Deadline: 12/1/2022
Contact: Jennifer Gutman, Vanderbilt University
Email: jennifer.m.gutman@vanderbilt.edu

Deadline extended till December 20, 2022

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

“The moment of the archive,” Stuart Hall writes, “represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement” (2001: 89). This panel engages the moment of the archive in a time of planetary emergency. How do artists, scholars, curators, librarians, and other archive-builders constitute a record of the past in light of a radically uncertain future? In addition to considering how human societies might produce a meaningful record of their histories with global calamities looming, commentators on the Anthropocene have examined the way the earth itself will generate a geologic record of human activity. From the view of deep time, these natural archives threaten to reduce cultural artifacts to mere deposits in the stratigraphic record. In light of this prospect, many artists, authors, and curators respond by reclaiming the commons as a space of archival constitution. For example, the Future Library Project has dedicated a patch of public forest in Norway to growing trees that will be used as raw material for publishing an archive of secret manuscripts in one hundred years. Projects like the Future Library pose important formal and ethical questions around constituting archives in the present: in what ways do contemporary archives mark an end of innocence, to use Hall’s formulation? What modes of self-reflexivity emerge from archives that are entangled with geological time scales and more-than-human ecologies? How might archivists address their work toward a future that will be shaped by the ecological impact of today’s carbon economies, or even a future without human life? This panel welcomes papers that engage such questions, as well as related topics including but not limited to: archival literature and media, decolonizing archives, rapid-response collecting, geological media, libraries, and curatorial practices.

Please submit a presentation abstract (within 300 words) and your name, email, and short bio (within 100 words) by December 20, 2022 to Jennifer Gutman (jennifer.m.gutman@vanderbilt.edu). This call is for a pre-formed panel, which will be submitted for consideration to the conference organizers at the end of December. Information on the panel’s potential acceptance will follow.

Posted on October 9, 2022