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