Description:

Title: Atmospheric Attention: Towards Rearranging Ourselves and the World

Abstract:

Gloria Anzaldúa was both Texan and indigenous, both indigenous and Mexican, both masculine and feminine, both campesina y professional, both artista y academic... both, both, both. All these boths weighted and enlightened Anzaldúa's life. Through a laborious process of self-writing, something she names "auto-historia-teoria," our revered ancestor has left us an oeuvre of thought which traverses the many boundaries of her lived experience, pushing readers to interrogate and re-consider themes of separation and connection, of fragmentation and integration, of self and other. Her archive is profound, and there remains much to uncover and
activate. This paper thinks with living Anzaldúan insights about the deep relationality of all that is, a view she holds over and against separatist logics imported through colonization. On Anzaldúa's picture, this universal interconnection (amidst infinite diversity) can be consciously engaged through "spiritual activism," enabling personal and collective change. Section I offers a practical example grounded in Anzaldúa's theorizing about the harmful subject/object categorizing which lies at the
heart of colonial modernity. This provides a foundation for considering "atmospheric attention" in Section Il, or a practice with suspends and disperses habitual selfhood in its living relation with "otherness," In Sections Ill and IV, griet and water are explored as atmospheric portals, drawing on Anzaldúa's Coyolxuaqui Imperative and Anishinaabek
practices of water zaagidowin respectively.