This critical approach to the archive has been pioneered by a diverse and interdisciplinary group of contemporary scholars, including Saidiya Hartman, Julietta Singh, Marisa J. Fuentes, and Magda Teter. In the pages of these authors’ books, we encounter the archive as an unstable, even hostile, repository of the past, in which the inequities of human curation and preservation have weaponized storytelling against the voices (and bodies) they wish to be silenced or destroyed.
These are theoretical paradigms that move fluidly across widely different historical periods, genres, and texts. We therefore wished to create a collaborative session that would bring together papers according to a strong methodological similarity, rather than chronological or linguistic likeness. Working together, the Chaucer Forum and the History and Literature Forum have selected five papers that engage with both oral and material definitions of “archive,” from several different literary traditions and fields. We are extremely excited about the opportunity to bring these scholars into conversation with one another and create the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue that the MLA’s format makes possible.
Our panel will consist of four panelists, each offering an 10-12 minute paper, with over thirty minutes left for discussion. William Arguelles begins the discussion by asking how we should read recent archival discoveries related to the Geoffrey Chaucer/Cecily Chaumpaigne “raptus” case alongside disturbing contemporary archives of sexual assault, including the Epstein files and public Title IX complaints. Naomi Howell moves between a medieval past and its more recent interlocuters by following the trajectory of a specific manuscript (Bodleian MS Michael 569). This manuscript, a late thirteenth-century Hebrew miscellany, arrived at the Bodleian as a multilingual object, with Hebrew texts juxtaposed and coexisting alongside Old French and Latin ones. By removing these parts of the manuscript, Howell notes that the Victorian librarians created a narrative of two hermetically-divided cultures that the archival evidence had explicitly contradicted.
Ariadna Tenorio, in her paper, draws attention how fictional narratives of racial difference within colonial parish archives could be used retrospectively not only to enshrine historical oppression, but also to escape it. Tracing the fluid transition of a specific family’s legal racial identity in the decade immediately before Mexico’s War of Independence from Spain, Tenorio argues that these archival texts let us witness a self-fictionalization in action, as a man reinvents himself repeatedly in the record from an enslaved person to a free man allegedly of more prestigious racial lineage.
Finally, Ričards Umbraško brings us back to the urgency and high stakes of the present moment, engaging directly with a 2009 novel by the feminist Ukrainian author, Oksana Zabuzhko. Umbraško argues that in this book, Muzei pokynutykh sekretiv (The Museum of Abandoned Secrets), Zabuszhko makes a powerful statement about the multivalent intersection of imperialism, gender/queer erasure, and the long legacy of Soviet domination and totalitarianism within Ukraine’s archives of its own past.
Two of our four speakers are currently doctoral students, one at Harvard University and one at the Graduate Center- CUNY. One of our other speakers is untenured, an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. Finally, our fourth speaker is a Senior Lecturer in the department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Two of them are affiliated with English departments, one is affiliated with a Center for Latin American Studies, and the fourth is studying in a department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.