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🇲🇽 Mexico /Culture & Society

Cristina Rivera Garza: The Doorbell

From La Jornada · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Named sources Context piece
  • Cristina Rivera Garza describes research as a practice of caring for the materials, voices and traces that demand attention.
  • She argues that identity does not grant permission to approach a subject; the relevant question is how researchers care for it.
  • Drawing on poet Charles Bernstein, she links collecting to an ethical and affective relationship with the world.

Research, Cristina Rivera Garza writes, is a practice of care. It requires learning everything possible about the materials that sometimes become what she calls our obsessions, but its greater task is to protect them and build a space where their voices and traces can resonate, coexist and eventually reach others.

Rivera Garza insists that identity is not what gives someone permission to approach one material or another. Permission comes instead from the strategies used to care for it. The question is not simply who is doing the research, but what kind of relationship the researcher builds with whatever has claimed their attention.

She recalls poet Charles Bernstein’s formulation that people become collectors “through the care we have in and for the world.” For Rivera Garza, that care is both emotional and ethical. We gather, recover or claim only what belongs to us, she writes, and we belong only to what we have cared for.

through the care we have in and for the world

· Charles BernsteinThe poet’s formulation supports Rivera Garza’s argument that collecting rests on an affective and ethical relationship with the world.
About this summary

Originally published by La Jornada in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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