In my dissertation, I engage with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1651-1695) as a poet, playwright, and newly and importantly, as a political thinker, philosopher, and political actor. My commitment is to understand and draw out how, not if, Sor Juana’s writing is political. I read Sor Juana as being a political actor, embedded in relationships of power, like all of us are, which requires a thorough analysis of Sor Juana’s context. Sor Juana’s location in the Iberian Early Modern world, her status as a woman living in one of the colonies of that world, and in close proximity to the colonial court all make her writings excellent resources for exploring how colonial-imperial and patriarchal power feed into one another and yet are not perfectly synchronized.
I also work with Sor Juana as a thinker of the political. This means taking seriously Sor Juana’s own philosophical pursuits and putting them in conversation with questions of her time as well as our own. On the one hand, her engagement with matters of the vicerroyal court, patriarchy, conquest and conversion, and the question of the person require a historical analysis. On the other, the complexity of her work, its polyphony, multilingualism, and interdisciplinarity open up the potential for metaphorical and transhistorical analysis.
Reading Sor Juana historically, conceptually, and poetically, my dissertation studies different articulations of the interlocking nature of power. First, I investigate colonial-imperial and patriarchal power through specific material and poetic sites. Then, I theorize both the complex interdependence between patriarchal and colonial-imperial power as well as the availability of space for a politics that is not captured by the experiences of domination and hegemony imposed by them. My dissertation addresses the challenge of negative world-making (how to counter worlds where practices of domination and hegemony pervade and create other worlds that foster life) within the terms of three “utopian topoi”: the body, the kitchen, and the city. Throughout the dissertation, juxtaposing Sor Juana’s texts, contexts, and several political thinkers, I reconstruct a notion of situated imagination (phantasia), defined as wishful thinking that is neither strictly fixed in place nor outside of place. This way of conceiving political imagination, I argue, offers a subtle understanding of the relationship between political actions and dreams of emancipation that is not solely defined through the times and places of an oppressive system’s emergence but also by the continual reenacting of the practices of domination that sustain it.
My work is currently being supported by the Luigi Einaudi Graduate Dissertation Fellowship.
Header image: José Agustín Arrieta (1865) “Poblano Cuisine”.