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Join Michelle Caswell for a talk on community archives March 5 and 6!
March 5 | 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
UWM Libraries 4th floor conference center
Urgent Archives: Communities, Representation, and the Fight Against (Symbolic) Annihilation, Michelle Caswell
In the 1970s, feminist communication scholars first proposed the term “symbolic annihilation” to describe the ways in which women are absent, underrepresented, or misrepresented in mainstream media. Taking this concept as a starting point, the first part of this talk will examine the ways in which mainstream archival practice has symbolically annihilated communities of color and LGBTQ communities through absence, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation. In the face of such symbolic annihilation, marginalized communities have formed their own independent community-based archives that empower them to establish, enact, and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, and substantive. In the second part, this talk will examine the relationship between symbolic and actual annihilation. Symbolic annihilation both precedes and succeeds symbolic annihilation in that communities are rendered nonexistent, invisible, or expendable before they are subject to violence, and then, after violence, such acts are often rendered invisible or expunged from the record, magnifying and mimicking the violence itself. In the wake of such archival silences and misrepresentations, communities often conjure up imaginary records, that is, records that do not actually exist but are collectively imagined to fill affective voids left by existing bureaucratic and legalistic records. This talk will end with an examination of such impossible archival imaginaries and a proposition for all of us to “imagine otherwise,” that is, to conceive of and build a world in which communities that have historically been and are currently being oppressed are fully empowered to represent their past, construct their present, and envision their futures as forms of liberation.
March 6 | 9:30 a.m.
UWM Libraries Digital Humanities Lab
Bagel Hour discussion with Michelle Caswell
Join us for an informal discussion over bagels and coffee with Michelle Caswell.