Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives : Memory in the Blood
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;'This paper explores stories of re-mapping the archives through art and poetic-prose, using ideas of haunting through ‘memory in the blood.’ Our family archives are like maps that haunt and guide us toward paths past-travelled and directions unknown. We travel through these archives that offer up new stories and collections of data, and a brutal surveillance is exposed at the hands of the State. We gain insight into intimate conversations, letters, behaviours and movements, juxtaposed with categorisations of people, places, landscapes and objects. These records are our memories and lives; material, visceral, flesh and blood. The State wounds and our records bleed. I travel through my own Nanna’s records and recognise that we have never lived outside the State, and this very act of recognition continues the wounding. State acts of surveillance, recording and archiving had the power to place our
family stories in the public domain, or obliterate stories within a broader history of erasure; filed away, silent and hidden until bidden. But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State. Detective-like methods allow us to creatively re-map events and landscapes, piece together lives fragmented and heal our wounds.' ((Re) Mapping the Archive, 4)
-
Embodied Archives
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-6) 'In a profound meditation on the complex genre of autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois, toward the end of his extraordinary life, wrote: 'What I think of myself, now and in the past, furnishes no certain documents proving what I really am. Mostly my life today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten accidentally or by deep design' (cited in Sundquist 3). Situated in the context of Du Bois' haunting meditation on loss, memory gaps and historical omissions, I want to ask the following question: What if some of these vast omissions, forgotten accidentally or because of the violent historicidal forces of assimilation, were recuperable through the staging of an archaeology of one's body, through the reflexive examination of the self as repository of so many dense cultural sedimentations and as archive of accumulated histories and practices? The question, then, that I want to pose in the course of this paper is: In what ways may our lived bodies be seen as living, corporeal archives, repositories of historical practices and inventories of almost invisible traces?' (Author's abstract)
-
Embodied Archives
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue vol. 11 no. 1 2011; (p. 1-6) 'In a profound meditation on the complex genre of autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois, toward the end of his extraordinary life, wrote: 'What I think of myself, now and in the past, furnishes no certain documents proving what I really am. Mostly my life today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten accidentally or by deep design' (cited in Sundquist 3). Situated in the context of Du Bois' haunting meditation on loss, memory gaps and historical omissions, I want to ask the following question: What if some of these vast omissions, forgotten accidentally or because of the violent historicidal forces of assimilation, were recuperable through the staging of an archaeology of one's body, through the reflexive examination of the self as repository of so many dense cultural sedimentations and as archive of accumulated histories and practices? The question, then, that I want to pose in the course of this paper is: In what ways may our lived bodies be seen as living, corporeal archives, repositories of historical practices and inventories of almost invisible traces?' (Author's abstract)
-
The Poetics of (Re)Mapping Archives : Memory in the Blood
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;'This paper explores stories of re-mapping the archives through art and poetic-prose, using ideas of haunting through ‘memory in the blood.’ Our family archives are like maps that haunt and guide us toward paths past-travelled and directions unknown. We travel through these archives that offer up new stories and collections of data, and a brutal surveillance is exposed at the hands of the State. We gain insight into intimate conversations, letters, behaviours and movements, juxtaposed with categorisations of people, places, landscapes and objects. These records are our memories and lives; material, visceral, flesh and blood. The State wounds and our records bleed. I travel through my own Nanna’s records and recognise that we have never lived outside the State, and this very act of recognition continues the wounding. State acts of surveillance, recording and archiving had the power to place our
family stories in the public domain, or obliterate stories within a broader history of erasure; filed away, silent and hidden until bidden. But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State. Detective-like methods allow us to creatively re-map events and landscapes, piece together lives fragmented and heal our wounds.' ((Re) Mapping the Archive, 4)
