Interviews/Entrevistas [Library Binding]

Gloria E. Anzaldua (Author), AnaLouise Keating (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415925037 | ISBN-13: 978-0415925037 | Publication Date: May 2000 | Edition: 1

In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldúa's powerful voice speaks clearly and passionately. She recounts her life, explains many aspects of her thought, and explores the intersections between her writings and postcolonial theory. For readers engaged in postcoloniality, feminist theory, ethnic studies, or queer identity, Interviews/Entrevistas will be a key contemporary document.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Among the most daring and influential of feminist theorists, Gloria E. Anzaldúa has long valued the interview process, considering it an intermediate form of writing--"part of communicating, which is part of writing, which is part of life"--as well as a means of self-discovery. As a result, she has granted at least a hundred interviews over the past 20 years, 10 of which, the earliest dating from 1982, are collected here by AnaLouise Keating. Lightly edited to avoid repetition, these interviews shed light on Anzaldúa's theories of convergence and the mestizaje, her spiritual views, the role of hallucinogenic drugs in her creativity, her literary influences, and the genesis of her various books, especially her best-known works, This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands/La Frontera. In fact, since Anzaldúa's writings are so intensely personal, readers new to her may find that starting with the interviews makes as much sense as starting with her books. Although most of these pieces have been previously published, it is wonderful to have them in a single volume, and even better that Keating has gone back to the original tapes or transcripts in order to restore excised material--which almost always, incidentally, deals with Anzaldúa's rich and complicated spiritual life. Interviews/Entrevistas offers welcome insight into a remarkable writer's mind. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

The book brings together difficult-to-access materials that provide considerable insight into an unusual life. -- Publishers Weekly
For the prolific lesbian Chicana author, interviews are another kind of oral writing that provides an immediacy, an openness, and a self-exposure greater that that of any spontaneity in her meticulously revised publications. These dialogues and conversations give Anzaldua's perspectives on her work, the multiple and overlapping realities of her life, her beliefs about fluid sexual identities and desires, and her theories on convergence--a way of writing that combines the sexual, the mental, the emotional, and the psychic-supernatural in a written stream-of-consciousness. -- Booklist
This impressive collection of interviews offers us a sustained look at Gloria Anzaldua's insistence on theorizing the personal and on infusing the political with the poetic--words which have shaped feminist theories and practices over the last two decades. -- Angela Davis
All of [Anzaldua's] writing draws upon intensely personal sources, which makes interviews with her so enlightening. -- San Antonio Express-News
This memoir-like collection will appeal especially to the author's longtime fans. -- Curve
Gloria Anzaldua's boundless generosity of spirit glows throughout these interviews. I especially enjoy her ideas about space/time and the nature of reality (or the many realities...). -- Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Almanac of the Dead

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 320 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415925037
• ISBN-13: 978-0415925037
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,730,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a womb with a skew, August 23, 2001

By 

Cynthia Rucker "[e-mail]" (Mount Perry, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Interviews/Entrevistas (Paperback)

I took this with me on vacation, after earlier reading "La Frontera", and I believe the two should be read together. Gloria is the anti-white guy writer, no, not that she is anti-white guy, but that she is barely hanging on the fringes of American mainstream society. In a class I took, some of the Caucausian men thought that Gloria should "get over" her angst and anger. I say, I think she has only begun. I'd like to see her write some fairy tales, since she has so much--I think it's called "magic realism"--in her poetry in La Frontera. "Entrvistas" is like another window onto her writing mind, and the cool thing is that it's like an oral history--all interviews. A neat, and so non-traditional, way to write and communicate.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another great book from AK Press, August 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Interviews/Entrevistas (Paperback)

In this memoir-like collection, Anzaldua explores the intersections between her life, her writings, and post-colonial theory. The interviews contain clear explanations of Anzaldua's concept of the 'Borderlands' and 'mestizaje'; her use of the term 'New Tribalism'; and what she calls 'conocimientos' - alternate ways of knowing that synthesize reflections with action to challenge the status quo.