The Campaign for Atlanta: An Act of Research

The Campaign for Atlanta: an essay on queer migration was a public event presented by the John Q collective (Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr) on May 17 and 18, 2013 at the Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum. It was a performative essay form that investigated a palimpsest of civil war histories and fragments of regional and national queer migrations. This article begins to make explicit the issues explored in the performance: namely, the divergent ways in which the past is linked to place by various technologies of sight and their very different historical worldviews. Written for a special issue on activism, the article makes the case that activating archives in public situations allows scholarship to expand its purview, to include nontraditional configurations and interdisciplinary methods as a way of linking scholarly content to artistic form.