Re-Mapping Memory: Possibilities of Postcolonial & Anti-Racist (Counter)Archiving

DIGITAL CONFERENCE VIA ZOOM

THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021

9:00 AM - 4:00 PM (ET) / 14.00 - 21.00 (EST)

In light of the recent anti-racist protests in reaction to continued police violence in the United States and across the globe, the Princeton-HU Strategic Partnership Research Project Re-Imagining the Archive: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Entanglements is hosting a one-day digital conference to discuss the current challenges of memorial cultures and politics. 

The simultaneous critique of racism, sexism, and transphobia in different places across the globe in 2020 marked a specific moment in time that we take as a prompt to further the conversation on anti-racist and postcolonial memorial and archival practices and methodologies. How and where do we encounter the legacies of enslavement and colonialism in our everyday lives, in our research and our institutions’ histories? What strategies can we find to publicly address and counter these histories of violence? This includes the renaming of streets and the removal of statues but also the creation of new sites of commemoration. Keynote speaker Anjali Arondekar and panelists will address the following questions: How can transdisciplinary gender and postcolonial studies, combining historiographic, literary, and anthropological perspectives, not only challenge existing archives, but also re-imagine methodologies of archiving? How do the body, feeling and aspiration act as archives and how can we approach the archive itself as a processual hub of relationships and struggles? In other words, which archival hermeneutics are required to tell marginalized gendered (hi)stories, including fictional and speculative re-imaginations as alternative forms of (counter)archives, and envision possible queer antiracist/antisexist futures? 

More information:

https://hu.berlin/re-imagining_the_archive