Insurgent Ruptures and Infrastructures of Memory: Community Museums, Digital Resistance, and Post-Imperial Futures

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines how grassroots museums, digital storytelling, and interdisciplinary collaborations function as insurgent spaces of knowledge production. Through case studies spanning Puerto Rican, Latina/o/e, and Arab American communities, the panelists reveal how alternative archival practices, interactive methodologies, and community-centered frameworks contest epistemological violence and dominant histories. Maria’s “Tola’s Room” explores a Puerto Rican house-museum in Baltimore that disrupts conventional museum practices through sensory engagement and virtual tours, amplifying diaspora narratives often erased by imperial institutions. Luisa builds on this by tracing the institutionalization of Latino histories within the Smithsonian, showing how radical narratives risk dilution but find counter-hegemonic potential in digital platforms. Layla extends this discussion to public health research, demonstrating how the Center for Arab Narratives (CAN) resists imperial constraints and reimagines health equity through community-driven, interdisciplinary models. Together, these papers highlight how insurgent methodologies across museums, archives, and research challenge imperial legacies and open creative spaces for post-imperial futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• From Resistance to Compliance: How Institutionalization Shapes Radical Historical Narratives and Veils Imperial Legacies - Luisa Fernanda Arrieta Fernandez, Spelman College

• Tola’s Room: How Student-Led Virtual Tours of Baltimore’s House-Museum Challenge Traditional Museum Practices - Maria Celleri, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Chair

• Maria Celleri, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Biographical Information

María Célleri (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research expertise includes Latin American & Caribbean/Latinx studies, cultural studies, monument and museum studies, and decolonial feminism. Her forthcoming monograph focuses on the Virgen del Panecillo monument in Quito, Ecuador, and how the Virgen functions to solidify longstanding national narratives around race and gender and acts as a strategic site of decolonial future imaginaries. A revised book chapter on feminist struggles for reproductive rights in the Andes and a co-authored piece on displacement and activism in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

Luisa Fernanda Arrieta Fernández is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Spelman College. Luisa Fernanda Arrieta received her Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of Connecticut. Her research has focused on national museums as stages for the performative embodiment of the state and as tools for the construction of national identities. Currently, she is working on her first manuscript. Titled: The Struggle to Appear, Afro-Colombians and the Technologies of representation, 1880-1940, this manuscript it argues that while Nationalistic projects used visual culture to craft and promote discriminating ideals of citizenship, these same images and strategies empowered ordinary people to assert their own place within the nation’s narrative, subtly challenging and expanding the boundaries of belonging. Dr. Arrieta Fernandez was one of the recipients of the Latino Museums Studies Program fellowships hosted by the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington D.C in Summer 2018. There, she connected her work on the representation of Afro-Colombians in Colombia’s national museums with the representation of Latino/as in the U.S. at the Smithsonian. She continued her work with the SI as a curator for the Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino digital and contemporary exhibit. In 2019 she was a recipient of the HWW Public Humanities fellowship. He was also a Research Fellow at Greenhouse Studios, the center for Digital Humanities projects at the University of Connecticut where she collaborated on several projects that use digital strategies and comprehensive historical research to develop tools for inclusion and representation.