August 9, 2023
Una Plática: Defining Autohistoria-teoría and Wanderings for Art Education
An act of social justice, autohistoria-teoría is a “reflective self-awareness” (Keating, 2022, p. 82). Autohistoria-teoría travels beyond critical self-reflection to collective voices and social issues as a journey and process, ambulando, or wandering with intentionality. In addition to using our stories to create strategies, tools, and theories, we generate new narratives (Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018). In her unpublished essay, “Autohistoria-teorías-Mujeres que cuentan vidas: Personal & Collective Narratives That Challenge Genre Conventions,” Gloria Anzaldúa refers to autohistoria-teoría as “a coherent story pieced together from the remembered fragments;” the “piecing together” engages “self-reflection, imagination, analysis, and intuition” that includes academic to shamanistic to creative research and is a way to create new knowledge, including aesthetic (as cited in Keating, 2022, p. 84). Autohistoria-teoría is offered as a tool for marginalized writers, artists, art educators, and more:
More than writing self into existence, a move made by many minoritized scholars, autohistoria-teoría represents a hybridized space of creativity and bridge building, in which we use our life stories to develop deep critical, spiritual, and analytical insights, to boldly theorize experiences and insights against the broader landscape of specific sociocultural discourses. (Bhattacharya & Keating, 2018, p. 345)
Chimine N. Arfuso (2022) identifies six major components of autohistoria-teoría:
- Risking the personal,
- An outcome of self-reflexivity (Anzaldúa, 2015) that includes magical thinking,
- It is a “[gesture] of the body” (p. 603), it defies the Cartesian mind–body split, and embraces ambiguity.
- It comes from the perspective of written inside oppressive systems as opposed to an outsider colonial viewpoint.
- Autohistoria-teoría “operates outside colonial assumptions, it decolonizes epistemological and ontological assumptions around valid knowledge production” (p. 603).
- Scholars use it as a social justice praxis to heal from colonial trauma.
To differentiate between autohistoria and autohistoria-teoría, autohistoria explores the personal whereas autohistoria-teoría broadens, excavates, and complexifies the personal (Keating, 2022, p. 82). In “Autohistoria-teorías-Mujeres que cuentan vidas,” Anzaldúa refers to autohistoria as the personal story + familial/cultural/communal story (both present and historical), then autohistoria-teoría “encodes with information from the imaginal” (Keating, 2022, pp. 83–84). The distinction between the two refers to the “amounts and types of personal/autobiographical materials we use, where it leads us, how its guidance invites us to transform (ourselves, the work we produce, and reality itself) and the amount of theoretical self-reflection and application we bring into this process” (Keating, 2022, p. 83). Anzaldúa explains, “I use [autohistoria] to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; an autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes” (Keating, 2006, p. 6).
Aside from referring to creative work as a fruit of autohistoria-teoría, Anzaldúa does not dive deeply into how making art generates, creates, or becomes autohistoria-teoría. In “Border Arte: Nepantla, El Lugar De La Frontera” Anzaldúa (2015) refers to autohistoria:
Border arte is an art that supersedes the pictorial. It depicts both the soul del artista y el alma del pueblo. It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told. I call this form of visual narrative “autohistorias.” (p. 62)
Anzaldúa names art as an act of autohistoria, a visual narrative that shares the voices of the individual and collective, but she does not discuss how autohistoria as art can theorize. However, in artmaking we are constantly theorizing through media, theme, context, and so on. This posting, perhaps, generates more questions than answers! To be continued…
References
Arfuso, C. (2022). Whispers of the soul; Autohistoria-teoría as decolonial knowledge production. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(6), 602–608.
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality (A. Keating, Ed.). Duke University Press.
Bhattachayra, K., & Keating, A. (2018). Expanding beyond public and private realities: Evoking Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría in two voices. Qualitative Inquiry, *24(5), 345–354.
Keating, A. (2006). EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Palgrave Macmillan.
Keating, A. (2022). The Anzaldúan theory handbook. Duke University Press.
Column by:
Christen Sperry García, SRAE Chair
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