Bring your lunch!

15 November 2023: Mariama De Brito Henn, MA (Centre for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies), What are Alternative Forms of Archives and Why Do We Need Them?

When Saidiya Hartman labeled the archive as a “death sentence, a tomb”, she demonstrates the inability of the archive as we know it, to tell the (hi)stories of the people that it condemned to be objects rather than subjects. Following the broader move to decolonize the humanities, my project aims to reinterpret ritual  dress as an alternative archive of a people who had to create their cultural history and identity anew, after arriving as involuntary immigrants on the shores of the Americas. 

Thus, this presentation will focus on the problems that arise when working with colonial archives and collections and how material culture can be a way to give voice to the muted.

Next meeting: 

17 January 2024: Dr. Rebecca Kahn (Dept. of History), title TBD 

Poster "Collections and Collecting" WS 2023/24