Studies in Literature and the Arts (487-0-1)

Topic

Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledges & Irreverent

Instructors

Alejandra Uslenghi
847/467-1713
3-113 Crowe

Meeting Info

Kresge 3535 Span & Port Sem Rm: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledge and Irreverent Uses

This seminar studies the contemporary appropriation, uses, and reactivations of cultural archives in modern and contemporary literature and culture. Even if archives are often imagined as architectures of knowledge, places where the past is organized, protected, stabilized, and made legible through systems of order, we will challenge this idea and conceive the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both texts and documents as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that register our present. We explore the processes of memory that foreground the central role of archives, especially when it comes to subaltern knowledge and experiences of minoritized communities, historically excluded. We analyze how archives have often been the basis for the rethinking of cultural heritages and foundational fictions, embodied as state repositories and libraries, cabinets of curiosities and colonial herbariums, natural history collections, and forensic databases, family albums, community memory projects, and volatile infrastructures of the digital cloud. We reflect on the poetics and the politics of archives in contemporary engagements that erode the national archive's former boundaries and stability, performing intervention and subversions in counter-archives that probe to be recombinant and generative of other futures.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: REASON: Pre-registration is not allowed for this class. Please try again during regular registration.