Overview
Miranda Castro is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University where she specializes in Indigenous Studies, Latinx Studies, Border Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. She also holds a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies.
Her project, Borderland Relationalities: Indigenous and Latinx Translational Terrains, explores the intersections between Indigenous and Latinx women writers who elucidate the nuances of the various forms of translation required to recover stories and histories from plundered lands and dispossessed peoples. The analytical framework of borderland relationalities encourages the vast multilingual, multinational, and multispecies interconnections necessary for investigating the literary production of geographies along the US-Mexican border. Multilingual literatures of the borderlands contextualize the various layers of centuries-long mass-extractive processes, which includes the extraction of both material resources as well as the extraction of grounded and relational ontologies. Borderland authors, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Natalie Diaz, Ofelia Zepeda, and Cristina Rivera Garza, emphasize a throughline between early colonial relations to land and more recent state-sanctioned processes of extraction and exploitation of Latinx and Indigenous populations. She aims to elucidate how radical forms of translation elaborate a form of care work necessary for any intersectional literary investigation across national and linguistic boundaries.
Research Focus
- Indigenous Studies
- Hemispheric American Studies
- Theories of Decoloniality and Coloniality
- History of Medicine
- Globalization and Modernity