The Flight of the Berelele: Trans*Ontopoetics, Muxeidad, and Binnizá Cosmologies | CU Experts

Abstract: This essay analyzes Zapotec cosmologies, ethics, literature, and performance with a focus on the berelele dance, which imitates an avian mating ritual seen in the wild. By considering the ontopoetics of the stone curlew dance in relation to Zapotec literature and performance art, this essay deploys the heuristic “trans*ontopoetics” to consider how non-normative gender relationalities and sexualities not only evince epistemological and ethical density across time and space but relate to communitarian and cosmological dimensions for relationality beyond Western gender logics. Through a study of Zapotec literature, linguistics, and cosmology, alongside Maya-Xinca philosophy, this essay foregrounds the lyrical and performatic dimensions of the berelele bird in Zapotec literature and art to unsettle connotative and denotative restrictions bound to lexical and indexical erasure and obviation associated with ongoing colonial violence in and beyond Oaxaca.

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