Volume 27: Archives

The 2017-2018 Editorial Collective is pleased to present the 27th volume of disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. Over the past year, we have compiled an exciting collection of interviews, scholarly articles, poetry, and fiction that explore the volume’s central theme: “Archives.” Archives are dynamic constellations of absence and presence, ghosts and ghouls, dust and the digital. As such, discussions of archives stretch into multiple schools of thought and practice, raising questions about power, knowledge, memory, community, and social justice. The works collected here, each one employing its own theoretical and methodological approach to archives, contribute to these important and timely conversations. The volume features interviews from the four scholars invited to the University of Kentucky for the Committee on Social Theory’s 2017 Spring Lecture Series: Karen Till, Kimberly Christen, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and Michelle Caswell. They were generous with their time and energy, sharing insights gathered from years of engagement with archival issues in their research. In their interviews, they tackle archives from the perspectives of indigenous knowledges, privacy, knowledge production, memory, legacies of colonization, violence, community control, art, embodiment, identity, and difference. Ultimately, their words remind us what is at stake in discussions of archives: the past, present, and future of the people who archives do–or do not–represent. The poetry and artwork in this collection reflect the fragmentary and distant yet paradoxically immediate nature of the archive, tracing the ways in which the stories that we tell, the stories that we remember, and the stories that become official shape our existence. These works also productively probe the role that geography and power play in archives and memory-work, while asking provocative questions about the presence of the past. Together, they comprise a multifaceted study of the archive and its significance in our lives

Categories as Archives: From Silence to Social Justice: An Interview with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books, including How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World (2001), Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (2006), and Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (2007). Cañizares-Esguerra is currently working on two book-length projects: Categories as Prisons, which explores how historiographical categories organize what questions about the past are permissible and therefore how archives and narratives are organized; and The Radical Spanish Empire, coauthored with Adrian Masters, which challenges the Anglo-American liberal notion that parliamentary democracy, humanitarianism, print culture, and the public sphere were the crucibles of modernity, arguing that sixteenth-century Spanish America witnessed massive popular participation in the creation of new laws and radical forms of antislavery and abolitionism, as well as the creation of vast archives of new social and natural knowledge and the rise of systematic skepticism and philosophical pragmatism in governance