Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Queens College, City University of New York/ENGL 781 Archive, Memory, and the Latinx Past (Fall 2024)

With a focus on both archival theory and method, this course will explore new modes of thinking about the Latinx past by legitimating communal memory, and by engaging models of temporality that do not presume common origins or unbroken continuities and traditions through the study of the multilingual documents and multimedia objects that constitute the Latinx archive. Revisiting Foucault and Derrida’s critical considerations on the archive, José Esteban Muñoz’s provocation that we consider ephemera as evidence, alongside the work of critical archive scholars, we will reflect on the nature of things, fragments, evidence, and acts associated with archiving. This course will tackle the timely research questions: how do we read the migrant and multilingual archives of latinidad that demand a transnational framework? What kinds of collective memory are being made available to address the US’s increasingly Latinx future? How might models of a collective Latinx past engage the memory of both oppressor and oppressed, enslaver and enslaved, those who seize land and those dispossessed of it? To some, the sheer variety of latinidades militates against any commonality. Can we meaningfully connect these variegated experiences of and with the past, without reducing them to a false singularity or continuity? We will read works that comprise the Latinx past by authors such as Luisa Capetillo, Julia de Burgos, María Ruiz Amparo de Burton, and Tomás Rivera.

The course will also explore the theory and practice of speculative history. Contemporary Latinx authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres in Boat People (2005) and Justin Torres in Blackouts (2023) creatively engage and theorize the archive. We will read these contemporary works following recent philosophers of history emanating from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora (Sylvia Wynter, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Edouard Glissant), and from decolonial Indigenous thought with the aim to address some of the following questions: What ethical imperatives bind those who comingle truth and fiction in historical novels, or experimental poems in which the voice is constrained by an archive that does not come from the immediate family or the lyric self? How is the body an archive; how is space an archive?

Some possible readings include: Y no se lo tragó la tierra/ and the earth did not devour him by Tomás Rivera Boat People by Mayra Santos Febres Mis memorias/ Crossing the Rio Grande by Luis Gómez Blackouts by Justin Torres Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody The Black María by Aracelis Girmay