Petrou Lecture: "Archives, Materiality, History" with Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Tufts University. Her research interests include comparative literature, British empire, US-Asia studies, and transnational feminism. She teaches courses in the Global Eighteenth Century, Asian diaspora literature, metaphors of globalization, and decolonization and postcolonial thought. Her books includeThe Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015);The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, with D. Lloyd (Duke University Press, 1997); Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996); and Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University Press, 1991).

This paper reflects on the possibilities, limits, and alternatives to the archives that authorize knowledge about the histories of nations and empires in terms of explicit interests - those of ruling elites, slave owners, and colonial administrators, in the shelter nation or imperial state - and deny indigenous, enslaved, laboring and colonized people the humanity and presence the accord free liberal persons and the society in which they are enfranchised. However difficult the confrontation with denials of indigenous, enslaved, racialized, colonized, "undocumented" humanity - it is also an occasion to query under what conditions, and in relation to what materials, the condition of "other humanities" might be examined.