ACLA 2016 CFP -
Archival Formations and Boundaries in Comparative Literary Studies
Organizer: Angela Veronica Wong, The State University of New York at Buffalo
Co-Organizer: Megan MacDonald, Koç University, Istanbul, TURKEY
In the past two decades, scholarship in the humanities has taken a well-documented archival turn. This seminar invites papers that consider the archive and its uses, particularly for comparative literary practices. As many scholars have pointed out, archives cannot be considered as solely raw material to be sifted through by the neutral eye of a historian or scholar with the goal of assembling the truth of history. They can be mechanisms of managing cultural memory and asserting national power. They can be monuments and institutions, material and a process, and importantly, filled with absences. What can the archive yield, even if the archive is incomplete? What is at stake in reading literature in/through an archive, and which ones do we choose? If archives play a role in shaping and maintaining imagined communities, what is the relationship and/or difference between archive and history? What can archives, archival research and the “archival turn” tell us about the field of the humanities?
Additional topics could include:
collecting, modernity and literary practice
management and disciplinary functions of an archive
colonial archives and postcolonial legacies
location, circulation, and fluidity of archives
politics and legality of the archive and archival research: permissions, access, copyright
temporality and time of the archive
digital archives/digital humanities
archive and canonization, literary history and so-called world literature
gender and the archive; the domestic archive
ecology of the archive
the archive and diaspora; the ocean/sea as archive
translation and the archive
national/extra-national spaces
the unarchiveable and what can’t be found in the archive
http://www.acla.org/seminar/archival-formations-and-boundaries-comparative-literary-studies