Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region [edited collection]

Under advance contract with Louisiana State University Press
Editors: Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison
Proposals (500 words): November 1, 2023
Completed Chapters (7,000 words): March 15, 2024

As the double meaning of our title suggests, this collection intends “record, document, archive” as a triad of both verbs and nouns. Record, Document, Archive seeks projects investigating processes that record, document, or archive “event in place and time” as well as projects examining artifacts themselves, those records, documents, and archives that evince various souths within the region. Through examining the technologies and traces of recording, documenting, and archiving the U.S. South across disciplines and historical context, this collection asks what it means for the region to be both defined and imagined as a place of documentation.

In particular we welcome contributions that engage with processes and products that are im/material, un/documented, un/collected, or more-than-/human. We invite a wide temporal and disciplinary array of studies on, in, or about multiple iterations and scales of the South (American, Hemispheric, Global, U.S.): whether in recorded time (e.g., archival or media studies), time immemorial (e.g., Indigenous studies), and/or deep time (e.g., geology). 

Guiding questions might include:

• What un/recorded, un/documented, or un/archived souths exist within or beyond hegemonic concepts? 
• Within what constitutive or erasing systems have records, documents, and/or archives emerged or endured? 
• How is “region” a humanist heuristic, one that scholars have perhaps reverse-engineered in our methodologies (broadly defined)? 
• What alternate ways of knowing the region emerge when earth, life, and information sciences are brought in conversation with southern studies? 
• What can documentary arts tell us about the dialectics of seeing as they apply to the region? 
• What do archives cataloged as “southern” reveal about the limits of colonial and capitalist knowledge regimes of nation? 
• What does the archive, as a collection of documents, a set of practices, and an institution, illuminate about the formation and continued domination of certain ways of understanding the South? 
• How might the archive (broadly conceived) be a site for reclamation, narrative storytelling, ancestral recalling, and historical revisioning? 
• How have queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies called into question southern archives or necessitated new documentary practices?

We encourage submissions that challenge Eurocentric documenting practices in disciplines with hegemonic legacies – such as studies in U.S. history, archive, anthropology, geography, literature, and media, and we prioritize scholarship from interdisciplinary approaches such as Indigenous, diasporic, transnational, queer, and environmental studies, among others. We especially welcome contributions interrogating un/documentation and immigration in context of what John-Michael Rivera calls in Undocuments (2021) “the spectral logic of undocumentality” (9). Contributions that engage with “un/documenting” in the broadest sense – conceptually, materially, organically, politically, bureaucratically, technologically, and otherwise – are highly encouraged.

Other Possible Topics Include: 

• Artifacts and relics (im/material or un/collected); un/written or un/recorded correspondence; oral histories; etc.
• Archival collection development, acquisitions, and access (copyright, paywalls, open access)
• Activism in archival studies, museum studies, and information sciences; “liberatory memory work”; community archives
• Indigenous archives and counter-archives, Indigenous data sovereignty, Indigenous earthworks
• Undocumented souths and southerners
• Geological or ecological formations that complicate dominant notions of “the South” or “southern”
• Lost, erased, ephemeral, speculative or contested archives
• Ecologies of the archive, the archive as an ecosystem, documenting climate change in the South, archive as conservation, archival migration/assemblage
• Social and psychological acts of collecting, the emotional and affectual labor of documentary work, ethical and practical issues of curation
• Digital documentary practices in the South
• Diverse forms of documentary arts, including but not limited to television, feature and short documentaries, audio recordings, documentary photography and other audiovisual archives about the South
• Data recovery and digital restoration, archive hacking
• Recording corporeal testimonies and trauma, the body as archive
• Disability justice, medical recordkeeping, accessibility issues, the archive as a space of resistance (i.e. the reclamation of knowledge systems, ontologies, and identities structured by disability)
• Documentary as activism: feminist, trans*, and queer archives in the South, Civil Rights archives, labor archives, documenting the BLM movement, documenting environmental racism
• Fake archives, mockumentaries, forgery and fabrication, hoaxes, archival appropriation
• Interactive archives, documentary performances
• Legal and financial documents, documenting evidence; contracts, policy memos, public records, and balance sheets as archive
• Official government and/or historical records or recording systems 
• Memorials and monuments, artifacts and material histories, museums, archival sites and spaces
• Pedagogies of archival research
• The role of literature in cataloging, archiving, remembering, and documenting, the memoir as documentary, auto-ethnography
• Unruly or accidental archives, radical or revolutionary recordkeeping, anarchives, living archives

500-word proposals should be sent to Stephanie Rountree, Lisa Hinrichsen, and Gina Caison at Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com by November 1, 2023. Please also direct any questions about possible submission topics to this email.

For those asked to contribute to the collection, completed essays of approximately 7,000 words will be due by March 15, 2024. Submissions from both established and emerging scholars are welcomed, as is work from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Anticipated publication year is 2025.

Contact Information
Stephanie Rountree (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor of English
University of North Georgia

Contact Email: Record.Document.Archive@gmail.com