Archiving Alterity: Documenting Violence Against South Asian Women (NeMLA)
Philadelphia
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Event: NeMLA
This panel will explore the afterlives of women’s memories and experiences in South Asian archival practices their narratives of violence in South Asia. It takes the lead from Antoinette Burton’s analysis of women’s private spaces as, ‘never simply or self-evidently interior but are continually open onto the public, the national, and the historical, helping not just to reflect these domains but to produce them as well.’ This panel aims to understand how women’s narratives question whose experiences can be preserved, exhibited, and remembered in the public spaces (curations, social media, exhibitions, museums etc.) and how women’s memories serve as an alternate space for marginalised communities to bring our narratives of violence in South Asia. Papers analysing intermedial modes of expression– written and oral by women in order to expose what remains unspoken to serve as a means of resistance to discursive erasure, are welcome.
Keeping Saidiya Hartman’s question in mind: ‘is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?’ This panel further invites papers questioning the role of archives and how they recover, speculate, or share stories of South Asian women’s experiences of violence that are on the verge of or are already extinct. It asks, what does emancipatory writing by South Asian women look like? What does it consist of? What is the role of language and the lack thereof to convey the depth of trauma and memories of the same? What can literature tell us about processes of marginalisation of places, people, and things, and how can it bring marginalised perspectives to the foreground? Note: The panel seeks papers on the timeline from 1947- the present
_Themes and topics related to these questions might include, but are not limited to:_
Transmission of memory or the recovery of lost histories
Oral literature and its power of resistance Fictive testimonies
The language and crises of witnessing
Comparing historical and fictional approaches to archives
Memory and the archive in translation
National histories vs private memories
Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to memory and the archive
Memory and identity
Memory and archive
Women and the 1947 Partition of India
Post-memory and Precarity
Nationalist Historiography vs Alternate Feminist Historiography
Trauma and memory
Archival practice as a political project for historical redress
Social Media and Archival Practices
South Asian Women's Protest Artwork
Please send 300-word abstracts with a short bio.
Vaishnavi Dube