Congratulations to Dr. Pilar Riaño on the publication of Avanzar a tientas. Memorias, violencias y producción de conocimiento (Universidad de Guadalajara and CALAS Publications), The Spanish-language publication, is available here.
In Avanzar a tientas, Dr. Riaño interrogates the dynamic field of memory, its languages, initiatives, and disputes in the afterlife of mass violence.
In particular, she examines the impact that colonial and capitalist forces of dismemberment of bodies, cultures, and territories have on memory and the capacity of acts of memory by subjugated groups, or groups affected by dispossession and disappearance, to remember what is fragmented and make present what is absent.
Understanding that attempts to control and dismember the memory of colonized peoples are at the same time projects to suppress their knowledge and archives, the book examines the work of memory and the ways in which knowledge is generated from three axes of questioning: the place of questions, the horizons of doing, and the movements that inform doing and knowing.
The text offers a reflection on “memory as methodology” considering the plurality of its expressive forms, languages and dimensions of action. It considers the historical and regional landscapes in which memory emerges as a living and changing field of forces. It dialogues with the authors, movements and initiatives that have been shaping this field, particularly in the last three decades. Additionally, the text establishes a dialogue between Latin American academic reflections on memory and that which emerges from transnational feminisms, the coloniality of power, critical race studies, the ethnography of violence and cultural studies.
CALAS launched the book at the 2024 Guadalajara International Bookfair in November 2024.
