DAAAS Archival Gap in the Global Imagination Conference

This conference will host conversations from a wide variety of disciplines and geographical areas around recovering the subjective experience of historically marginalized peoples. The problem of how to write about the historically marginalized — the enslaved, the illiterate, the imprisoned — has been the subject of innovative historiographical and cultural work globally in the last half century. Marxist historiographical approaches by E.P Thompson or the Indian Subaltern Studies school attempted to recover working and peasant class histories that were never written down. More recently, US Black studies has grappled with the impossibility of recovering experience of the enslaved. Most famously, Saidiya Hartman’s interventions advance imaginative aspects of recovery. Thinking beyond the strict remits of history as a discipline, she has emphasized the place of both speculation and active imagination in thinking through the impossibility of knowing much about lives deemed ‘unimportant’.

So far, these area studies have had very little correspondence with each other. This conference will address this issue by bringing together scholarship working in different geographies and disciplines to discuss the global significance of the archival gap, share methodologies and insights, and collaborate on future scholarly output.

Date: Thursday February 18, 2027

Time: 9:00am-6:30pm PST

Location: Stanford Department of African and African American Studies, Building 80 (Main Quad) Auditorium

Session details are forthcoming.

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