This panel, then, considers the un/archived to pose questions about what archives and repertoires are available to store experiences that are constantly being erased by official narratives coming from both the state and the media? As linguistics sites of memory, how do novels and films challenge a singular “we” that might muffle subversive voices? How do they create vocabularies for addressing gendered legacies of violent and contested histories of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, and forced displacement? Do literary and cinematic acts of memorialization have a unique authority in the Global South? What are ethical forms of co-creations between scholars, communities, artists, and filmmakers that contribute to expanding archives? While each paper offers a method of rereading and rethinking archives by examining a novel or a film, they all make a broader claim about the interaction between novels, films, and other loci of memorialization such as monuments, official records, and memorials. These sites of memories often determine what is to be remembered or forgotten.
Irina Troconis will begin with an analysis of Raquel Rivas Rojas’s Inventario para después de la guerra (2022). Although fictional, Rojas’s novel depict experiences of survival of many Venezuelans who have been forced to leave their country in the last ten years. Inventario actively challenges the boundaries that separate genres (novel/poetry), the personal from the collective, the past from the future, and—most provocatively—what is inside a story/book/archive and what is left out of it (those who purchase the novel receive a hand-made scapular with it). Drawing from a multidisciplinary corpus that includes affect theory (Brennan, Ahmed, Stewart), new materialism (Latour, Bennett), and theories of miniatures and souvenirs (Olalquiaga), Troconis examines how Inventario creates a repertoire (Taylor) and, through it, a future (understood as both a place and a time) for memories that are always about to be destroyed, invisibilized, or buried.
Omid Bagherli’s paper deals with the spatial and temporal limits of archives . He does this through Jamaican-American Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s 2018 experimental film 1968 < 2018 > 2068. Witherspoon’s film is largely comprised of a suggestive collage of televised footage from 1968, spanning coverage of the deployment of the National Guard after MLK’s assassination, the Battle of Saigon, and displays of the USSR’s military prowess. On one level, it memorializes the victims of imperialistic and racist orders as recorded by television footage in the Cold War era. Bagherli focuses on Witherspoon’s brief but suggestive turn to virtual objects and quantum physics in the last third of the film to argue that the shift from the televised archive to a virtual register (using computer-generated images) does more than simply illustrate the constructedness of the past by present orders. Rather, the jump to the virtual register attempts to image an alternate spatiotemporally— one incapable of being archived— that subtends what Witherspoon calls the violent “spell” of “Western spacetime” which the geopolitical Cold War footage so evocatively portrayed. Referencing Wright’s Physics of Blackness, Marriott’s Lacan Noir and Gaboury’s Image Objects, Bagherli illustrate how Witherspoon equates the position of blackness within the Western imperium to the inconsistency of wave-particle duality.
Calhoun Doyle theorizes ‘suicide archives’ as fungible, surreptitious, and fundamentally literary discursive formations. He does this through examining literary rewritings of the resistance of the Talaatay Nder or ‘Tuesday of Nder’, which refers to a collective anti-slavery suicide at the beginning of the nineteenth century in northern Senegal: when an entire village of female warriors self-immolated to escape capture and enslavement. Reading between oral and scriptural accounts in Wolof and French, Doyle demonstrates how suicidal resistance becomes a crucible for thinking through the limits of conservative notions of archive, narrative authority, and, ultimately, historical memory. What does it mean to read a text written in flame and effaced in ash? When does suicide shade into literature?