Call for Papers: Archival Science Special Issue on Deserts as Archives

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Mar 28, 2022
Call for Papers: Archival Science Special Issue on Deserts as Archives

Call for Papers: Archival Science Special Issue on Deserts as Archives

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This is a Call for Papers for Archival Science's Special Issue on Deserts as Archives. Scroll down to find instructions for submission.]

Deserts in our collective imagination mean annihilation, romanticism, emptiness, and death. Because it defies the ordinary notions of place, the desert may evoke an erroneous state of “nothingness.” Even Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni has highlighted this fact in declaring that the “desert is not a place” because it defies the ordinary definition of emplacement. The archive itself has been likened to a desert, where “archivists are lone arrangers alone in these store rooms, basements, and archival storage facilities” (Jessika Drmasich, 2022, email exchange). Engaging with ideas of deserts’ “placelessness,” nothingness and fullness, this special issue draws on cutting-edge archival theory to examine the archival dimensions of deserts across the world, with a special focus on the Sahara.

Archives evoke documents, vaults, organized boxes, closed doors, guarded access, and both navigation and construction of various forms of authority (Derrida 1995, Steedman 2001, Mbembe 2002, Stoler 2008). The authority vested in the archive is such that the very possibility of historical statements is contingent on their existence (Foucault 1969). Archives also came to be associated with loss, incompleteness, and silence as well as power relations between the dominant and the dominated, most often connoting secrecy and uncomfortable truths. However, the advent of the digital age improved storage and collection, democratizing, albeit theoretically, the possibility of access to data across the globe (Szekely 2017; Mizruchi 2020). Transitional justice systems and the increasing awareness of the need to create spaces for groups that suffered from exclusion and silencing have refocused archives on trauma (Harris 2014, 2020), healing, and recognition, giving rise to other-archives (El Guabli 2018).

The theoretical vibrance of archive studies and practice have, however, remained mainly urban or tethered to ordinary notions of built environment. Deserts have figured on the periphery of archival theory, and their potential for a better understanding of archives  has remained outside the scope of archivist theorizations. Although human life in deserts may be harsher compared to other spaces, the desertic space is home to infinite layers of existence that undergird its archivist potential. From the Libyco-Berber script engravings in the al-ṣaḥrā’ al-kubrā (the Great Sahara) and the discovery of the 5000-year-old pottery in the Chinese desert to the shifting migrant trails in Sonora and the Sahara, desert archives are stable and malleable, ephemeral and ethereal, hidden and visible; ranging from unmarked graves to High-Tec surveillance materials. Nothing stays entirely hidden or visible  in the desert because sooner or later it will be covered or uncovered by the moving sand. The stability of rocks and ruins is contrasted by the aerial movement of nuclear particles and the erasable traces of migratory paths on the sand. Thus, unlike any other archive, desert archive is both expandable and self-erasing, visible and invisible. It encompasses (ir)retrievable experiences of past and present enforced labor, residues of nuclear experiments, scars of state brutality, blueprints of border fencing, and stories of grandiose plans for the desert. Desert archives are therefore both local and translocal, connecting different regimes of knowledge and conceptualizations of notions of provenance, storage, and access.

Papers in this special issue will endeavor to theorize and conceptualize deserts’ archival potential, beyond accepted notions of archives and archiving practices from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Areas of focus and possible topics may include: 

  • Desert archive through indigenous epistemologies and temporalities
  • Desert as an archive of non-human existence and/or critical approaches to anthropocentric notions of archive
  • Desert archive as an afterlife of (neo)colonial and state violence
  • Desert archive and space as a locus for historical contestation and historiographical rewriting
  • Desert as an archive for routes of human mobility 
  • Desert as a fictional archive of cultural and historical memory
  • Desert as home to different layers of temporality
  • Desert as an archive which contests mainstream ideas about deserts as natural borders or romanticized depictions thereof as “bridges”
  • Desert as an archive of racial making
  • Desert as an archive of linguistic plurality Desert as an archive of oral literature/verbal arts
  • Methodologies to retrieve desert archival records
  • Discussions of the limitations and the possibilities involved in the access, use and re-creation of desert archives
  • Current/novel engagements of desert archives by scholars but also activists, artists, writers, and public discourse
     

As an interdisciplinary special issue, Deserts as Archives seeks to stimulate critical reflection on the desertic spaces as archives, proposing new definitions based on the ephemerality of the archive, the material as well as the non-human elements that make up the archive of the desert and the desert as archive. Papers that propose new concepts and analytical frameworks, and which build on interdisciplinary methods and multimodal sources to account for the desert as archive are particularly welcome.

Guest Editors


Brahim El Guabli, Williams College, USA (be2@williams.edu)
Itzea Goikolea-Amiano, IMF-CSIC, Spain
itzea.goikolea@imf.csic.es

Key dates


Abstract Submission deadline: April 30, 2022.
Notification of acceptance or rejection of Abstracts: May 15, 2022.
Article Submission deadline: October 15, 2022.
Review time: October to April 2023.

Submission Instructions 


Abstracts (500-1,000 words) and a short bio (200 words) should be emailed to the guest editors Brahim El Guabli (be2@williams.edu) and Itzea Goikolea-Amiano (itzea.goikolea@imf.csic.es) by April 30, 2022. The editors will notify authors whether their abstract is accepted or rejected by May 15, 2022. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will have to submit their manuscript for peer review by October 15, 2022. Acceptance of an abstract does not imply ultimate acceptance of the completed paper for publication. Articles for inclusion in the special issue will go through a rigorous peer review process. Submissions should be made online via the Archival Science editorial manager system. Please select article type “SI: Deserts as Archive” upon submission of the manuscript. Authors are encouraged to follow the journal suggestion for papers not to exceed 7,000-8,000 words and are expected to conform to the journal’s publication guidelines. 

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412