Short Abstract:

The panel focuses on the legibility/illegibility of texts, images, sound, and performative media inscribing typologies and stereotypes of minorities. We encourage interpretations of how these media's competing reflections of care and violation represented the experiences of marginalized individuals.

Long Abstract:

We seek contributions that explore a wide range of representations, typologies, and reflective surfaces of care and violation arising from acts of inscription that have translated the experiences and recorded the lives of marginalized individuals. Our focus is on the pre-WWII era period in which middle-class individuals—including social photographers and journalists, philanthropists, academics, and professionals—documented the experiences of autodidacts, illiterates, insurgents, laborers, radicals, migrants, and vagrants. Through their descriptive skills and sometimes 'ventriloquized' narratives, they captured and symbolized the presence of marginalized people and conveyed their subjectivities, often through typologies and stereotypes. In so doing, their multimedia inscriptions were able not only to unwrite the class(es) of those they recorded, but also to tie their own writing efforts to progressive or charitable action. Thus, they made ostensibly unsafe outsiders more visible, legible, and palatable to the public for charity and curiosity in some instances, and for violation and surveillance of proletarians, minorities, and immigrants in other instances. Just like the mirror that cannot but reflect, these inscriptions are surfaces of both caring and injury. When read along the grain, the historiographic potential demonstrates unwriting as preservation. But when going against the grain, unwriting becomes an inversive act of reorienting authority and power. We welcome panel contributions that focus on communities or on individuals crossing and passing class. We seek detailed analyses through visual, textual, or historical studies and/or artistic projects in the sites of migration, radicalism, and bohemianism that address inscription, transmission, and unwriting.

This Panel has so far received 2 paper proposal(s).
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