Department of English

Macarena Gomez-Barris, “Archival Disappearances and Southern Submerged Perspectives of Resurgence”

In this talk, I address how to think about the colonial archive in relation to disappearance and Indigenous resurgence in the Américas, specifically focused on the legacy of Darwin and in relation to the category “los desaparecidos” that is often used to describe modern state violence, but extends back to the colonial era of discovery, scientific exploration, and monocultural occupation. Given recent approaches in decolonial and Indigenous studies, is there a way to include Southern, Indigenous, and counter-archival perspectives that give texture to the colonial anthropocene? I discuss Tierra del Fuego and the visual archive on the Selk’nam peoples as an important touchstone for addressing these questions.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press 2010), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press 2017), and Beyond the Pink Tide: Artistic and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018). She is co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards A Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press 2010) and co-editor with Licia Fiol-Matta of Las Américas Quarterly, a special issue of American Quarterly (Fall 2014). Her new book project is At the Sea’s Edge. Her essays have appeared in Antipode, Social Text, GLQ, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies as well as numerous other venues and art catalogues. She has been a Visiting Professor at New York University and a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at FLACSO-Quito. She publishes on decolonial praxis, space and memory, and submerged perspectives. She is founder and Director of the Global South Center, a transdisciplinary space for experimental research, artistic, and activist praxis, and Chairperson of the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.