Praxis through Multiplicitous Agency

Abstract

Andrea Pitts’ Anzaldúan reading of multiplicitous agency critically weaves together Latinx, Latina feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, and disability theorizing alongside Anzaldúan scholarship to demonstrate how pluralistic communities come together for positive social transformation. In this process, they provide a powerful scholarly resource to Anzaldúan scholarship. Ultimately, Pitts invites us to break away from modes of being that fall into individualism, insularities, binaries, isolation, and even imperialism to imagine instead “new geographies of selves” (32). This revision involves developing an agential capacity that recognizes ours and other’s (nos y otrxs) multiplicitous and complex identities and their interaction. By being open to this complexity, opacity, ambivalence, and the imperative to new ways of being both intangible and tangible radical transformations emerge in practice. However, though rooted in Leonard Harris’ insurrectionist ethics, Pitts recognizes one must leave room for a coalitional process that may not succeed but is always open to interpretation and challenge considering the fluidity of multiplicitous agency that informs it (166).