Archives of Aliveness: Black Trans* Latinas & the Politics of Self-Preservation

• In Event: Racialized Transmisogyny, Necropolitics, and New Methodologies for Survival

Abstract

Under an anti-Black and transmisogynist world system, we must be careful to not reduce Black trans* life to an archive of slavery, death, and/or disappearance. Instead, we must become active witnesses and chase the archives of aliveness: archives held in living gestures, friendships, Facebook statuses, tweets, selfies, news interviews, self-published poems, plays, and more. When we find these archives, we must linger with what they and their prospective collectors may have already theorized and allow ourselves to become students. Here is where the work begins. “Archives of Aliveness: Black Trans Latinas & the Politics of Self-Preservation” is a methodological paper about locating archives of aliveness using the self-published writings of Cuban-Nigerian American writer Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi; the activist archive of Afro-Mexican abolitionist Karolina Lopez; and the ephemeral performances of housing rights organizer Chela Coleman. By braiding together the archives of three differently Black, Trans* Latinas in the U.S., this paper demonstrates how we might approach living as a practice, rather than a theory, and in doing so, center the politics of self-preservation as a balm to state practices of trans* debility.

Author

• Alan C Pelaez Lopez, University of California-Davis