Bochum University, July 11, 2025 | 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Archive and Genre
July 11, 2025, 10:00-18:00
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Englisches Seminar, GB 6/137
Conveners: Laura Bieger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Florian Sedlmeier (Universität Hamburg)
This workshop posits and explores a dialectic of archive and genre. Both archives and genres function as social institutions. They have ritualized ways of gathering, grouping, storing, and circulating cultural memories and modes of belonging. Both are quasi-empirical categories and use that status to implement social hierarchies. Our working hypothesis is that conjoining the two enhances our understanding of both phenomena. Definitions of archives as physical sites quickly reach their limits once we confront them with the placelessness of genres, as “fields of knowledge” (Dimock 2007) that always undercut their categorization. This is especially helpful in conceptualizing diasporic archives or counter-archives with a complicated relation to place. Conversely, grounding genre in an archive can help to challenge the still dominant (post)structuralist paradigm of genre theory: considered with archive, notions of genre as ordering practices and social institutions gain the media-material basis that remains underexplored in theories of genre.
The issue of media-materiality is indeed crucial for our approach. Recent scholarship on the archive has both de-emphasized the significance of the material site and stressed the capacity of the collected, material object to function as an archive (Stein 2022). Thus, cultural artifacts and the genres they generate are not only objects to be stored. They also appear as archives in themselves. From this angle, genre emerges as a self-archiving practice that holds and circulates social and literary conventions. At the same time, archives rely on genres to establish their ordering principles. Likewise, the system of genre is an effect of ways of writing: it materializes in concrete artifacts that can then be collected but also assert a function as an archive. Not least, historically and geopolitically, both ways of writing and archiving are subject to shifting media systems.
Program
10:15-10:30 Introduction
10:30-11:30 Yogita Goyal (University of California at Los Angeles) | “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found”
11:30-12:00 Coffee
12:00-13:00 Daniel Stein (Universität Siegen) | “Archiving Black History in Picturebooks for Children”
13:00-14:15 Lunch
14:15-15:15 Florian Sedlmeier (Universität Hamburg) | “Stories of Miscegenation: Genres and Knowledge”
15:15-16:15 Heike Schäfer (Universität Frankfurt) | “Reworking the Archive: Redaction and Dissent in Erasure Poetry”
16:15-16:45 Coffee
16:45-17:45 Laura Bieger (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) | “Genre and Archive as Infrastructure”