Annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), February 26 - March 1, 2026, Montreal, Canada.

Proposal submissions are welcome through the ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/seminar/14147d29-1e1d-440c-981a-0d7a9b022666  

This seminar proposes to investigate the interdisciplinary theories and methods that scholars have brought to bear on archival research involving writers from racialized, gendered, sexual, and linguistic minority communities. A principal objective for the seminar is to encourage dialogue across theoretical, methodological, disciplinary, linguistic, or cultural boundaries that have only infrequently entered into critical conversation with one another. 

Archival theorist Linda Morra has acknowledged the seminal theoretical influence of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on literary scholars who have sought to better understand how archives wield power over our self-understanding as individuals and as members of larger groups (Morra 2014). Among official language minority communities (OLMCs), such as those of French Canada, the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu has provided an influential framework from which to investigate institutionalized principles informing decisions around resource allocation, collection and appraisal in archives (LeBlanc 2022). French theory has also been central to scholarship on archives and memory. Of particular note has been theorist Pierre Nora’s seminal work on “lieux de memoire” (Nora 1984), or “memory sites,” as physical places and objects acting as containers, or archives, of memory. 

The seminar organizer is particularly interested in theories and methods that (whether or not they intersect with the Hexagon) provide new directions in archival research. For example, research in digital humanities has offered traditionally underrepresented groups an unprecedented authority and agency to create new affective relationships with the broader community while also prioritizing individuals over institutions (Morra and Schagerl 2012). Affect theory has, in turn, offered a necessary vocabulary for investigating the ethical implications of archives that exert an emotional pull on researchers who experience them, however paradoxically, as sites of promise and sites of erasure (Dever 2017).  Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson’s apt reminder, that the decolonization of knowledge must be accompanied by critical awareness of positionality and reciprocity, opens up promising avenues for integrating Indigenous knowledge systems into research about archives and literature (Robinson 2020).

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Archival silences, erasures, and contested histories
• Queer, Indigenous, Black, diasporic, or multilingual archives
• Digital humanities and literary archives
• Intersections of literature and memory in archival work
• Case studies of specific archives, collections, or writers
• Language minorities and translation in the archive
• Archival ethics and reparative archival practices