Intermediary Interlocutors: Unknowing Race and Sexuality in the Long 19th Century’s Archives

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

How do you negotiate the archive of racism? If the intention is to study the historical experiences of people of color, then scholars must acknowledge that the institutions that collected and preserved the majority of our historical materials served the interests of white supremacy rather than the interests of our subjects. Cognizant of these histories, our panel seeks to analyze the intellectual gaps, epistemological errors, and pedagogical possibilities of doing research that forefronts minoritarian subjects within the nineteenth-century archive. We deliberate our roles as intermediary interlocutors and the multiple meanings the phrase evokes in order to more carefully consider our ethical obligations within the archives and to make clear the implications of working within archives of racism.

The archive is a series of intermediaries. We pay particular attention to these intermediary relationships between the scholar and the archives as well as between historical actors and the documents that record their lives. We deploy “intermediary” concepts such as intimacy, longing, melancholy, and racialization to make visible the structural violences, erasures, and revisions within histories of people of color and their positionality to the state and society.
However, we also take care not to romanticize the role of the intermediary and acknowledge our own roles as agents and actors within the scholarly process. As such, we are not just intermediaries, but are also interlocutors. We take active stances to query to role of the state, the academy, donors, and other entities of power in reading how archives are formed and who is allowed access to them. At a fundamental level, our papers center minoritarian archival subjects as key interlocutors themselves, asking what it means to ethically theorize with and through nearly forgotten bodies.

Ultimately, in order to refuse the racism of the archives, we are always aware that the archives and materials we interact with were assembled as a part of wider knowledge-making apparatuses that reinforced hegemonic power. We practice deliberate unknowing as a pedagogy of dissent. We aim to reconceptualize and reknow our relationships with the subjects, objects, and materials within the archives. Rather than take the archive at its word, our unknowing aims to produce a more ethical scholarly practice alongside our various intermediaries and interlocutors.

Christofer A. Rodelo models a method of archival examination attentive to the lingering of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous bodies by examining the performance and aesthetic repertoire of mid-19th century freak show performers Maximo and Bartola. Kris Klein Hernandez, utilizing frameworks from the carceral state, examines the 1866 court document of a Mexican widow in Bagdad, Mexico, in which she sexualizes African American troops to illustrate regionalized interpellations of racial anxieties. Yuhe Faye Wang attends to the documents the United States accumulated during the Chinese exclusion era to reconceptualize practices of reading about and for queer sexualities within the state and settler colonial archive. Together, our papers highlight the possibilities and perils of unknowing the 19th century archives of racism.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• TBD (Unassigned)

Individual Presentations

• Exhibiting Brown: Maximo and Bartola, Archival Lingering, and 19th Century Latinx Performance - Christofer Rodelo, Harvard University

• Illicit Intimacies at Bagdad: Mexican and African American Archival Longings on the Confederate-Mexico Borderlands - Kris Klein Hernandez, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

• Settled Exclusions: Negotiating Gender, Sexuality, and Chinese Racialization in the Settler Colonial Archive - Yuhe F Wang, Yale University