November 8 – Archives
As poet NourbSe Philip asks, how do you tell a story that cannot be told, yet must be told? How to create archives where documents do not exist, were destroyed, erased? Our learning objectives in this class are to consider archives as sites of hegemony, resistance and knowledge production, and as material, static and living (Reading 2). We will connect the ethical dilemmas and principles (vantage points) discussed in the last two classes to the archives and difficult knowledge: implications as researchers to work with and engage with archives and archival material.
Readings
- Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press. Chapter 3: “Haptic Temporalities: The Quiet Frequency of Touch.” (71-100) and, ‘Coda: Black Futurity and the Echo of Premature Death.’ (103-116) UBC Online.
- Brown, Elspeth H., and Sara Davidmann. “Queering the Trans✲ Family Album” Elspeth H. Brown and Sara Davidmann, in Conversation.” Radical History Review 2015.122 (2015): 188-200.
- Stoler, A. L. (2010). Archival Dis-Ease: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(2), 215-219.
- Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “The witness in the archive: Holocaust studies/memory studies.” Memory Studies2 (2009): 151-170.
- Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar, and Erin Baines. “The archive in the witness: Documentation in settings of chronic insecurity.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 5.3 (2011): 412-433.