Archival Activisms: Resistance In/Through Print
This panel is sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Caucus, NeMLA
Drawing from several decades’ worth of critical re-evaluations of the structures and limitations of the literary archive, in which “retroactivist”, recovery-oriented ethics repeatedly bump up against the exclusionary “violence of the archive”, this panel invites papers interrogating both the concept of the material archive and its usefulness as a practical or metaphorical tool for activist scholarship in women’s and gender studies (Bessette 11; Derrida, qtd Mansour 43). At a critical juncture in which digitization both enables increased access to situated archives and provokes crucial re-evaluations of what ‘counts’ as archived material (Keisha Bruce’s recent article on the “Black digital diaspora” of Instagram being one example), the manuscripts, letters, zines, galley proofs, newspapers, public records, and private possessions that historically constituted a traditional ‘archive’ deserve further critical expansion and re-assessment in contemporary queer/feminist/activist discourses.
Whether through Saidiya Hartman’s insistence on “refashioning the disfigured lives” of Black victims in records from the Transatlantic slave trade or Jenn Shapland’s reparative inhabitation of Carson McCullers’s love letters, what tactics of rehabilitation can we locate in confrontation with an always-disintegrating material history? How is the concrete artifact disseminated or converted in the digital age, either literally or semantically? How do we situate our encounters with the archive (private, public, scholarly, material, digital, sensual) in our own work to preserve or defend suppressed, forgotten, or elided identities and experiences?
Situated at the intersection between activist ethics, artistic endeavour, and literary criticism, this panel welcomes examinations of individual or collective queer/feminist archives; critical or creative reflections on one’s own archival presence; discoveries or recoveries of overlooked material; and theoretical questionings of the nature or purpose of ‘the archive’ itself in contemporary scholarship. Papers working outside of Anglophone, Eurocentric, or canonical orientations of the archive are especially appreciated and encouraged.
Please submit a 200-300 word abstract at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21061
Sophie Yates