S&F Conference: Archiving Colonialism
“But words live in the spirit of her face and that/ sound will no longer yield to imperial erase”: Archiving Colonialism
Featuring La Vaughn Belle, Justin Leroy, and Cameron Rowland, moderated by Saidiya Hartman
Title quote from June Jordan, “A Song for Soweto” Copyright 2005 June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust; reprinted by permission; www.junejordan.com.
This panel was part of the 44th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, The Politics and Ethics of the Archive, on February 8-9, 2019. For more information about the conference, visit the conference page.
44th Annual S&F Conference
Featuring
Maira E. Álvarez, La Vaughn Belle, Elizabeth Castelli, Sebastián Castro Nicolescu, Yvette Christiansë, Maria Cotera, Jarrett Drake, Akwaeke Emezi, Molly Fair, Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, Che Gossett, Jennifer Guglielmo, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Joffroy, Mariame Kaba, Steve Lang, Marie Lascu, Justin Leroy, Abram J. Lewis, Grace Lile, Robin Margolis, Marya Annette McQuirter, Laura McTighe, Melissa Morrone, Premilla Nadasen, Vani Natarajan, Miriam Neptune, Monique Tú Nguyen, Chinelo Okparanta, Shannon O’Neill, Riya Ortiz, Cara Page, Molly Rosner, Cameron Rowland, Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, C. Riley Snorton, and Martha Tenney.
Plus workshops with Borderlands Archives Cartography, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, the NYC Trans Oral History Project, and XFR. Exhibits featuring Librarians and Archivists for Palestine, No Selves to Defend, The Medical Industrial Complex Timeline, and The Scholar and Feminist: An Interactive Archive.
Description
This year’s Scholar and Feminist conference builds on BCRW’s close collaboration with the Barnard College Archives to address the complex questions that circulate around the politics and ethics of archival work. Central to traditional scholarly work in reconstructing and interpreting the past, archives are perhaps even more crucial to the preservation of the stories and legacies of marginalized communities and political movements.
The S&F Conference will bring together archivists, librarians, artists, activists, and scholars to discuss the particular political and ethical challenges that reside in the project of creating archives for communities and social justice movements. How do we move beyond the notion of the archive as indifferent repository of textual, material, and digital materials and toward an archive of engagement? How can archival material be put to use to draw attention to muted histories and otherwise invisible networks of affiliation and connection? What difference do recent digital tools and capabilities make in the archiving and accessing of the past? How can archives empower communities to tell their own stories and offer others access to those stories while remaining critical of the risks of appropriation? What political and ethical questions weigh most heavily on the contemporary work of the archive?
In addition to traditional keynotes and panels, the conference will feature workshops and exhibits to introduce participants to the wide array of work taking place among communities and their archivists at the current moment.
For more, visit the conference page.