Our understanding of the colonial world is mediated. Within visual and textual archives, knowledge of the past is rendered legible through the technologies of imperial bureaucracy. Yet as the microphone and speaker share a common circuitry, tools of surveillance and control may be utilized and appropriated by African people to document moments of oppression and resistance. Studied control of record-keeping processes allowed African creatives, writers, and bureaucrats to embed their own oppositions within the annals of history. Often hidden, secret, or below the surface, resistance may be fully transparent to some while completely opaque to others. Unearthing such moments offers access to new historical narratives which complicate traditional understandings of the “colonial” and “post-colonial.”
This panel welcomes submissions which consider representations of resistance within archives spread across the continent and imperial core. We seek projects across a variety of disciplines which explore the politicality and militancy of African workers and creatives embedded in colonial bureaucracies. Contributions may examine any archive, artwork, location, or period, but should identify elements of radicality and opposition, visible or implicit.
Attendant to the ways study and reproduction of the archive petrifies its biases, this panel seeks to urgently disrupt African historiography by asking: In which ways have African subjects utilized the technologies of modernity to subvert coloniality? How can thinking anachronistically and anatopically bring new theoretical understandings to our consumption of archival material? What moments of opacity can be found in the margins of the African archive? Which subjects are rendered fugitive in its gaps? How do we see resistance in documentary works? How can a complication of archival technologies advance our understanding of present crises?
Papers from across the humanities are encouraged, particularly Art History, Visual Studies, and other disciplines studying the politics of visuality. Co-chair proposals are also considered.
Please submit a 250 word abstract and short bio or CV by March 5, 2025 to jkonieczny@gradcenter.cuny.edu for consideration. Notice will be returned by March 7, to accommodate individual paper submission.
Colonial Means, Decolonial Ends – Archival Representations of Resistance
