Archival Imagination of/for the Future Free
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Published:October 2021
The introduction lays out the concept of archival imagination, which operates in the service of the future and advances a temporality that exceeds historical causality. With particular intensity since the mid-1990s, scholars, artists, archivists, curators and data-specialists have been defining, condemning, rescuing, defending, performing, questioning, queering, creating, negating, restaging, reclaiming, and debating the archive. But the very idea that there is a thing we can call “the archive” is itself a fiction. There are only, and always already, many different kinds of archives, and as many different potential archival imaginations. The chapter explores the particular intensity of archival power in the context of Israel/Palestine, and therefore the urgency to mobilize the archive to imagine otherwise, toward “becoming Palestine.”