Recent decades have seen increased scholarly interest in literature that incorporates archival material such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal (2009), and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). However, less attention has been given to how literary, extraliterary, and hybrid forms have grappled specifically with elusive or ephemeral archival materials that are not easily translated into language. This proposed session continues conversations surrounding texts using archival material and builds on their reception as belonging “to no known literary genre” (Pane 2005). By focusing on less-studied sources and authors who work with historically specific yet materially liminal archives, we inquire into how “embodying the in-between” (Kim 2013) allows for narratives that stray from singular and disembodied voices to formulate embodied and “multiply-voiced utterance[s]” (Dowling 2013).
In their reflections on various wartime and warfare related archives, the panelists also expand our current analytical lens, which tends to characterize archive-oriented literature as narratives of trauma (Pane 2005). Working with precarious archives demonstrates how critical fabulation allows for an archival engagement that produces alternative narratives that more aptly represent subjective experiences of violence. Therefore, this panel looks to not only discuss precarious archives as literary objects, but also aims to foster conversation about how scholarly engagement with the intersection of literature and archival material can serve as a generative encounter.
Kyle Kinaschuk’s paper opens the panel with an analysis of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections, which responds to the bombing of Air India Flight 182. Kinaschuk frames Saklikar’s collection of hybrid poetry as a grievance against the multicultural logic of national belonging and exclusion in Canada. Through cut-up of the language of state inquiry and images of documentary reports, Saklikar develops what Kinaschuk calls an “archive sonar” that produces its own audio-visual record of the bombing’s aftermath.
Katherine Chandler and Hilary Mushkin’s co-written paper builds on the previous presenter’s paper by examining how extraliterary forms complicate the idea that drones are neutral and disembodied actors of war. By examining how human edits, redactions, and hand-written notes shape the collection of warfare data, they argue that drone warfare finds its traces in everyday practices. Chandler and Mushkin explore how drone images articulate the complex intersection between machines and humans in modern warfare.
Elizabeth Kim’s paper on Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War returns us to the conversation on hybrid poetry as a form of archival engagement. Her study of Hardly War proposes that Choi’s intentional (mis)translations of archival material yield interpretations that undermine geopolitical interests in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The inclusion of photographs, illustrations, memoir, and historical narrative in Hardly War illustrate the entanglement of contemporary U.S. geopolitical agendas and the past histories of Cold War conflicts in Asia. Kim suggests that hybrid poetics reframe Cold War archives such that the official narratives justifying neocolonial interventions become the very thing that make it possible to contest them.
Johaina Crisostomo’s paper turns to Filipino print culture in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War to examine how it illustrates the entanglements between indigenous, Tagalog, Spanish Catholic and Protestant world views. Importantly, Crisostomo approaches the decentralized and multilingual archive through “oral” means. She argues for the importance of engaging with living communities, whose unregistered collections of historical documents not only illuminate official archives but also resist colonial forms of knowledge production that have kept these historical documents away from public scrutiny.
Altogether, these papers argue for the importance of a literary engagement with archives that is not limited by traditional methods or uses of archival materials. The four panelists turn our attention to how extraliterary and hybrid forms use language to articulate the gaps, errors, and violence of official state records and documents. By pointing to the capacity of literature to address these issues, we challenge the idea that precarious archives are limited by their associations with trauma and loss.