Decolonial Phenomenologies: The Languages and Affect of In-Betweenness in Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Josefina Báez’s Early Work

Abstract

This article explores the intersections between Gloria Anzaldúa’s and Josefina Báez’s textual theories of in- betweenness, as they pertain to issues of textuality, and more broadly relationality, in their early work. In her life-long philosophical search Anzaldúa devised a phenomenology in which the metaphors of the border, borderlands, or bridges, and the concept of nepantla signal the place of writing in the context of coloniality, decoloniality, and migration. From her early thought, these concepts often capture not only issues of location, but also of intentionality and decolonial change. Similarly, Dominican American (DominicanYork) author, director, and performer Josefina Báez, explores the unstable spaces and temporariness of in-betweenness in the context of im/migration and colonization centering the experience of Dominican diasporic communities. Báez proposes concepts such as dominicanish or ‘bliss’ as imagined, relational spaces and states that are non-territorial, fleeting, and that resist the fixity of oppressive categorizations of the subject. Both authors are interested in finding the poetics that may be appropriate for such transfrontera spaces and states, as well as in theorizing new practices of reading (or viewing) and writing from these spaces. This paper describes these theories and shows how, by presenting readers with textual encounters in which the I must enter the unstable, hardly meltable, spaces in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Dominicanish (2000), where the authors, as textual hosts, invite audiences to engage in a phenomenology of shifting where unsettling experiences of in-betweenness and impermanence may result in decolonial transformation.