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<DIV>Call for Proposals:<BR><BR>The Archive and Everyday Life Conference<BR>May
7-8, 2010<BR><BR>McMaster University<BR>Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada <BR><BR>Confirmed Keynotes: Ann Cvetkovich (_An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures_), Angela Grauerholz (_At Work
and Play: A Web Experimentation_), Ben Highmore (_The Everyday Life Reader_;
_Everyday Life and Cultural Theory_), Michael O'Driscoll (_The Event of the
Archive_)<BR><BR>This conference will bring together academics, advocates,
artists, and other cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of
archive and everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation to
contemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday life theory
has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to "rescue the everyday from conventional
habits of the mind... to attempt to register the everyday in all its
complexities and contradictions." Archive theory provides a means to explore
these structures by "making the unfamiliar familiar," hence opening the
possibility of generating "new forms of critical practice." The question of a
politics of the archive is critical to the burgeoning field of archive theory.
How do we begin to theorize the archive as a political apparatus? Can its
effective democratization be measured by the participation of those who engage
with both its constitution and its interpretation?<BR><BR>"Archive" is
understood to cover a range of objects, from a museum's collection to a personal
photograph album, from a repository of a writer's papers in a library to an
artist's installation of found objects. Regardless of its content, the archive
works to contain, organize, represent, render intelligible, and produce
narratives. The archive has often worked to legitimate the rule of those in
power and to produce a historical narrative that presents class structure and
power relations as both common-sense and inevitable. This function of the
archive as a machine that produces History--telling us what is significant,
valued, and worth preserving, and what isn't&--is enabled through an
understanding of the arrchive as neutral and objective (and too banal and boring
to be political!). The archive has long occupied a privileged space in
affirmative culture, and as a result, the archive has been revered from afar and
aestheticized, but not<BR>understood as a potential object of critical
practice.<BR><BR>Can a dialogue between archive theory and everyday life theory
work to "take revenge" on the archive (Cvetkovich)? If the archive works to
produce historical narratives, can we seize the archive and its attendant
collective consciousness as a tool for resistance in countering dominant History
with resistant narratives? While the archive has worked to preserve a
transcendental, "affirmative" form of culture, bringing everyday life theory
into conversation with archive theory opens up the possibility of directing
critical attention to both the wonders and drudgeries of the everyday. Archiving
the everyday--revealing class structures and oppression on the basis of race and
gender, rendering working and living conditions under gloobal capitalism
visible, audible, and intelligible--redirects us from our busyness and
distractedness, and focuses our attention on that which has not been understood
to be deserving of archiving. The archive provides the time and space to think
through !<BR>a collection of objects organized around particular set of
interests. If the archive could grant us a space in which to examine everyday
life, rather than sweeping it under the carpet as a trivial banality, we could
begin to understand our conditions and develop the desire to change
them.<BR><BR>How can we envision the archive as a site of ethics and/or
politics? Does the archive simply represent a place to amass memory, or can it,
following Benjamin, represent a site to make visible a history of the present,
thus amassing fragments of the everyday, which can in turn be used to uproot the
authority of the past to question the present? In short, what happens when we
move beyond the archive as merely a collection and begin to theorize it as a
site of constant renewal and struggle within which the past and present can come
together? Furthermore, how then does the archive as an everyday practice allow
us to understand or change our perception of temporality, memory, and this
historical moment?<BR><BR>Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are
not limited to, the following topics and questions:<BR><BR>·
The archive both includes and excludes; it works
to preserve while simultaneously doing violence. Are the acts of selection,
collection, ordering, systematizing, and cataloguing inherently
violent?<BR><BR>· The question of digitization:
the internet as digital archive and the digitization of the physical archive.
Digitizing the archive renders collections invisible and distant, yet
increasingly searchable and quantifiable. Does the digitization of the archive
reveal new ways of seeing persistent power structures? Or does it hide
them?<BR><BR>· National and colonial archiving:
questions of power and national identity.<BR><BR>·
The utopian, radical potential of the archive as
well as its dystopian possibilities.<BR><BR>·
Indigenous modes of archiving.<BR><BR>·
Visibility and pedagogy: while the archive often
works to hide, conceal, and store away, it can also reveal and display that
which otherwise remains invisible. Do barriers to access restrict this
emancipatory function of the archive?<BR><BR>·
Questions of collective memory and nostalgia (for
Benjamin, a retreat to a place of comfort through nostalgia is not a political
act).<BR><BR>· The archive as revisionist
history.<BR><BR>· The archive as a form of
surveillance.<BR><BR>· The role of reflexivity
with respect to the manner in which the archive is
constructed/produced/curated.<BR><BR>· Function of
the narrative form for the archive: how does the way in which the archive
reveals its own constructedness unravel the concept of the archive as
"historical truth"?<BR><BR>· The future of the
archive: preservation and collection look forwards as well as into the past. How
should we understand the hermeneutic function of the archive and the struggle
over its interpretation?<BR><BR>· The relationship
between the archive and the archivist/archon.<BR><BR>·
Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the
archive: who speaks and who is spoken for?<BR><BR>·
The affective relationship between the archive and
the body.<BR><BR>Following the conference, we intend to publish an edited
collection of essays based on the papers presented at the conference to
facilitate the circulation of ideas in this exciting field of
inquiry.<BR><BR>"The Archive and Everyday Life" Conference will take place 7-8
May, 2010, sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund). The
conference format will be diverse, including paper presentations, panels,
round-table exchanges, artistic performances, and exhibitions. We encourage
individual and collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the
disciplines and from artists and community members. <BR><BR>Paper
Submissions should include (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500 word abstract;
and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.<BR><BR>Panel Proposals
should include (1) a cover sheet with contact information for chair and each
panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the
theme of the conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and
(4) a one page curriculum vitae for each presenter. <BR><BR>Please submit
individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via e-mail attachment by
October 15, 2009 to <A href="">tayconf@mcmaster.ca</A> with the
subject line "Archive." Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.
Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one
attached document).<BR><BR>Conference organizing committee:<BR><BR>Mary
O'Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah Blacker<BR><BR>Website: <A
href="">http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/Taylor_2010/index.html</A></DIV><STRONG><FONT
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<DIV><BR>______________________________________________________<BR>"In my work,
there are only my expectations and I can't let anybody in, even though I am
writing for you, hoping that you come in and help me with this book. That's the
only way I can do it. It's the liberation for me, it's the freest place I know.
You know, the freedom of the mind." Toni Morrison.
<BR>______________________________________________________<BR>"Our devices for
mincing human flesh are part of an international machinery. The whole society is
militarized, the state of exception is made permanent, and the repressive
apparatus is endowed with hegemony by the turn of a screw in the centers of the
imperial system." Eduardo
Galeano<BR>______________________________________________________</DIV>
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<DIV>Denis Salter<BR>McGill<BR>853 Sherbrooke St. West<BR>Montreal, QC<BR>H3A
2T6</DIV>
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