Marianna Hagler will make opening remarks. Then, panelists will present for 18 minutes each, followed by a 15-minute period for audience questions.

Carlina Duan’s paper, “‘The wholeness of holes’: Reorienting reading modes in documentary poetry,” explores how contemporary documentary poets read archival materials related to different histories, and model additional possibilities for readers to engage with historic materials through multimodal forms. By focusing on documentary poems by Craig Santos Perez and Divya Victor, Duan argues that these writers’ modes of “effortful” reading enable poets to negotiate overlapping political, social, and cultural demands placed upon their historicizing work, including pressures to transparently represent ‘hidden histories’ and bear witness to violent historic events through first-person testimonies. Duan suggests that these poets’ modes of reading poetry do not seek to monumentalize history by bearing witness, as early twentieth-century models of poetry of witness did, nor do they seek to make legible a broken historic archive. Rather, these writers use documentary poetic form to explore somatic, material, and sensorial textures of historical events, often innovating new rubrics of opacity. In doing so, they consider ethical relations to history, and the readerly labor involved in engaging with historical narratives.

Sheera Talpaz’s paper, “Experimental Arabic Prison Literature: On the Urgency and Impossibility of Legibility,” explores opacity from another angle. Many works of prison literature paradoxically thematize the opacity of experiences they seek to represent and make legible to a (perhaps unaware) public. Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell (2008) tells the story of Musa, a recent graduate incarcerated in Syria’s Tadmor prison, dubbed “the kingdom of death and madness” by the poet Faraj Bayrakdar. Indeed, from the first pages, as Musa is apprehended and tortured to his incredulity, one is reminded of Primo Levi’s treatment of Auschwitz as the site where “there is no why”— an epistemological blackhole wherein knowing is as impossible as it is irrelevant. Attending to similar traumas are a number of metafictional texts that not only thematize but also embody the opacity of imprisonment under totalitarian regimes. This presentation will consider Sinan Antoon’s I’jaam (2007), a novella that takes the form of a found prison manuscript, and Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell (1966), a “plotless,” tonally numb novella written not on but around the experience of incarceration. Both texts aestheticize the paradoxes and tensions of writing the unwritable, Antoon’s through the conceit of a manuscript whose ambiguity marks the prisoner’s self-censorship and resistance, and Ibrahim’s, whose nihilistic tone and unvarnished, terse style is at odds with its protagonist’s acts of truthtelling.

Michaela Kotziers’s paper “To Write a Life Otherwise: Orlando, My Political Biography as Documentary Adaptation” will consider the affordances of Paul Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography as a “documentary adaptation” of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography. Preciado’s film is simultaneously a fictional biography of each cast member who plays Woolf’s successive Orlandos, an embodiment of the intertextual intimacies of trans life histories, and a collective alternative to the representational strain that autobiography places on individual lives. This paper positions Orlando, My Political Biography alongside trans life writing scholarship and Sandy Stone’s foundational argument to consider trans “as a genre” or “a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption" might exceed existing generic frames of representation in her article “The Empire Strikes Back.” Preciado plays with the intertextuality of trans biography by replacing psychoanalytic and medicolegal texts with Woolf’s Orlando as the template for trans life histories, in addition to drawing attention to the fictionality of a scripted and dramatically staged “documentary” wherein actors voice their own life histories through embodiments of the character Orlando.

This panel, which gathers early career artist-scholars and graduate students, examines the intersections of representation, genre, and form. We hope that this panel stimulates discussions on experimental documentary methods in poetry and film, how to address epistemological barriers, and imagining reparative modes of representation that do justice to the pasts and futures of their subjects.