Paper archives have long been foundational sources of data for humanities scholars–be these materials organized as logs and records or correspondences and various other writings, institutionally produced and preserved or recovered by other means. What are the risks and rewards of digital archives? What are our corresponding responsibilities–as archivists and scholars of archives in the digital era? What makes a digital data archive? What are their ethics in the new digital formats of accessibility and of preservation? Can we revolutionize the burdens that accompany past archives? This seminar addresses these pressing questions of archives in the digital era.

How do linguistic constructions of race, immigration, and coloniality intersect to produce restrictive categories of citizens of color in contemporary Italy? What happens when multiple colonial regimes interfere as diasporic communities negotiate multiple conceptualizations of race while asserting national belonging?

Retellings, or repurposings, of Ovidian myth offer the opportunity to examine and cross boundaries between people and things.

This essay tells a story about blackness and being, black durational performance, black power and the powers that cohere in the blackness of Now. 

We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships, … our ability to defy social conventions as well as support these conventions. All of this we learn from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others.

–Toni Morrison

The challenge was...

Toni Morrison began to formulate her engagement with the black past early in her career, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia: a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World.