After April 1^st, 2021, the conservative media’s weaponization of Critical Race Theory reached a fever pitch. Spring 2021 would be consumed with hype and misinformation regarding the discipline’s teaching of a range of archival epistemologies and Global South fieldwork. Critically, these attacks were initiated on September 2020, at Washington, D.C.’s National Archives Museum prior to President Biden’s election. In response to these attacks, several global initiatives in the arts seized on this cultural war as an opportunity to reassess archival research: Université de Paris’s “Au delà de l’archive,” the Global South Cosmology and Epistemology Initiative (led by figures such as Walter Mignolo and Shadreck Chirikure), and the Cold War Research Network all questioned archival methodology and even the reasons for housing such documentation at prominent European Special Collections at places such as Oxford University or Universiteit Leiden. The rationale for addressing the criticality but also the attacks of CRT for the MLA’s “Just in Time” session is to explore how, since this past spring, literary studies addressing the intersection of race and civil rights have taken this opportunity to unsettle notions of the historical, along with how the literary might conduct histories of the Global South differently. Dialoguing with previous scholarship on the archiving of the Black Atlantic in Achille Mbembe’s “The Subject of the World,” Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother regarding fieldwork at the heritage sites of the UNESCO Slave Route, and the critical contributions in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12.2, 2008 (editor David Scott’s “On the Archaeologies of Black Memory,” Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Patricia Saunders’s “Defending the Dead: Confronting the Archive,” among others), this panel will converse with these works and link them to the powers and silences of the archive in Latinx studies. The symbolic nature of the original attack on CRT at the US’s most prominent archival center and its capital indeed demands such an inquiry.

A foremost and MLA-recognized scholar in Ethnic Studies and CRT, José David Saldívar’s intervention will interrogate the ability of the archive to document Mexican indigenous life during and after the conquest of México-Tenochtitlán. Using Yuri Herrera’s groundbreaking novel Señales que preceden el fin del mundo and the author’s discovery at the UC Berkeley Bancroft archive—the otomí word “maki” (loving, valuable sister)—Saldívar situates this postcontemporary archive between two zones of death or necroviolence—corporeal and social—to grapple with the precarious lives of indigeneity. In a seeming ode to Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” Saldívar addresses the speculative archive, or the racialized voices that cannot be verified among the unmarked graves scattered within the US-Mexican borderland. The presentation promotes ways of reading in bodily absence and against unspeakable violence.

If Saldívar addresses the transnational dimensions of the archive, Sarah Quesada turns to the transatlantic. In her reading of Junot Díaz’s short story, “Monstro” (2012)—about a zombie apocalypse in Haiti—Quesada privileges the African archive to decolonize the distortion of zombies. Tracing the fear of the zombie back to its colonial origin in vodun-practicing Benin, Quesada’s discursive analysis reads Díaz’s grotesque zombies against anti-African discourses originating in Africa and contemporary oral proverbs recited at Benin’s UNESCO Slave Route site. Archival research in les Archives nationales d’outre mer (Aix-en-Provence, France) and fieldwork in Benin provide a counterhistory to both the colonial record and the mainstay of popular culture, Quesada argues, that reassesses archival methods for CRT.

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario will offer an interpretation of the archive from her perspective as a Caribbeanist and the managing editor of Small Axe. Her paper will focus on Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection of poetry Boat People (2005) and its role in documenting the disappeared bodies of Caribbean migration. In conversation with the essays published in Small Axe, Pérez-Rosario offers insights into the poems’ historization of structural inequality and social injustice, or a “cimarron poetics” that challenges the absences and silences of the archive through the imagery of the ship. Through this imagery, her paper will also dialogue with contemporary social justice movements in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, from the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border and the ecological and debt crises in Puerto Rico.

The goal of this session is to provide ample time for discussion, as these papers touch upon such current and critical issues. With 15 minutes each, this should leave sufficient time for an unstructured and lively conversation, which we anticipate based on the topic and its timeliness.