Short Abstract

This panel explores counter-archives as practices that challenge institutional and epistemological exclusions, bringing together theoretical perspectives and case studies across African, archival, decolonial, memory, feminist, queer, and media studies.

Long Abstract

Archives play a central role for African Studies today. Yet, we know that they are not neutral repositories of the past, but instead institutions and practices that determine what becomes recordable, preservable, searchable, and historically legible (Focault 1969) —and therefore also what can be forgotten or marginalized. Archives and archival practices are therefore sites of power rather than transparent sources control today`s knowledge of the past (Derrida 1995; Stoler 2008).

Based on these discussion, many researchers therefore argue that counter-archival practices are needed to challenge the institutional, political, and epistemological rules that determine what becomes a record, whose memory becomes history, and who has authority to preserve and interpret the past (Caswell 2021; Motha & van Rijswijk 2016; Schweizer 2021).

Counter-archives and counter-archival practices are especially needed to reconstruct marginalized histories and voices of groups systematically underrepresented or misrepresented by official archives: Black communities, Indigenous peoples, migrants, women, queer communities, colonized populations, and political dissidents.

In our panel we want to further theoretical discussion about counter-archives as well as bring together practitioners who present case studies of counter-archival practices.

Our panel invites papers from diverse disciplines that actively work with archives such as:

- African history

- Social anthropology

- archival studies

- postcolonial/decolonial studies

- memory studies

- literary studies

- feminist/queer studies

- media studies

- artists

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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