Category: Resources

Deadline: February 1, 2023

Online Workshop

May 23-24, 2023

The Archive Revisited focuses on reimagining the legacies of Black feminist internationalism in Soviet Eurasia, i.e., East Europe and Central Asia. The workshop invites scholars, artists, and activists to submit contributions that explore these legacies for their meaning today. Black Internationalist intellectuals shared knowledge globally and formed alliances across nations and continents. For example, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde, among many others, tackled the problems of their times, forged transnational relations, and imagined alternative futures that could secure survival for everybody. However, existing archives often hold fragmented traces (if any) of Black women and queer people’s experiences in Soviet Eurasia. Even less is known about Eurasian communities’ perceptions of Black sojourners and their intellectual contributions. Likewise, the role of Eurasian knowledge production in Black internationalists’ theorizing does not often come through easily in the archive and scholarship. Against these gaps and absences, workshop participants are invited to reflect on the meaning and value, including the limitations and possibilities, of past relationships, encounters, and intellectual exchanges. The workshop approaches the archive as a site of exploration and location of creative invention and critical knowledge production. It invites participants to explore and elevate perspectives muted in the archive as well as to look at the archive beyond what happened or has not happened. Participants are encouraged to read the archive for what it withholds or implies and reveal/ imagine stories suppressed or discarded by traditional historiographies. Furthermore, the Archive Revisited invites potential contributors to foreground the value of past relationships for the contemporary moment.