• Editorial Comment:Archives and Afterlives
• Laura Edmondson

Archives destabilize and proliferate in the context of performance. At the Mid-America Theatre Conference held in Minneapolis last March, I attended several presentations that expanded understandings of the archive through challenging distinctions between contexts and texts, texts and archives, and archives and bodies.¹ For example, I was struck by Dohyun Gracia Shin's presentation, "Gothic Doubles of the Antebellum South in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Appropriate," in which she elaborated upon Marvin Carlson's concept of theatre as a memory machine to posit that theatre is, rather, a memory archive, "a repository of cultural memory that attempts to archive the unarchivable trauma."² Shin centers theatre itself as a repository of what remains after disavowal and violent erasure.

Shin's phrase, unarchivable trauma, gestures to the concept of afterlives. Whereas Saidiya Hartman used "afterlife" to index the unfolding damage of slavery, the term has been embraced across the humanities and social sciences as a means of theorizing the porosity between the past and the present.³ In other words, it marks the infinite number of ways that the harm wreaked by centuries of settler colonialism, serial genocide, and white supremacy—what Catherine Cole calls "the afterlives of injustice"—hammer the now.⁴ What does the archive mean in the context of the unarchivable? What does it mean to think of performance as a sustained attempt (and its incipient failure) to archive these afterlives? How do the temporalities of the afterlife circulate in this general issue, in which archives of the unarchivable and unspeakable loom so large?

Archives are commonly put in opposition to counterarchives. That is, archives are understood as a fixture of power à la Foucault, whereas counterarchives are understood as holding traces of afterlives and survivance.⁵ Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire, which was published twenty years ago and remains one of the most-cited works in our field, articulates a similar distinction. Whereas the archive contains those items [End Page vii] "supposedly resistant to change" and seeks to "sustain power," the repertoire "enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge."⁶ The repertoire could be understood as the counterarchive par excellence for performance.

Is this distinction still useful? Afterlives cloud the air we breathe; to reckon with its fallout, our discipline would do well to follow the lead of Black and Indigenous studies and unleash the archive.⁷ In their refusal of violent acts of memory suppression, these scholars imaginatively and rigorously enfold land, ocean, and bodies as a capacious archive. In M Archive, an extended meditation on M. Jacqui Alexander's visionary work Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexis Pauline Gumbs summons dirt, sky, fire, and ocean as archives in recognition of how remains become embedded in the very forces of nature; in an oft-cited passage, she imagines a future when "black oceanists" theorize "a causal relationship between the bioluminescence in the ocean and the bones of the millions of transatlantic dead."⁸ In a similarly expansive move, queer poet, memoirist, and scholar Deborah A. Miranda of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation calls for the fleshing of the archive. In her stunning poem, "My Body Is the Archive," she muses on what it means to "carry my research with me": "When my body is the archive,/the archive sits down beside you/on the plane to that Indigenous/Symposium in Frankfurt."⁹ These quotidian moments coexist with evocations of transhistorical trauma: "When my body/is the archive, I hear an ocean/of a million untold stories/roaring for release, like/tinnitus of the soul."¹⁰ Miranda insists upon an understanding of the body as an archival body—that is, as saturated and perforated with the past. A body that holds its own oceans. The summoning of geographic and embodied archives speaks to a quest for minoritized and marginalized epistemologies, leading not so much to another "archival turn" as an archival explosion.

To unleash the archive is to invoke a host of questions. In his classic 1995 text Archive Fever, Derrida declares: "Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word...

• 编辑评论：档案和来世
• 劳拉·埃德蒙森

档案在绩效背景下会不稳定并激增。去年三月在明尼阿波利斯举行的中美洲戏剧会议上，我参加了几场演讲，这些演讲通过挑战语境与文本、文本与档案、档案与机构之间的区别来扩大对档案的理解。^{1例如，我对 Dohyun Gracia Shin 的演讲“布兰登·雅各布斯-詹金斯的}适当作品中战前南方的哥特式双打”感到震惊，她在其中详细阐述了马文·卡尔森的戏剧作为记忆机器的概念，并认为戏剧是，记忆档案馆，“一个文化记忆库，试图存档无法存档的创伤。” ²辛将剧院本身视为否认和暴力抹除后留下的东西的储存库。

申的短语“无法存档的创伤”暗示了来世的概念。尽管赛迪亚·哈特曼使用“来世”来形容奴隶制所造成的损害，但该术语已被人文学科和社会科学广泛接受，作为对过去和现在之间的孔隙度进行理论化的一种手段。³换句话说，它标志着几个世纪以来的定居者殖民主义、系列种族灭绝和白人至上主义（凯瑟琳·科尔称之为“不公正的后遗症”）所造成的伤害以无数种方式打击着现在。⁴在不可存档的情况下，存档意味着什么？将表演视为存档这些来世的持续尝试（及其初期的失败）意味着什么？来世的时间性如何在这期大刊中流传，其中不可归档和难以言说的档案如此庞大？

档案通常与反档案相对立。也就是说，档案被理解为福柯那样的权力固定装置，而反档案则被理解为保存着来世和幸存的痕迹。⁵戴安娜·泰勒 (Diana Taylor) 的《档案与剧目》(The Archive and the Repertoire)于二十年前出版，至今仍然是我们领域被引用最多的著作之一，它阐明了类似的区别。尽管档案中包含了那些“据称抵制变革”并寻求“维持权力”的项目，但剧目“展现了具体的记忆：表演、手势、口头、动作、舞蹈、歌唱——简而言之，所有这些行为通常被认为是短暂的、不可复制的知识。” ⁶剧目可以被理解为卓越表演的反档案。

这种区别还有用吗？来世使我们呼吸的空气变得浑浊；考虑到其影响，我们的学科最好遵循黑人和土著研究的领导并释放档案。⁷这些学者拒绝暴力压制记忆的行为，富有想象力且严谨地将陆地、海洋和身体作为一个巨大的档案馆。在M Archive中，对 M. Jacqui Alexander 富有远见的作品《穿越教育学》进行了深入思考亚历克西斯·波琳·甘布斯 (Alexis Pauline Gumbs) 将泥土、天空、火和海洋作为档案，以认识遗骸如何融入自然的力量；在一段经常被引用的段落中，她想象了一个未来，届时“黑人海洋主义者”将“海洋中的生物发光与数百万跨大西洋死者的骨头之间存在因果关系”。⁸来自 Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen 民族的酷儿诗人、回忆录作家和学者 Deborah A. Miranda 也采取了类似的扩张行动，呼吁充实档案。在她令人惊叹的诗《我的身体就是档案》中，她思考了“随身携带我的研究”的含义：“当我的身体是档案时，/档案就坐在你旁边/在飞往原住民的飞机上/法兰克福研讨会。” ⁹这些日常时刻与超历史创伤的唤起并存：“当我的身体/是档案时，我听到一片海洋/一百万个不为人知的故事/咆哮着释放，就像/灵魂的耳鸣。” ¹⁰米兰达坚持将身体理解为档案身体——也就是说，身体充满了过去的痕迹。一个拥有自己海洋的身体。对地理和具体档案的召唤表明了对少数化和边缘化认识论的追求，与其说导致了另一次“档案转向”，不如说导致了档案爆炸。

释放档案就会引发一系列问题。德里达在 1995 年的经典著作《档案热潮》中宣称：“今天，没有什么比这个词更不可靠、更不清晰了……