Convenors:
- Veronica Ferreri (Ca’ Foscari University)
- Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths)
- Malte Gembus (Coventry University)
Short Abstract:
This panel examines archives and repertoires, even those on the move, to question how the ‘archive’ becomes a site of repair and contestation of past state violence and its current epistemic order.
Long Abstract:
The centrality of violence for the workings of the state within societies is well explored in anthropology (Clastres 1974; Hansen & Stepputat 2006; Gupta & Sharma 2006). But violence is not just enacted through force and physical means, but also through the workings of official narratives, national history, and the organization of state archives in documentary and architectural form. History itself can be regarded as sedimented layers of violent events in the service of a state-centric justification of further violence. But how is ‘History’ layered and what is the role of archives therein?
This panel explores how ‘the archive’ and archival practices become sites of repair and contestation of the violent past and the current epistemic order to forge a different ‘horizon of possibility’, including new forms of citizenship. We approach the official archive as imbued with authoritative, normative, and affective qualities (Derrida 1995; Stoler 2008). Yet it also engages with a larger notion of the archive as a repertoire that encompasses both physical objects and embodied practices (Slyomovics 1998; Taylor, 2003; Hirschkind 2020). Concrete materials such as maps, documents, artworks, photographs, recordings, everyday objects, monuments to ephemeral modalities of remembrance such as storytelling, performances, or protests inform our notion of archive. Further, this panel asks how do archives move transnationally or are produced, negotiated, and mobilised in the volatile environments of migration? How does the archive contribute to contestation, repair and perhaps even overcoming violent pasts without foreclosing future iterations of the political present and configurations of political belonging?
Speakers:
- Katarzyna Puzon (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
- Elena Liber (UCL)
- Secil Douglas (University of Waterloo)
- Alia Mossallam ((EUME) Transregional Forum, Berlin)
- Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths)
- Veronica Ferreri (Ca’ Foscari University)
- Magdalena Buchczyk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
- Susan Slymovics (UCLA)
- Alice von Bieberstein (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
- Nadia Fadil (KU Leuven)