Seminar in Criticism and Theory: Archives and Historical Narrative

An archive can be the extensive literary remains of the famous--or a haphazard collection of miscellaneous documents and photographs found in somebody's attic and turned over to the authorities. Technically, an archive consists mainly of unpublished, unique, and original documents--but certainly the term "archive" has been more broadly construed, an issue that we will investigate.

This course takes up the issue of archives: what are they, how do scholars think about them, and how do you use them? Moreover, is there or should there be an ethics of using archives, or are using archives in one's writing (of whatever type) basically a free-for-all? And what do you do if the archives are against you: if the people you are interested in are historically misrepresented, misconstrued, and lied about? How then do you read the archives?

This course has three parts. First, on the history and theory of archives, including readings from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ann Laura Stoler, Diana Taylor, and others. Second, on the need to dismantle and reframe old archives as well as establish new ones, with attention to writers on decolonizing and queering archives. Third, on writing with (or against) the archives in both scholarship and fiction, with attention to both critics and defenders of Saidiya Hartman's concept of "critical fabulation." Besides Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) longer readings may include works such as Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021), Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (2023), and/or others.

Requirements include a presentation on the course reading; an analytical discussion of a particular archive; a response to one of the course readings; and a seminar paper.