Feeling Liberatory Memory Work: On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger

Greetings from your failed neighbour state to the south. Or, should I say, a completely successful white supremacist state to the south, since the US has been very successful with that foundational goal. I am speaking to you from the unceded land of Tovaangar, whose traditional caregivers are the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples. You might know it as Los Angeles.

I want to thank the conference organizers, particularly Emily Lonie, for inviting me. I want to thank Verne Harris and Jarrett Drake, whose work on liberatory archives challenges and infuses my own; Marika Cifor, who first gave us the language to talk about affect in archival studies; and Jennifer Douglas, Tonia Sutherland, Rebecka Sheffield, and Jamie Lee, whose work, respectively, on grief, trauma, accountability, optimism, and the body in archives is a shining example of what archival theory can accomplish.² And I want to thank you all for being here, in a distributed sense of the word here, listening to me, in this impossible situation.

This is an impossible time to be giving a plenary address. It is an impossible time to be making sense of anything. It is an impossible time to carry on. And yet, here we are, carrying on. I have rewritten this talk a dozen times, each time failing to fully capture the changing circumstances I find myself in – we all find ourselves in. Impossibility is the only constant.

“Welcome to the conditions of impossibility,” those whose lives have always been made precarious and/or expendable by white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism might respond. “Welcome to (a drastically tone-downed version of) the club.”

For the past 93 days, I have been at home, barring necessary trips, with a five-year-old son, an elderly father-in-law, and, when he’s not working a shift, my husband, who is a Los Angeles County emergency physician. My house is tiny for four people – the long division leaves us at about 325 square feet each – and even tinnier for the aspirations of a five year old; a trapped, increasingly senile immigrant father-in-law; a husband who has to decontaminate multiple times before crossing the threshold; and me, a woman who previously had ambitions. Last week, I heard a constant stream of police helicopters and sirens out of my window, evidence of a police state clamping down on its own citizens. We live in a heightened state of calculated risk: what are the dangers of leaving the house based on our race, gender, age, profession? Black Americans have always lived in a state of such calculated risk.

In addition to being a professor, I am also now a kindergarten teacher – in the medium of Spanish, I might add, which is the language of my son’s school, but not a language I speak well. I have said “¡buen trabajo!” more times in the past 93 days than I had ever previously envisioned.

I am now also a caregiver, full time; a watcher; an enforcer of protocols, and rules, and distances. I follow everyone around with Lysol. I am simultaneously trapped and liberated by the caregiving roles that have been forced upon me. I did not predict that, when the revolution started, my primary job would be keeping the menfolk safe.

None of us signed up for this, even though some of us trained for it. My husband re-reads his oath before each shift. He keeps asserting that this, this, this is what he trained for.

This is also what I trained for, in some weird way. I grew up in a traditional white working-class American household in Chicago. My mother and grandmother both hard-wired me to be a caregiver, to be pleasing, to be agreeable, to put family first, to have dinner on the table by 5:30. The past 30 years of my life have been revolting against this feminine imperative, or better, channelling a feminine imperative into a feminist one. Care, after all, is ethically valuable, even as it is devalued. And here I find myself back again, as...