This special MLA session stems from the cultivation of a generous and generative community that organically took shape over twelve weeks of teaching a graduate course on postcolonial intimacies, the body, and the archive, during a particularly freezing winter at the University of Toronto. From the very first class—where students and professor met as strangers—the shared act of storytelling, theoretical excavation, and attuning to bodies and feelings, fostered an alternative pedagogical space. This emergent community embodied bell hooks’ vision of the classroom as a “radical space of possibility” where, as she writes, “we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, think and rethink, create new visions” (1994, p. 12). In this precious space, intellectual engagement became inseparable from collective decolonial practices of care and healing, focusing on the concept of the body as an archive and the body in the archive.

Drawing from the work of Black and Brown feminist interdisciplinary scholars such as Marisa J. Fuentes, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Julietta Singh, the conversations held every Wednesday on a late afternoon, problematized the very notion and function of colonial archival spaces. If the Archive can be considered as a locus of power characterized by practices of invisibilization (Ahmed, 2007), the weekly classes re-oriented the attention on epidermic, carnal counter-archives of bodies, marked – and scarred by the histories of colonialism and whiteness (Pesarini, 2023). Following different avenues, ranging from poetry, memory, and monuments, the three young scholars presenting in this session, have been conceptualizing and expanding the idea of the archive through their theoretical engagements with the body, both physical and symbolic. To promote discussion, the three panellists will present a 15-minute paper each. Professor Pesarini, the respondent, will pose questions to the panelists and leave the floor open to the audience, allowing a lively discussion to ensue.

The session will start with “We Share an Afternoon of Mourning: Grieving Empire and Embodiment in Black Aesthetics” by Matthew Molinaro. Drawing upon the work of Black cultural mobilizers such as Dagmawi Woubshet, Laurie Laurie Lambert, and Kevin Quashie, Molinaro will explore how death, dispossession, and loss remake poetic responsibility, wherein embodiment and tenderness summon ancestral legacies, queer and feminist futurity, and collective transformation. Inspired by June Jordan’s “poetic alchemy” Molinaro’s work analyses shift in Black transnational poetics—one that inhabits a post-68 saturation of death, of martyred heroes, of quelled freedom dreams, of unfinished liberation struggles, to move toward life. He shows how Black theorists simultaneously mobilize grief through the body against imperialist and carceral formations and revise the Black body’s positioning for surveillance and regulation under Western governance and white supremacy.

In an attempt to remember/re-remember, and locate an always-shifting origin, visual artist and scholar Lauren Warrington intimate’s work “To Form a Pearl” will trace an embodied memory in the Chinese Canadian diaspora. Through material practice, scraps, fragments, photographs, stories, and gestures, Warrington reflects on inherited memories of the matriarchs in her family who remained in Guangdong during the Chinese head tax (1885) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923), histories of women largely unaccounted for in formal archives. Reckoning with the sparse information that remains, Warrington turns to accounts from my family and look to embodied knowledge as a form of archive, re-materializing ephemera from a space of speculative memory.

Ahmed’s work examines a different kind of body—namely, the body of monuments and public inscriptions of love in postcolonial India. Once the final resting place for many statuary relics of the empire, New Delhi’s Coronation Park was left to ruin until the mid-2000s, when proposals emerged to make it a monument to the national diversity of India’s independence movement. Reconstruction was underway when, in 2014, the right-wing opposition party swept to power framing one group of the population as “true” citizens while branding cultural and religious minorities—of whom Ahmed’s is a member—as “invaders.” Using storytelling as method, Ahmed’s reading of love graffiti inscribed on these monuments reveals the complexities of cross-cultural and cross-religious romances in a country that did not exist until such relationships—and millions like them—forged its reality. He contends that these plaques honour the struggles for India’s self-determination, positioning this young love as an archive of the revolutionary, liberatory promise of India to all its citizens.These papers challenge monolithic conceptions of the Archive while providing new and original conceptualizations on the body. These epidermal counter-stories are able to unveil hidden dynamics of power embedded within ideas of knowledge rooted in colonial paradigms.