On a day of December 1995, Swiss author Daniel de Roulet received by mail
a 7.3 pounds parcel. Inside were files sent by the Helvetian police department. Files
documenting his life, week after week: an archive of what he had said, of the places
he had been to, of the people he had met for 17 years, between 1964 and 1981. The
Secret Files Scandal in Switzerland broke out 1989, when it was revealed that the
Bundespolizei (now Swiss Federal Police), charged with domestic intelligence, was
secretly and illegally keeping more than 900,000 files in secret archives. Under their
surveillance were Swiss citizens and foreigners, among which unionists, left-wing
activists, ecologists and intellectuals. After the existence of the archives was
disclosed, 300,000 people requested to see their files. The documents were first
blacked out, in order to redact sensible data, such as police informers’ names.

What would a map look like if it aimed at empowering the territory it represents and its people?
How can a cartographic gesture allow its referent to speak on its own terms?
How can we map Long Island Latinx communities in a way that allows them to become
politically visible without becoming socially vulnerable? In spite of their increased presence,
vital contribution of close to 20% of the local economy (see “New Americans on Long Island,”
Hagedorn, 2011), and their growing cultural presence in music, literature, filmmaking,
gastronomy, and visual art, Latinxs remain a rather unknown group among their neighbors.

Pendant longtemps, mon rapport aux archives, s’il ne s’est pas limité à étudier des fonds
d’auteurs – fonds passionnants, mais qui posent des problèmes méthodologiques différents de
ceux que nous pourrions appeler un travail sur documents éparpillés -, mon rapport aux
archives, donc, a été le plus souvent médié par le travail d’autres que moi. J’ai en général
établi un rapport aux archives qui n’était pas si différent du rapport que l’on peut avoir avec
des livres dans une bibliothèque.

We are living through the planetary construction of a hybrid cultural and historical record: parts
analog, parts digital. Even our books are now born-digital, usually in Microsoft Word, before
they ever make it to print; our research happens on a browser before we visit the shelves.
Completely immersed in that moment of construction and re-evaluation, my work aligns with
what Roopika Risam has recently described as a “postcolonial digital humanities,” a praxis
whose main task is to produce “the multiple epistemologies […] that are needed to ensure that
cultural heritage from communities of the Global South finds a place in the digital cultural
record.” The larger share of that scholarly work, theory and practice, has wrestled with the
implications of such a moment for the careful construction and interpretation of the documentary
record of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic. My scholarship moves then beyond signaling
absence or crisis to engage in restorative and experimental work to build and read a useful past.
In this sense, the work also belongs in the philological and historicist traditions of textual
criticism and book history from the margins.

For the last two decades, archives have been present on fictional and non-fictional literature as well as in the literary discipline, a phenomenon that leads us to interrogate their epistemological inscription on our work as researchers. We, literature specialists, are now part of the wide « public of the archives » (specialized and non-specialized). But what do we do with and at the archives?

In the literary discipline this incorporation of archives which are not used as “sources” stems from a specific conception of the work on literature, that considers the text not as an isolated ontological realization, but as a material object, constitutive of its identity, since it reintroduces the anchoring of the literary text in its present and in the present of interpretation. As specialist of literature, my practice of the archives do not consider them as a place of reflection, or of evidence, but as a building space, were the object is generated, in a form of exchange that involves a confrontation with materials that are often opaque (Farge 1989 : 90).

This incorporation of archives changes several aspects and methods of our work: at the level of disciplinary writing protocols, and at the level of the definition of our objects of research. Classic works such as Arlette Farge’s Le goût des archivesand Natalie Zemon-Davis’Fiction in the Archives (1987) from Natalie Zemon-Davis, remind us that working with the archives we are confronted to a crowd of characters that take shape through their writing, and build a kind of human comedy; their fragmentary destinies fascinate us, and encourage us to build hypotheses that take them into account. These « archival characters » are henceforth incorporated into our work, and coexist with fictional and historical ones, but they have a specific status.

In order to develop these postulates, I will expose a recent research in the archives of Heinrich Schliemann (Neubukow 1822-Naples 1890), the autodidact and polyglot archeologist, whose name evokes the extraordinary destiny of a child fascinated by the ancient world, that, once he became an adult and a millionaire, used his fortune to make his dream come true: to discover the place of the ancient city of Troy.

This paper will analyze the professional trajectory of García Márquez through the information provided by his personal archives. The Harry Ransom Center acquired the archives in 2015. This presentation will go over new and rare archival evidence that helps us to understand the writer from a perspective never seen before. A key feature of my presentation will be to offer the audience a behind-the-scenes understanding of García Márquez’s creative and writing process. Evidence will come from several of his most famous works, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The presentation will also discuss the value of archival evidence to analyze the writer’s transformation into a global literary icon. Part of the presentation will inform the audience about how I have used the archives to curate the forthcoming exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center on García Márquez.

“American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, a major concert performer and minor film star of the 1940s, began fading from fame in the 1950s, while still only in his 30s. By 1960, he had moved to Thailand to restart his career in the fertile musical fields that spread around the American intervention in Southeast Asia. Emigrating gave Rocco new gigs and new audiences, and he found success arguably beyond what he had enjoyed in his earlier heyday. But Thailand also afforded him anonymity — especially racial and sexual anonymity — that he could not have hoped for in the U.S. This anonymity, quite reasonably and by all accounts, was a happy turn in Rocco’s life, especially in an age when McCarthyist homophobia and racism were reaching a fever pitch.

Rocco’s biography, however, raises complex questions for historical research. To the extent that Rocco’s years in Thailand were lived in deliberate privacy, how can they best be considered, understood, and represented in research? This question parallels recent work on imagining new kinds of archives (Doreen Lee, others), and on reflecting on archival absences (Saidiya Hartman, others), as it takes up the case of a figure whose story left few archival traces. However an archive of Rocco’s life was not repressed by a self-interested state, but by Rocco himself. How are scholars to handle questions of self-imposed anonymity — methodologically as well as ethically?”

In that paper, I present my postdoctoral research on archives and gender. An important part of my project consists in collecting interviews with feminist activists to produce oral archives and online podcasts. I expose the general framework of this research (oral and women history), the purpose of the collect, the political and intellectual interests of producing archives and collecting life stories to understand gender-construction and support polyphony in feminism. I discuss important issues regarding knowledge and truth in oral archives and feminist research. I argue that a feminist and queer approach of gender as performative, grounded on a performative approach of language, can help us to analyze archives from an intersectional and non-essentialist perspective.

It happened here. Democracy was upended, and started walking as a ghost-name, rather than a political model of government, on November of 2016. We know how the machinery of misinformation, foreign intervention, and internet forms of activism (and “activism” here has a very broad sense, regardless of its political color), along with political mishaps, the collaboration of bad actors, and un-democratic practices, ended up in the election of the 45^th president of the US without the support of the popular vote by a large number.

The manifestations of archival productivity ever since are impossible to tackle, as they have grown exponentially thanks to the false promises of social networking. In the middle of that, there is one particular truth —that of some people undertaking un-hackeable practices to reaffirm the presence of the demos, that is, the people as a political actor. One of those un-hackeable practices happened immediately after Election Day, when thousands of people started writing post-its and sticking them on the walls of Union sq / 14^th street Subway station hallways. Just a few weeks ago, similar post-it-ing happened in the streets of Hong Kong: thousands of post-its turned the streets of protest into a space of ephemeral memory of the political actions that Hong Kong inhabitants were undertaking, and that would end up having legislative effects.

In my talk and power-point, I will reflect on these ephemeral walls of post-its, and the political un-hackeability they promote.

 

“American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, a major concert performer and minor film star of the 1940s, began fading from fame in the 1950s, while still only in his 30s. By 1960, he had moved to Thailand to restart his career in the fertile musical fields that spread around the American intervention in Southeast Asia. Emigrating gave Rocco new gigs and new audiences, and he found success arguably beyond what he had enjoyed in his earlier heyday. But Thailand also afforded him anonymity — especially racial and sexual anonymity — that he could not have hoped for in the U.S. This anonymity, quite reasonably and by all accounts, was a happy turn in Rocco’s life, especially in an age when McCarthyist homophobia and racism were reaching a fever pitch.

Rocco’s biography, however, raises complex questions for historical research. To the extent that Rocco’s years in Thailand were lived in deliberate privacy, how can they best be considered, understood, and represented in research? This question parallels recent work on imagining new kinds of archives (Doreen Lee, others), and on reflecting on archival absences (Saidiya Hartman, others), as it takes up the case of a figure whose story left few archival traces. However an archive of Rocco’s life was not repressed by a self-interested state, but by Rocco himself. How are scholars to handle questions of self-imposed anonymity — methodologically as well as ethically?”