THE Archival silences working group

Working group (Co-Director) | PRINCETON UNIVERSITY | september 2019 - PRESENT

Co-Director: Professor Kinohi Nishikawa, Associate Professor, Department of English, Princeton University

In his essay “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Rodney G.S. Carter writes “silences are, in part, the manifestation of the actions of the powerful in denying the marginal access to archives and that [has] a significant impact on the ability of the marginal groups to form social memory and history”. In this vein, the Archival Silences Working Group at Princeton University seeks to foster an interdisciplinary conversation centered around the limits, freedoms, frustrations and general complications presented by the many biases inherent in both past and present archival practice. Built on writing by academics, archivists, librarians, community activists and essayists, this group will have two aims: to establish the problem of archival silences and examine ways in which that problem has been reckoned with by various communities. How do we adapt to the reality of archival silences? How do we mitigate these lost voices practically, emotionally, and in our scholarship or academic practice? Scholars covered may include Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Caswell, Rodney G.S. Carter, Verne Harris, Helena Willa Samuels, and Marissa Fuentes while topics covered may include critical fabulation, symbolic annihilation, community archives, the history of archives and libraries, invented archives and The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Hosted and funded by the Humanities Council at Princeton University, the seminar met four times in the fall of 2019 (with five planned meetings for the spring of 2020, canceled due to COVID-19).

The 2020 pandemic that brought the group’s work to an abrupt halt in the spring of 2019 remained a concern, prompting the Archival Silences Working Group to instead present a series of public webinars. Speakers were invited to discuss how their own work engages or redresses the question of archival silences, especially in light of the inequalities brought to light by the Covid-19 pandemic, institutional reckonings over structural racism and historical memory, and the violent intersections of policing and militarization.

Instead of a lecture format, each session was curated to put speakers in conversation with each other and with the audience. Press related to all events and the work group in general can be found on the Humanities Council website.

Virtual Programming, Fall / Spring 2020/2021

Archival Silences in the Present Moment (recording available)

October 20, 2020 at 4:30pm

  • Dorothy Berry, Digital Collections Program Manager, Houghton Library, Harvard University

  • Ashley D. Farmer, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and History, University of Texas at Austin

  • Edgar Garcia, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Chicago

  • Ashton Wingate, Digital Archivist, NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund

Decolonizing Knowledges (recording available)

November 17th, 2020 at 4:30pm

  • Matt Cohen, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Archive, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

  • Athena Jackson, Director of Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles

  • N. S. ‘Ilaheva Tua’one, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

  • Joyce Pualani Warren, Assistant Professor of English, University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

Fictioning Archives

March 2nd, 2021 at 4:30pm

  • John Keene, Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies and Chair of African American and African Studies, Rutgers University, Newark

  • TaraShea Nesbit, Assistant Professor of English, Miami University

  • Namwali Serpell, Professor of English, Harvard University

Reading List Fall 2019

  • Session 1

  • Session 2

    • Carter, R. G. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence”. Archivaria, Vol. 61, Sept. 2006, pp. 215-33, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12541.

  • Session 3

    • Arondekar, Anjali. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 10–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3704707.

  • Session 4

    • Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings”. American Literature, 1 December 2013; 85 (4): 661–688. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2367310

Reading List Spring 2020

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In Pursuit of the Picturesque