Body of evidence: time and desire in embodied archives

Keywords: archives, embodiment, temporality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that archives are lived, messy spaces where history unfolds not linearly, but in proximity to bodies—bodies who physically handle materials both before and after they may become “archival”, who make connections between actors or events throughout time and space, and whose lived experience and desires shape how they interact with archives. Scholars have interrogated “the archive,” reading it against the grain and highlighting erasures, silences, and absences. However, the work of Indigenous scholars and community archives demonstrates that inclusion into institutional repositories is not always desirable. In other words, some may refuse to be archived. I argue that we must view archives as political spaces that defy the binary of representation/erasure through the embodied life that interacts with them—the bodies who labor in archives, who live history and create and donate materials, who use and interpret materials, and who shape the political landscape in which archives exist or fail to. This approach pushes us to consider how differently positioned bodies interact with archives in different ways and to understand archives not as mere repositories of history, but as embodied and future-oriented political spaces. I draw on my experience as both a feminist geographer and library and archives professional to illustrate with two examples from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library: a building name debate that brought divergent lives and times into contemporary conversation around archives and the reinterpretation of dominant historical narratives about women through undergraduate student curation.