Intervention : Laetitia Zecchini

Postcolonial Archives: Networks, Objects, Collaborations, Absences

Symposium

Location

Session: Symposium – Full Day

Room: Wisconsin Ballroom

Floor: Floor 2

Organizers: Anjali Nerlekar, Francesca Orsini, Venkat Mani

The study of print culture and its archives has been undertaken much more intensively for the colonial period in South Asia, revealing the « structuring structures » of ideologies, literary tastes, and reading and consumption habits. Colonial archives abound as do the scholarly attention devoted to them. Just as archives of magazines and publishing houses, of schools and associations, of colonial officials and their departments, illuminated the « ordinary life » of ideas and literature in the colonial period, what archives can we draw upon for postcolonial South Asia? In their work on the Bombay poets, Anjali Nerlekar and Laetitia Zecchini have shown the resilient networks of small magazines and literary collaborations despite an impulse towards marginality and self-effacement in these material spaces, while a repository like “Tasveer Ghar” (curated by Christiane Brosius, Sumathi Ramaswami, and and Yousuf Saeed) does the same with elements of the popular visual sphere in the digital archival world. In this panel we want to explore what these and other archives can tell us about their own logic of objects (reading them « along the grain », Stoler) and about what they exclude; about the formation of literary tastes; about « literary activism » (Chaudhuri), about the networks of interconnected documentation that the archives reveal and the collaborations in and through the archives. The symposium is both “of and in the archive” (Steedman), about the material archives and what form they take (folders, scraps, correspondence, drafts, film reels, photographs) and what can we learn by their absence in some cases. The topics of discussion will cover: – literary archives, film archives, historical/national archives – networks and connections – archives and collaborations –textual, ideological and cultural dimensions – the creation of taste – authors and estates –creation of readership/ viewership; literary and cinematic consumption –location, access and censorship

Thematic axes : Approches historiques des modernités littéraires et artistiques, Dynamiques interculturelles, Disciplines et frontières disciplinaires : méthodes, pratiques, outils

Keywords : Literature, Indian Studies, Postcolonial studies