Archival Entanglements

“Edited volumes are their own kind of archive, preserving the felicitous entanglements of prolonged conversation. These authors explore the limits of archival capture across a wide range of memory projects, while exemplifying the possibilities of creative redeployment.” —Dorothy Noyes, author of Humble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life

“Archival Entanglements covers a notable breadth of topics while effectively making the case that inquiries into the nature of the archive are essential at this moment in history. A timely and wide-ranging collection.” —Karen Eliot, author of Albion's Dance: British Ballet During the Second World War

An impassioned and multidisciplinary argument for engaging with the archive as both vitally generative and ripe for critique and reimagination within the arts and humanities.

Archival Entanglements arrives in the wake of the archival turn in the arts and humanities. What humanists call "the archive" has been challenged, deconstructed, and reinvented, but, as editors Puja Batra-Wells and Harmony Bench show, the conversation about the archive is far from over. In this interdisciplinary collection, contributors from digital humanities, performance studies, labor studies, race and ethnic studies, and more come together to shed new light on how objects, knowledges, environments, bodily practices, and identities are entangled with the archive. Showcasing a range of approaches from traditional essays to artistic engagements, the works in this collection complicate questions of archival memory; raise issues of accessibility, erasure, latency, and surveillance; and ask if we should forge new spaces of remembrance that reach beyond the limits of the archive. Archival Entanglements posits the archive as both a generative site of knowledge production and a constricted force of consolidation around dominant narratives—essentially, as a complex web of theories and practices with which the arts and humanities are fundamentally entangled.

Contributors:
Anurima Banerji, Franco Barchiesi, Puja Batra-Wells, Harmony Bench, Johannah Bird, Leigh Bonds, Iñaki Bonillas, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Eric Gonzaba, Brian Harnetty, Brian Eugenio Herrera, Kelly Kivland, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Mariah E. Marsden, Mimi Ọnụọha, Martin Joseph Ponce, Rebecca Schneider, Amy Shuman, Michelle Wibbelsman, Nicole Wood

Puja Batra-Wells (Editor)
Puja Batra-Wells is Associate Director of the Global Arts + Humanities | Cross-Disciplinary Research Exchange at The Ohio State University. She is a scholar of material cultures and folklore and coeditor (with Willow G. Mullins) of The Folklorist in the Marketplace.

Harmony Bench (Editor)
Harmony Bench is Associate Professor of Dance History and Theory at The Ohio State University and author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common. She also collaborates on award-winning digital humanities and data visualization projects in the performing arts.

Contents

1. List of Illustrations
2. Introduction: Entangled with the Archive
3. Part 1: Gaps, Erasures, and an Ethics of Recognition
   1. Part 1 Introduction
   2. Chapter 1: The End of a World / As We Knew It
   3. Chapter 2: Emily Jungmin Yoon's Archival Poetics: "Comfort Women" Testimonies and Literary Justice in A Cruelty Special to Our Species
   4. Chapter 3: Marginalia
   5. Chapter 4: Caring, Keeping, and Kinship-Making: Unaffiliated Ancestors in the Space of the Archive
   6. Chapter 5: Archival Instabilities: From Ephemerality to Newfound Significance
   7. Chapter 6: Archival Forethought
4. Part 2: Networked Memories and Minor Histories
   1. Part 2 Introduction
   2. Chapter 7: The American Gay Bar T-Shirt: Understanding Queer Nightlife Histories with the Wearing Gay History Archive
   3. Chapter 8: Archival Encounters: Lesbian Newsletters and Rural Visibility
   4. Chapter 9: Forest Listening Rooms: Sound, Archives, and Social Engagement in Appalachian Ohio
   5. Chapter 10: Countering Environmental Narratives with Archival Latencies
   6. Chapter 11: Imagining Digital Bibliography as Archival Intervention
5. Part 3: Ancestral Practices and Otherwise Archives
   1. Part 3 Introduction
   2. Chapter 12: Indigenous Meaning-Making, the Limits of Archives, and the Promise of Practice
   3. Chapter 13: The Laws of Movement: The Natyashastra, Caste, and the Archives of Indian Classical Dance
   4. Chapter 14: Labor History, Social Death, and the Birth of the Black Worker
   5. Chapter 15: What Else: Gesture and Glitch in "What Is a Better Life"
   6. Chapter 16: Slow Scrape Event Scores
   7. Prelude by Kelly Kivland
   8. Chapter 17: mookii, agaasaa: poems
   9. Conclusion: Entanglements in Expanding Archival Contexts
6. Acknowledgments
7. List of Contributors
8. Index