DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ◦ 24.04.2015
13-19 UNIVERSITY PLACE, ROOM 222 ◦ NEW YORK, NY 10003

Archives as we know them are disappearing or are otherwise being fundamentally displaced and altered. At the same time, new types of archives and discourses about archives are constantly emerging. The very meaning of archive is in the process of being altered, often by the addition of new adjectives: diasporic, queer, decolonized, invisible, spectral, erased, or redacted.

In the midst of these dramatic shifts in the literal as well as discursive space that archives occupy in our culture, our symposium title calls attention to media, and re-mediation, as a process where revolution and emergence is shadowed by disappearance. What does it mean to attend to the question of medium and of re-mediation in the archive at this time? What can we learn from previous archival revolutions, such as the ones occasioned by the fall of the Iron Curtain or the one prompted by the emergence of film as a new medium? The symposium brings together scholars working on different archival revolutions in order to encourage “cross-revolutionary dialogues” that may not ordinarily happen. Such dialogues promise to offer new perspectives on our present day archival revolution by considering previous turning points; at the same time, they could us render us more aware of how our present position shapes our vested interests in these particular pasts.

The speakers at this symposium, straddling the divide between academia, archive, and the arts, are among the people responsible for pushing our understanding of the archive beyond the long dominant textual model, moving other media outside of the persistent blind spots and into the center of their investigations.

Participants: Ernst van Alphen, Paula Amad, Călin Dan, Emma Hamilton, Iosif Király, Michael Kunichika, Oksana Sarkisova, Sven Spieker, Diana Taylor, and Cristina Vatulescu

Organizers: Emma Hamilton and Cristina Vatulescu

Conference cosponsored by the Center for European & Mediterranean Studies, NYU; the Department of Comparative Literature, NYU; the Office of the Dean of the Humanities, NYU; the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, NYU; and the Romanian Cultural Institute.

свернуть