Theorizing Practices: Underground Archives

Semester and Year	SP 2011
Course Number	ELEC-GG2710
Section	001
Instructor	Jack Tchen
Days	Tue
Time	3:30 PM - 6:10 PM
Units	4.0
Level	G
Foundation Requirement

Notes/Restrictions

Same as G13.2304002. Permission of the instructor required (jack.tchen@nyu.edu).

Description

This is an intensive research seminar “decolonizing” knowledge and building on the students' own subaltern archival work, with the goal of producing publishable essays. As part of the "hidden" organizing work of groups excluded and marginalized from dominant normalizing political cultures, collectors and their collections are a foundational yet largely unrecognized group of cultural activists. This course will examine our own subject positions and our gleanings, visit collectors and their collections, and examine critical writings related to collecting, making presence, and the political culture of knowledge-making. Agnes Varda’s documentaries The Gleaners and I and Two Years Later will serve as a starting point for the class. Readings will likely include: essays by James Hevia, Dominick LaCapra, Bruno Latour, and Ann Stoler; and selections from: Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings , Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever , Richards, The Imperial Archive , Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies , and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire .

Course Type

Graduate Electives (ELEC-GG)