Drawing on a broad range of archives – from epistolary exchanges of solidarity to cultural production such as poetry, performance, and novels – these presentations amplify counter-archives that interrupt the dominant narratives that have coalesced through EuroAmerican colonialisms and its handmaiden, liberalism. Through the multiplicity of these counter-archives, we articulate spaces that center and explore alternative feminist epistemologies. Each paper examines a different form of social activism that exemplifies, reimagines, and/or reinvents narratives that are silenced or ignored in government projects of state formation and capitalist accumulation.
Engaging with sub-theme six’s call to “demand abolition” of contemporary hierarchies of power and for artists to “rehears[e] futures that presently appear impossible,” this panel focuses on the cross-racial solidarities that move us beyond an ascribed set of identities fixed through imperialist discourses. Interrogating both self-representation and an assigned “Othered” status via religious, racial, gendered, and sexualized violences, presenters utilize literary, historical, and ethnographic methodologies to consider the transnational context of archive-building within a far-reaching Black, Latinx, and South Asian diasporas.
Dr. Jamele Watkins, "Performativity of Justice: Solidarity Campaigns with Angela Davis in Europe"
Neelofer Qadir, "Fugitive Archives: Critical Fabulation in Shailja Patel’s Migritude"
Dr. Lauren Silber, "Felt History: Literary Form as Geopolitical Archive in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban"
Samina Gul Ali, "Revolutionary or Terrorist? Fiction as Counter-Archive in Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana"