Liminal Subjects

Reviews / Votes

Lyrical, tough, eloquent, honest, generous, and, above all, wise. Sara Motta spells out the embodied material ground of our political struggles like no other. Here is a book to bring feminism back to its senses - a book that may even touch the hearts of men. In line with the creative, theoretical, and critical projects of trailblazer women of color like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, and in conversation with an ample array of voices that include influential academics, activists, and artists, Sara Motta takes us through a path of reflection that is also a search for a decolonized voice, knowledge, praxis, spirituality, and selfhood. The text introduces the reader to provocative and insightful analyses that combine different currents of decolonial and anti-colonial thinking in different parts of the world. Motta also offers concepts and archetypes that promise to facilitate the connection between parts of the self and the world, as well as between the self, others, and the world, that have been torn apart by modernity/coloniality. This is a profound text and an important contribution to various forms of anti-colonial and decolonial feminisms as well as to decolonial and anti-racist thought at large. In her visionary, transformational book, Sara C. Motta risks the personal, birthing new-yet-ancient (ancestral) modes of knowing, being, and becoming that profoundly challenge conventional western epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. Using poetry, prose, prayers, conversations, guided visualizations, ceremonies, rituals, case studies, and more, she offers a revolutionary, heretical alternative to modernity's spirit phobia. Her embodied wor(l)ds demonstrate the generative power of multiplicity, interconnectivity, and the erotic. Liminal Subjects invites readers to fully embrace our enfleshed, trauma-inflected, bruised-yet-becoming-whole selves; listen with raw openness to our exiled inner and outer selves; access our bodies' sacred wisdom; speak new stories into existence; and enact radical modes of decolonial love.