The Archive Revisited invites scholars, artists, and activists to submit contributions that explore archival artifact/s for its/their meaning today.
Black Internationalist intellectuals shared knowledge globally and formed alliances across nations and continents. For example, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde, among many others, tackled the problems of their times, forged transnational relations, and imagined alternative futures that could secure survival for everybody. However, existing archives often hold fragmented traces (if any) of Black women and queer people’s experiences in Soviet Eurasia. Even less is known about Eurasian communities’ perceptions of Black sojourners and their intellectual contributions. Likewise, the role of Eurasian knowledge production in Black internationalists’ theorizing does not often come through easily in the archive and scholarship.
Against these gaps and absences, the project invites to reflect on the meaning and value, including the limitations and possibilities, of past relationships, encounters, and intellectual exchanges. The project approaches the archive as a site of exploration and location of creative invention and critical knowledge production. Potential contributors are encouraged to read the archive for what it withholds or implies, and reveal/ imagine stories suppressed or discarded by traditional historiographies. Furthermore, the Archive Revisited invites to foreground the value of past relationships for the contemporary moment.
For example, the project proposes analyzing archival artifacts, considering topics that include but are not limited to:
• The importance or influence of Black feminist internationalism on Eurasian communities.
• The mobility of ideas across borders (e.g., travel of written works and their translations) that reveal intellectual exchanges between communities historically and in the present.
• What constitutes the archive of Black feminist internationalism, and what place Eurasian communities and their cultural and intellectual perspectives have within that tradition.
• The different historical circumstances that facilitated the physical and intellectual exchanges between Black sojourners and Eurasia.
• Queer/feminist perspectives on the intellectual and political histories of Black/Eurasian exchanges and what they may bring to contemporary struggles.
• How histories of interactions between Black and Eurasian communities may contribute to the archive of anti-colonial resistance.
Scholarly papers, analytical essays, first-person reflections, and other creative submissions and expressions (poetry, spoken word, etc.) can be up to 2,500 words. Contributions in different languages are welcome. To submit your contribution or inquiry, please, use the contact form.
The Archive Revisited 