DGfA Jahrestagung 2025
DGfA / GAAS | 71th Annual Meeting | June 12-14, 2025
Archiving America / American Archives
About this year's GAAS conference:
Focusing on the theme of Archiving America/American Archives, this year’s 71st annual conference of the GAAS takes up Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor’s critical prompt about the prominence of “archives” and “archiving” as keywords of current academic research. “Why the archive now?”, the authors ask. How has the term become “so ubiquitous and so capacious – encompassing the collection, the inventory, the library, the museum, and even the corpus of our scholarly projects, or the references we use?” (“The Archive in Transit,” 2012). Hirsch and Taylor’s questions become particularly fruitful once we connect them with past and present conceptions of “America” as we (re)consider the roles archives have played in the emergence of the United States as a nation state and global power.
The conference sets out to explore the dialogic relationship between the constitution and recreation of memory, notions of belonging, and the representation of national myths, ideas, and values. In what ways are archives complicit in shaping and repressing cultural heritage? How do archives maintain or confront imperial legacies, the dispossession and relocation of Indigenous people, or the transatlantic slave trade? How can archival work and the archive as an institution be an activist’s tool for decolonial practices and part of liberatory work? P. Gabrielle Foreman et al. stress the need to engage “public and scholarly audiences in innovative and collaborative initiatives that bring the buried and scattered histories of early Black organizing to digital life” (The Center for Black Digital Research). These questions and initiatives are in no way complete. Rather, they should open up conversations about the role of archives in American Studies as well as our own engagements with the field.
Archives are often connected with cultural heritage sites and preservational institutions such as museums, institutionalized archives, libraries, and memorials. These institutions shape the meaning-making processes of national identity constructions and foster notions of belonging (e.g., the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Gilder Lehrman Collection, the American Antiquarian Society). However, archives are not limited to such institutions. As Diana Taylor reminds us, “an archive is simultaneously an authorized place (the physical or digital site housing collections), a thing/object (or collection of things — the historical records and unique or representative objects marked for inclusion), and a practice (the logic of selection, organization, access, and preservation over time that deems certain objects ‘archivable’)” (“Save As… Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” 2010). Taking shape, for instance, as oral histories or changing locations as objects that travel through restitutional efforts, archives thus have a mobile as well as a precarious aspect. Building on these ideas, the conference offers ample room for reflections on notions of shared and divided pasts, the status of cultural memory studies, the guiding policies and practices that seize the archive in the active silencing of voices, and the working through of the traumatic experiences that constitute the complex histories and futures of the United States.
The Organisers wish to thank:
