been living in southern California under the name Mitchell Angelo Giovanni and had died on May 2, 2020 after drowning in Marina del Rey. Could this be true? Wasn’t it too much a coincidence that after 30 years, and just as the case had finally been brought to light, the alleged murderer would die under such strange circumstances? Was it possible he had faked his own death to evade justice?

The message came with a link to access his digital wake (it was 2020, and we were beginning to witness how the pandemic would affect our funeral rites) that included, in addition to condolences written from Mexico by people with the surname González Ramos, a series of photographs that documented the life of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni, from his birth on April 18, 1967 (the same birthdate as Ángel González Ramos) to the present. In the photographs was the boy with light eyes and blonde hair; the teenager in his leather jacket; the grown man with his thick neck and thinning hair, who, in different poses and among different company, never once stopped laughing. In all of the images of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni as an adult, he is smiling indiscriminately. Over and over again, as if it were a tic. He would peel back his lips and show his teeth, big and blindingly white. He would laugh at long-haired little girls, alongside young women, in the middle of family gatherings. He would smile next to Christmas trees and smile looking out at the ocean. Was he smiling at justice, knowing he had outwitted the law once again? Was he laughing at Liliana, telling her how after all these years he had come out on top – that he was still alive, while she lay, forever silenced, in a grave? Was he laughing at me, for failing to track him down? Was he laughing out of shame?

Was he laughing at you?

r

Full text: https://english.elpais.com/society/2023-02-05/what-is-the-killer-laughing-at.html

--crg

 

You can preorder #Liliana´sInvincible Summer here: 

https://sites.prh.com/cristinariveragarza

--crg