Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands

This book explores how Chicana literature often represents gender violence while simultaneously presenting strategies of survival in response. Adrianna M. Santos aims to contribute to a broader conversation concerning the intersections between Chicana literature and decolonial trauma theory, one which questions the colonial matrix of power and the universality of Western knowledge. Santos argues that Chicana survival narratives arise out of colonial wounds and form scars that both mark and protect the violated body. Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands proposes a “cicatrix poetics” that makes bold gestures toward healing and narrative/storytelling as survival. The book contends that the cicatrix fashioned through artistic expression is a necessary component for Chicana communities—not just to survive, but to thrive. The books presents several case studies that examine transformative narrativity and by theorizing the texts as survival narratives, social protest works that bring attention to violence and erasure, the chapters explore how literature can be an effective catalyst for both social change and personal transformation, an orientation towards freedom, liberation through love.