author: Gopinath, Gayatari
title: Archive, Affect, and the Everyday
date: 2018
abstract: This chapter explores the interface of archive, affect, and the everyday in the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora. I focus in particular on the photography of Allan deSouza; the ongoing collaborative multimedia/installation project <em>Index of the Disappeared</em>, by the artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani; and the work of the Lebanese visual artist Akram Zaatari. Queer diasporic affect, in their work and the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora in general, becomes the portal through which history, memory, and the process of archiving itself are reworked, in order to both critique the ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, war and occupation, and
tags: subject/archives, subject/_biblio, subject/queer
theme:
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[[Gopinath, Gayatari]]
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Citations importées le 2026-04-20
Interesting References “archive of feelings,” to use Ann Cvetkovich (144)
Interesting References “Warm Database” catalogs “emotional memory, those details of experience that are affective, sensory, often highly specific, and personal.”59 (144)
Very Important or Critical Yet the danger of any such project is that, despite the intentions of the archivists, the very act of gathering and indexing information—however arbitrary, fragmented and impressionistic this information may be—produces a body of material that may make the detained ever more available to the state’s scrutinizing gaze (144)
Very Important or Critical Nevertheless, the “warmth” of such data consists of those affective attachments—to places, people, things—that are experienced sensorially and through the body itself, and impossible to capture and quantify through conventional measurements and indices. (144)
Nadia Seremetakis asks, “How is history experienced and thought of, on the level of the everyday? … Where can historicity be found? In what sensory forms and practices? And to what extent [is] the experience of and the capacity to narrate history … tied to the senses?”61 Seremetakis’s questions allow us to understand the Index as archiving the “sensory experience of history”;62 sensorial memory (smell, texture, touch, sound, heat) conjures forth those affective attachments that store individual, familial, and collective histories, and that evade or are banished from the official archive. (144)
Sur les sens.