This was a good morning. I was surprised and very pleased to find out that my paper for MLA14, “Our Kind of People: Textual Community and the Latina Edited Anthology” was accepted for inclusion in the Chicana and Chicano Literature Division ¿Anthologizing Latinidad? panel and that the roundtable special- session “Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students,” which I’m on with Liana Silva, Abigail Scheg, Lee Ann Glowsenski and Tara Betts, was also accepted.
The abstract for my talk:
“Our Kind of People: Textual Community and the Latina Edited Anthology”
Readers see the authorial decisions as definitive while editorship remains invisible. Within a text, editors are seen, to the extent they are seen at all, as serving a generally administrative or organizational role. Yet in reality editors act as facilitators, filters and / or gatekeepers — albeit sometimes uncomfortable ones — deciding who and what is included and excluded, encouraging writing that otherwise might never be published or even written. By making these decisions, they decide whose thoughts merit inclusion, which ones belong and which do not, controlling how and if a subject or author will be presented. Still further, editors decide through which point of view or lens an artistic, social or political movement will be viewed. Discussing the role of editor, Norton editor Alane Salierno Mason, wrote “[e]diting a literary anthology is like forming a social club — you get to decide who are ‘your’ kind of people.” This paper focuses on anthologies as textual communities made up by women of color — especially Latinas. Although Latinas contributed to anthologies of Latino and feminist writings in the 1970s, beginning (largely) in the 1980s, Latinas became anthology editors. In their editorial role they facilitated other Latinas and women of color as writers to engage in intellectual discourse and be distributed on a larger scale than permitted by earlier underground newspapers and journals.
The two anthologies I focus on are Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited anthology, This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and the Chicana studies anthology Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race and Gender, (1986) edited by Teresa Córdova, Norma Cantú, Gilberto Cardenas, Juan García and Christine M. Sierra. Both books have publication histories that are themselves acts of resistance, reflecting how the books were constructed as well as how each has been presented, received and used. Though examining these anthologies, a sense of the construction of textual communities and the creation of anthologies as acts of resistance is discussed.
When our roundtable proposal is put online I’ll put a link to it here.