In discussing how the histories of empire are sedimented (or erased) in material terms, we build upon scholarship such as Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire (1984-92), Noenoe K. Silva’s Aloha Betrayed (2004), Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology (2013), Mishuana Goeman’s Mark my Words (2013), Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay (2017), Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), and Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media (2020). The panel will be comparative in scope, ranging from Oceania and the Caribbean to the sites of imperial memory and erasure in the metropolitan core of France. It will feature 12-minute presentations by four early-career scholars whose work represents a new, materially oriented set of approaches to the longstanding question of memory in the wake of empire.

Firstly, Kamalani M. F. H. Johnson will discuss the Hawaiian-language press (nūpepa) as a site of more-than-human memory in the context of the settler colonial seizure of Indigenous lands. By examining the 1900-1930 writings of J. W. H. I. Kihe, Johnson will show how the material form of the text (column space, typography, etc.) produces a surrogate for the land itself. In doing so, Johnson will contribute to the session’s focus on more-than-human matter as a counter-imperial archive.

Pedro Rolón will then invite us to turn from the Pacific to the Caribbean, where Hurricane María devastated the island of Puerto Rico in 2017. Through an analysis of Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s experimental film Celaje, which was partially shot on Super8 celluloid that was hand-developed with salt, dirt, and other corrosive materials, Rolón will argue that Celaje’s materiality foregrounds the precarity of Puerto Rico’s archives while presenting erosion itself as an insurgent mode of memory that interrupts the colonial imperatives of progress and endurance.

Hannah Rachel Cole will extend Rolón’s focus on more-than-human archives in the Caribbean by discussing how noncommercial plant life transmits Afro-Caribbean cultural histories and knowledges in the wake of the monoculture plantation system. Through a methodological presentation on the practice of reading for so-called “weedy” plants, which have long served spiritual, medicinal, and culinary roles for enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean, Cole will emphasize the “weeds” as material archives of the marginal geographies of plantation slavery that persist in the postcolonial present.

Finally, Pierre-Elliot Caswell will offer a counterpoint by considering how imperial memory can also be discerned in terms of absence, erasure, and immateriality. Turning from insular sites of colonization to the imperial metropolitan center of France, he will interrogate the role of digital media and technologies in reorganizing the memory of imperialism from the standpoint of embodiment. Extending Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” (2004), Caswell argues that podcasts, YouTube channels, and A.I. generated art reconfigure the corporeal and affective relationship to the past, allowing for the historical erasure of French colonialism to become re-integrated in the present.

Because it spans a range of geographies (the Caribbean, Oceania, metropolitan France), materials (newspaper, film, plant life, digital media), and languages (French, Hawaiian, English, and Spanish), this special session will encourage conference attendees to think comparatively about the residues of imperial memory in their multiple instantiations. The presentations and subsequent time for unstructured discussion will offer theoretical and methodological insights to scholars working in a range of fields as they consider the capacities and limitations of matter to act as sites of imperial memory.