The Being-in-common of Cristina Rivera Garza

Abstract

This paper aims a first approach to the oeuvre of Cristina Rivera Garza, a Mexican writer, and professor, living in the United States since 1990. She is responsible for the proposal and current direction of the Creative Writing postgraduate program, attached to the Hispanic Studies Department of Houston University. Practicing what has been called documental writing, she manifests an interest in showing the documents and the research archive in her works, overtaking the tension between fictional and non-fictional. Some of her most known works are Habia mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016), about the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo; Nadie me verá llorar (1999) and La Castañeda (2010), respectively a novel and a historical narrative about a psychiatric hospital in Mexico – which was also her thesis thematic; and Andamos perras, andamos diablas (2021), reedition of her first book of short stories (La guerra no importa - 1991), in which she discusses the femicide issue. Her most recent fictional work, El invencible verano de Liliana (2021), enters and shows the inquiry official documents about the murder of her sister. Her oeuvre is mainly written in Spanish, and approaches questions related to the Mexican context, mainly formed by short stories, research works, poetry, novels, and critical essays. In this paper, our interest is parcourse her essayistic publication The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (2019), in which she sustains the notions of “necrowriting” and “disappropriation”, engaging with many notions from the French intellectual field, displacing them to her own critical context. Our focus is turned to the three first essays of that book, in which she actualizes notions such as “the death of the author” (Roland Barthes), “the author function” (Michel Foucault), and “the inoperative community” (Jean-Luc Nancy). We’ll intend to show how Rivera Garza establishes this contact and how that is productive for her critical thinking.