Beyond Finding: Archives and Excess

Abstract

Doing archival research with the aim of redressing the history of any minoritarian community or subject is often an endeavor that leaves one saying: these records are beyond finding. And in that search for the thing not named, the lost narrative, the never recorded struggle, we scholars amass an excess of archival material, such that in the very midst of fragments there lies huge abundance. Pages and pages of notes, too many microfilm scans, rich and moving interview transcripts, shocking data points, all the maneuvers taken to follow a hunch or trail down a rabbit hole of investigation, family documents handed over with care, and people and names and places that you have no idea what to do with. For this forum, we sit with this irony of archival lack and archival excess as the twinned experience of minoritarian archival research. We think through how we can productively engage this excess and what methodologies we might invite to help give shape to this research outside of the traditional scope of a journal article or a scholarly book, and instead we look to creative writing, dialogic prose, artwork, installation, and collective writing.

  The scholars in this forum work within the interdisciplinary fields of queer studies, feminist studies, US slavery studies, Latinx studies, and Latin American and Latinx social movements, ethnic studies, and nineteenth-century American Literature.Together, we find solidarity amidst our collective experiences of amassing archival excess while confronting archival absence. For this forum, we ask: How do we process, catalog, and classify information that is ephemeral and fleeting, material that is not considered to be part of the “official” archive? What is the role of serendipity in the archives; how do accidents and surprises shape our research? While there has been much discourse on ephemera in the archive, what do we do with the ephemera of our own research when in the archive, those materials that never make it into our work but are just as important as the research itself? Can we name this an archive?