Conveners: Mallika Leuzinger and Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

Venue: GHIL

The past decades have witnessed a new kind of archive fever. Claims to the past are being made at a remove from institutionally verified or domiciled histories, with all kinds of historical materials now circulating in the public sphere and effective in forming communities of hurt and/or hope. These developments push us to expand both our catalogue and understanding of archive, even as we broadly take the term to mean records of the past that impinge on our imaginaries of the present and the future. This workshop brings together scholars working on a range of media across spaces including the internet, the street, the cinema and the home, to explore this construction and transformation of the archive.

In attending to the archive as a site of political, and certainly creative, activity, we are interested in claimants such as the scholar, the fan, the entrepreneur, the migrant labourer, the returnee, the citizen, the devotee, the revolutionary, the activist. We invite speakers to focus on the strategies, practices, scripts and aspirations these claimants develop, and to think especially about the relationship between archives, authenticity and authorship.

The workshop is for invited participants as we will be discussing pre-circulated papers. For any questions or if you would like to join us, please contact the convenors:

Mallika Leuzinger

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

You can also register for Rosie Bsheer's keynote lecture The Archive: From the Ordinary to the Spectacular, 14 March, 5pm by emailing events@ghil.ac.uk.

Conference programme (PDF)