Land as Archive

Catalog description

Who decides what histories are worth preserving? What kinds of information do archives make available and what forms of knowledge remain beyond their reach? Contending with the limits of archives as sources, this class proposes a different approach to historical thinking: attending to the traces inscribed in land and landscape as evidence. Following the lead of indigenous scholars and critics of the settler colonial state, we will think across and beyond disciplinary boundaries (archeology, architecture, geology, visual culture studies) to understand knowledge traditions that center place and land. These epistemologies ask us to reflect on the politics of inhabiting and occupying space, and on the histories of dispossession that condition our relationship to the city, the university and the home. Finally, the class will also address the way digital technologies (like satellite images and GIS) have worked to record the territory in databases, reconfiguring both the archive and the land. We will engage multimedia works by groups like the KHOJ International Artists' Association and Forensic Architecture; texts by Achille Mbembe, Haunani-Kay Trask, Audra Simpson and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; and collections at the NYU Archives and other local NYC archives.