BLOCK SEMINAR:
(Re-)Writing History–Decolonizing the Archive
Maria Huber

In »The Power of the Archive,« Achille Mbembe calls both the archival building and the documents contained within it a graveyard where ideas and former parts of unruly realities can be laid to rest. Thinking from his decolonial perspective, the archive becomes an instrument of hegemonic power, one that conserves its relics while simultaneously constraining them, nevertheless leaving us with the archive as an imaginary space to rediscover and reappropriate.

In this seminar, we’re therefore going to work on a decolonial perspective on archives with a main focus on reading theoretical texts about decolonial approaches towards different forms of archives, e.g., musical repertoires, online archives, colonial and historical documents, psychoanalytical discourses (Achille Mbembe, Nicole Anderson, Maryanne Dever, Avery F. Gordon), and discussing artistic examples of rewriting archives, as well as exploring different autoethnographic approaches towards archival work (e.g., Christina Sharpe, Trondt Rheinholdsen, Joana Tischkau, Danielle Brathwaite Shirley, Emma Goldman, Mark Fisher).