TY - JOUR
T1 - The “stuff ” of archives
T2 - Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives
AU - Manalansan, Martin F.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Scholars such as Anjali Arondekar, Antoinette Burton, and Ann Cvetkovich have suggested that the archive is a space for dwelling and a quotidian site for erotically charged energies, meanings, and other bodily processes. Following and extending these ideas, this essay seeks to establish a capacious notion of the archive devised and enabled by undocumented queer immigrants' households in New York City. Using ethnographic fieldwork and buoyed by writings in affect theory and material culture studies, this essay aspires to understand how seemingly chaotic and disorderly household material, symbolic, and emotional conditions are arenas for the queer contestations of citizenship, hygiene, and the social order. This essay suggests that mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements are the “stuff“ of queerness, historical memory, aberrant desires, and the archive. Archives, therefore, are constituted by these atmospheric states of material and affective disarray and the narratives spun from them. As such, this essay maps out these queer immigrant archives (conceived as mess) to showcase the relationships between and among objects, bodies, narratives, and desires.
AB - Scholars such as Anjali Arondekar, Antoinette Burton, and Ann Cvetkovich have suggested that the archive is a space for dwelling and a quotidian site for erotically charged energies, meanings, and other bodily processes. Following and extending these ideas, this essay seeks to establish a capacious notion of the archive devised and enabled by undocumented queer immigrants' households in New York City. Using ethnographic fieldwork and buoyed by writings in affect theory and material culture studies, this essay aspires to understand how seemingly chaotic and disorderly household material, symbolic, and emotional conditions are arenas for the queer contestations of citizenship, hygiene, and the social order. This essay suggests that mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements are the “stuff“ of queerness, historical memory, aberrant desires, and the archive. Archives, therefore, are constituted by these atmospheric states of material and affective disarray and the narratives spun from them. As such, this essay maps out these queer immigrant archives (conceived as mess) to showcase the relationships between and among objects, bodies, narratives, and desires.
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U2 - 10.1215/01636545-2703742
DO - 10.1215/01636545-2703742
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84908159471
SN - 0163-6545
VL - 2014
SP - 94
EP - 107
JO - Radical History Review
JF - Radical History Review
IS - 120
ER -