Counter-Archive

Counter-Archive PDF

Author: Paula Amad

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-09-23

Total Pages: 708

ISBN-13: 0231509073

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Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory.

The Partisan Counter-Archive

The Partisan Counter-Archive PDF

Author: Gal Kirn

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-07-20

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3110682060

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Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant ‘archives’ that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material – from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films – and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical “history of the oppressed” as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

Counter-Archive

Counter-Archive PDF

Author: Paula Amad

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0231135017

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"Counter-Archive brilliantly reflects the visual character of philosophy, geography, and historiography in twentieth-century France. Organized hermetically and crafted meticulously, this volume offers a wealth of information as it considers film theory."---Tom Conley, Harvard University Tucked Away in a Garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planete (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity, in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-grade, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. "This impressive book carves out a field of interest that, prior to Paula Amad's scrutiny, did not exist. Amad displays extraordinary erudition, assembling a remarkable bibliography of primary sources. She invites us to ponder her ideas in relation to our own digital, counter-archival, image overload."---Antonia Lant, New York University, editor of Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. "Paula Amad handles technical details with flourish and mastery, and the research in the French archives is exhilarating."---Donald Crafton, University of Notre Dame "Paula Amad's book is far more than an unusually successful effort to recover and analyze Kahn's unique dream of `archiving the planet.' It stages a theoretical interrogation of the terms archive, everyday life, and modernity, arguing that the emergence of motion pictures produced a revisionist concept of the archive or what she calls the counter-archive. Her book ultimately mounts a highly original methodological exploration of the intersection of history and theory."---Richard Abel, University of Michigan

Law, Memory, Violence

Law, Memory, Violence PDF

Author: Stewart Motha

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-22

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317569210

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The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence.

Archive That, Comrade!

Archive That, Comrade! PDF

Author: Phil Cohen

Publisher: PM Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1629635316

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Archive That, Comrade! explores issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open-access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate. It is informed by the author’s experience of writing a memoir about his involvement in the London underground scene of the 1960s, the London street commune movement, and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that hit the world’s headlines for ten days in July 1969. After a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of ‘archive fever,’ the book considers what the political legacy of 1960s counter culture reveals about the process of commemoration. The argument then opens out to discuss the notion of historical legacy and its role in the ‘dialectic of generations’. How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishises the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? The following section looks at the emergence of a complex apparatus of public fame and celebrity around the spectacle of dissidence and considers whether the Left has subverted or merely mirrored the dominant forms of reputation-making and public recognition. Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration? The final section takes up the challenge of outlining a model for the democratic archive as a revisionary project, creating a resource for building collective capacity to sustain struggles of long duration. A postscript examines how archival strategies of the alt-right have intervened at this juncture to elaborate a politics of false memory.

Krishna Sobti

Krishna Sobti PDF

Author: Sukrita Paul Kumar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 100045262X

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This book engages with the life and works of the distinctive Hindi writer Krishna Sobti, known for making bold choices of themes in her writing. Also known for her extraordinary use of the Hindi language, she emerges as an embodiment of a counter archive. While presenting the author in the context of her times, this volume offers critical perspectives to define her position in the canon of modern Indian literature. Alongside important critical essays on her, the inclusion of excerpts from the translations of some major works by the author, such as Zindaginama, Mitro Marjani and Ai Ladki, greatly facilitate an understanding of her worldview and the contexts in which she wrote. Also included in this book are some of her reflections on the creative process that help in unfolding the complexities of her characters and her specific approach to the language of fiction. Writing in the times of significant political and cultural churnings, her fiction includes themes such as the Partition of the country and its aftermath, women and their sexuality, desire and violence, history and memory. Her writing subverted the dominant narratives of the times and de-historicised history. Her own essays and other critical writings demonstrate the way Krishna Sobti’s characters are abundantly polyphonic and seeped in social realities. They encapsulate the cultural milieu of their times and serve as a site of resistance to the dominant archive of power. Her interactions with her fellow Hindi writers such as Nirmal Verma and Krishan Baldev Vaid, as also her letters, her memoirs and the reminiscences of others, further enrich this volume and establish her unique voice. Part of the ‘Writer in Context’ Series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, translation studies and Partition studies.

Archive Stories

Archive Stories PDF

Author: Antoinette Burton

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-01-25

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0822387042

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Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them—about the effect that the researcher’s race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are “found” there. Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles

No Archive Will Restore You

No Archive Will Restore You PDF

Author: Julietta Singh

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1947447858

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A thief, desire -- No archive will restore you -- the body archive -- The inarticulate trace -- Other women -- The ghost archive.

Counter-free Automata

Counter-free Automata PDF

Author: Robert McNaughton

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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A particular class of finite-state automata, christened by the authors "counter-free," is shown here to behave like a good actor: it can drape itself so thoroughly in the notational guise and embed itself so deeply in the conceptual character of several quite different approaches to automata theory that on the surface it is hard to believe that all these roles are being assumed by the same class. This is one of the reasons it has been chosen for study here. The authors write that they "became impressed with the richness of its mathematical complexity" and that "a sure sign of gold is when profound mathematical theory interacts with problems that arise independently. And indeed it is noteworthy that the class of automata we shall discuss was defined more or less explicitly by several people working from very different directions and using very different concepts. The remarkable happening was that these definitions could not be recognized as equivalent until algebraic tools of analysis were brought to the field in the works of Schutzenberger and in the works of Krohn and Rhodes." The theme of the monograph is the utility and equivalence of these different definitions of counter-free automata. Its organization follows the plan of taking up, one by one, each of a number of different conceptualizations: the historically important "nerve net" approach; the algebraic approach, in which automata are treated as semigroups; the "classical" theory based on state transition diagrams; the "linguistic" approach based on the concept of regular expressions; and the "behavioral" descriptions using symbolic logic. In each of these conceptual areas, the class of automata under study is found in a new guise. Each time it appears as yet another special case. The authors' burden is to show that all these definitions are in fact equivalent. Care has been taken so that this research monograph can be used as a self-sufficient text. Notations have been defined carefully and always in the context of the discussion. Most of the chapters end with a substantial number of exercises. It is self-contained in that all concepts are defined, and all theorems used are, with one exception, either fully proved or safely left as exercises for the student.

LGBTQ Film Festivals

LGBTQ Film Festivals PDF

Author: Antoine Damiens

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9048543894

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While scholars have theorized major film festivals, they have ignored smaller, ephemeral, events. In taking seriously minor European and North-American LGBT festivals which often only exist as traces within archival collections, this book revisits festival studies' methodological and theoretical apparatuses. As the first 'critique' of festival studies from within, LGBTQ Film Festivals argues that both festivals and queer film cultures are by definition ephemeral. The book is organized around two concepts: First, 'critical festival studies' examines the political project and disciplinary assumptions that structure festival research. Second, 'the festival as a method' pays attention to festivals' role as producers of knowledge: it argues that festivals are not mere objects of research but also actors already shaping academic, industrial, and popular cinematic knowledge. Drawing on my experience on the festival circuit, this book pays homage to the labour of queer organizers, critics, and scholars and opens up new avenues for festival research.