The Archival Gap in the Global Imagination Conference

This conference will host conversations from all disciplines in the humanities around recovering the subjective experience of historically marginalized peoples. The problem of how to write about the historically marginalized — the enslaved, the illiterate, the imprisoned — has been the subject of innovative historiographical and cultural work globally in the last half century. Marxist historiographical approaches by E.P Thompson or the Indian Subaltern Studies school attempted to recover working and peasant class histories that were never written down. Historians of Africa have long contended with patchy and piecemeal records by emphasising oral histories and the histories of languages and their development. More recently, US Black studies has grappled with the impossibility of recovering experience of the enslaved. Most famously, Saidiya Hartman’s interventions advance imaginative aspects of recovery. Thinking beyond the strict remits of history as a discipline, she has emphasized the place of both speculation and active imagination in thinking through the impossibility of knowing much about lives deemed ‘unimportant’.

So far, these area studies have had very little correspondence with each other. This conference aims to address this issue by bringing together scholarship working in different areas and disciplines to discuss the global significance of the archival gap, share methodologies and insights, and collaborate on future scholarly output. We welcome scholars from all areas in the humanities interested in exploring the limits of historical knowledge. These could include but are not limited to the following marginalised groups: racialised subjects, Indigenous peoples, women, the colonized, the disabled, oppressed religious groups such as the Muslim and Jewish diasporas, gender-nonconforming individuals, persons with non-heteronormative sexual orientations. We particularly encourage global south scholars, and those working in non-anglophone languages — although presentations will be in English. Select participants in the conference will be invited to contribute to an edited collection on this theme, extending the international dialogue we hope to begin at Stanford.

To submit a paper, please email your 300 word proposal and brief bio to daaasevents@stanford.edu.