Location
German Historical Institute London
Join us at the German Historical Institute London for a special keynote lecture by Rosie Bsheer (Harvard University) on ‘The Archive: From the Ordinary to the Spectacular’! 📅
Archive Fever has gripped much of the world since the Revolutions of 1989. The fall of communist regimes led to the opening of previously inaccessible archives and to post-Cold War struggles over historical truth claims. The creative works of artists from Poland to Vietnam to Lebanon began to engage the archive in their attempts to revisit the past. This coincided with an archival turn in the humanities and social sciences. Heeding the calls of postcolonial theorists, scholars critiqued the colonial encounter and its legacies not only in previously colonized territories but also on systems of global knowledge production.
A wave of critical scholarship ensued, on Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere, all of which challenged colonial, imperial, and state historical narratives. States were not immune to these developments. In a reactionary response, they embarked on archive projects to maintain their own hegemonic historical narratives, which, in turn, have been increasingly challenged in the last decade by bottom-up and unconventional archives facilitated by the age of accessible digital media and technologies. Archives are simply everywhere today.
But are all these artistic, historical, or research-based projects necessarily “archival”? Is there no need for the archivist or the historian in this new archival landscape? This talk will address these and other questions about the politics and aesthetics of archives, with a special focus on archival production in Saudi Arabia.
The lecture is part of the ICAS:MP workshop ‘Archives, Authenticity, Authorship’. Please email events@ghil.ac.uk if you would like to attend.