Archives and Afterlives in Postcolonial

What are archives and why are they a common feature of postcolonial stories? What are the different forms of archives that we encounter in postcolonial narratives and what aesthetic effects do they have on these narratives? By looking at archives that are found in literary texts and literary texts that are found in archives, we will study the different ways that the term 'archive' can be understood: as documents deemed important for posterity, as ephemeral collections of ‘small things’ in surprising shapes and spaces, and as metaphor for the ways in which time and knowledge are organized and experienced. We will consider how archives act as sites where the afterlives of unjust racial pasts persist into the present and take forms both old and new. We will discuss the role of archives in literary pursuits of racial justice as sites that both enable discovery and necessitate loss. As a word that sits on the borders between life and afterlife, past and future, ‘fact’ and fantasy, colonial and postcolonial, 'archive' is a resonant keyword through which many urgent concerns in the study of race and Empire today can be examined. Through our work for this course, we will ask: How might we as literary scholars of the postcolonial respond creatively to the traces and absences of the archive? We will explore archival afterlives in postcolonial works from the 20th and 21st centuries across a range of media including novels, poetry, film. We will also develop some initial forays into hands-on archival research at Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and seek out institutional as well as informal archives that lie beyond Morningside Heights. No prerequisites.