Spectral Archives
Duration: 01:13:43; Aspect Ratio: 1.818:1; Hue: 50.174; Saturation: 0.057; Lightness: 0.191; Volume: 0.147; Cuts per Minute: 0.027; Words per Minute: 0.014
Summary: Imperial Ghosting: The Return of Indian Country and Hiroshima in the War on Terror
Anne McClintock
In this paper I explore the persistent ghosting from official U.S.
history of the foundational atrocities of the long, near- genocide of
indigenous peoples and the nuclear obliterations of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. I trace how the unquiet dead of Indian Country and Ground Zero
have come to haunt the continuing “Global War on Terror” as collective
hallucination and extravagant violence. I explore the pervasiveness in
U.S. history of the military metaphor of “Indian Country” as a floating,
displaced country of the mind to define insurgent territories in active
war zones around the world, from the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Japan,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. In the process, I explore the
spectral hinges that connect the stolen time of indigenous American
Indian peoples, the time-zero of atomic war, and the permanently-ticking
paranoid time of the War on Terror. In company with critics such as
Avery Gordon and Gabriele Schwab, I am interested in the question of
historical ghosting because ghosts point to places where erased or
unresolved state or imperial violence has occurred. I argue that
imperial ghosting marks disturbances in history: administered
forgettings, guarded and unspeakable secrets, that nonetheless leave
material traces: in photographs, language, bodily gestures, as a kind of
counter-evidence that, if read against the grain, can point towards
more enabling histories, political action and the possibilities of
atonement.
Hands in/on the Archive: The Fugitive Touch of Archival Photography
Tina Campt
The human hand (in particular fingers, fingertips and the nerve endings
that comprise it) is one of the most complexly sensate corporeal
receptors, as well as one of the most expressive loci of social
communication. Hands are a source of both physical contact and affective
connection. A gesture of the hand solicits attention, elicits
responses, defines relationships, and initiates a cascade of
interactions that register at multiple sensory levels. Yet hands have
also served as equally powerful visual evidence of racial and criminal
pathology. This paper explores a set of recently uncovered albums of
convict photos compiled between 1893 and 1903 and housed at the Archives
of the Western Cape in South Africa. It engages the haptic dimensions
of this photographic archive both in terms of the sensate and material
dimensions of the albums as archival objects, as well as the haptics
staged in the images themselves. The albums assemble two photographic
portraits of each prisoner: one full-frontal with hands prominently
displayed in designated locations on their uniforms; one displaying
their hands positioned in relation to a second pathological indicator:
the ear. The paper probes the interplay between the hands, the ears and
other anthropometric indicators and theorizes the fugitive practices
this photographic archive also reveals.
The Time of the Archive: Visual Anthropology and State Violence.
Deborah Thomas
This paper addresses the process of creating visual ethnographic
archives of state violence. I draw from my experiences in two archives I
have been involved in producing to think about how time “governs” not
only the appearance but also the reception of archival "statements" in
both instances, and to make some preliminary arguments about the role of
visual culture in producing, reproducing, challenging, and/or
undermining a sense of collectivity, as well as revealing something
about the temporalities to which this imagining of collectivity is
tethered.

Allen Feldman, Introduction, Spectral Archives and Archival Specters: Archives of Violence, Terror, and Fugitivity
Tina Campt, Hands in/on the Archive: The Fugitive Touch of Archival Photography
The human hand (in particular fingers, fingertips and the nerve endings that comprise it) is one of the most complexly sensate corporeal receptors, as well as one of the most expressive loci of social communication. Hands are a source of both physical contact and affective connection. A gesture of the hand solicits attention, elicits responses, defines relationships, and initiates a cascade of interactions that register at multiple sensory levels. Yet hands have also served as equally powerful visual evidence of racial and criminal pathology. This paper explores a set of recently uncovered albums of convict photos compiled between 1893 and 1903 and housed at the Archives of the Western Cape in South Africa. It engages the haptic dimensions of this photographic archive both in terms of the sensate and material dimensions of the albums as archival objects, as well as the haptics staged in the images themselves. The albums assemble two photographic portraits of each prisoner: one full-frontal with hands prominently displayed in designated locations on their uniforms; one displaying their hands positioned in relation to a second pathological indicator: the ear. The paper probes the interplay between the hands, the ears and other anthropometric indicators and theorizes the fugitive practices this photographic archive also reveals.

Anne McClintock, Imperial Ghosting: The Return of Indian Country and Hiroshima in the War on Terror
In this paper I explore the persistent ghosting from official U.S. history of the foundational atrocities of the long, near- genocide of indigenous peoples and the nuclear obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I trace how the unquiet dead of Indian Country and Ground Zero have come to haunt the continuing “Global War on Terror” as collective hallucination and extravagant violence. I explore the pervasiveness in U.S. history of the military metaphor of “Indian Country” as a floating, displaced country of the mind to define insurgent territories in active war zones around the world, from the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. In the process, I explore the spectral hinges that connect the stolen time of indigenous American Indian peoples, the time-zero of atomic war, and the permanently-ticking paranoid time of the War on Terror. In company with critics such as Avery Gordon and Gabriele Schwab, I am interested in the question of historical ghosting because ghosts point to places where erased or unresolved state or imperial violence has occurred. I argue that imperial ghosting marks disturbances in history: administered forgettings, guarded and unspeakable secrets, that nonetheless leave material traces: in photographs, language, bodily gestures, as a kind of counter-evidence that, if read against the grain, can point towards more enabling histories, political action and the possibilities of atonement.

Deborah Thomas, The Time of the Archive: Visual Anthropology and State Violence
This paper addresses the process of creating visual ethnographic archives of state violence. I draw from my experiences in two archives I have been involved in producing to think about how time “governs” not only the appearance but also the reception of archival "statements" in both instances, and to make some preliminary arguments about the role of visual culture in producing, reproducing, challenging, and/or undermining a sense of collectivity, as well as revealing something about the temporalities to which this imagining of collectivity is tethered.
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