Politics and Desire in the Archive

This seminar invites papers that consider the methodologies of archival work and their potential connections to scholars’ fantasies of meaning, coherence, completion, and relevance. Archival research constantly toys with the boundaries between the private and the public. Intimate correspondences and diaries, for example, are made public when acquired by institutional archives, or private collections keep the personal artifacts of public figures. Government documents that were sealed for decades suddenly become “consultable,” fueling desires to narrate and delineate state power structures. In theory, those of us who work with archives must navigate a fine balance between respecting the privacy of the figures whose lives we encounter, publicizing information that we might deem useful to advance knowledge on a particular subject, and managing our own desires of the recovery and representation of such figures.

In conversation with scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Ann Stoler, and Anjali Arondekar, for example, we ask: in what ways may scholars navigate the production of feminist historiography with the scopophilic, colonial, and extractivist pleasures of encountering an “archival find”? How do we resist–or give in–to the impulse of speaking for racialized and/or minoritized subjects in and of the archive? How do desires to revise history or make documents “mean” in the service of particular research endeavors trap, limit, imbue, or appear in scholarship? What may ethics of care for archival research, documents, and repositories look like? Following Arondekar’s call to avoid the fetishization that comes with recovery by focusing on the “archive-as-subject,” the seminar invites a discussion about scholars’ political desires towards the archive and the respect and care for the stories and subjects that archives hold. We are especially interested in receiving proposals from a variety of fields, geographies, and periods in order to form a diverse, wide-ranging seminar.