Theatre Journal

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...