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Second conference

Archives of Shame in the English-Speaking World

Second edition of the Shame Network project on “The Cultural Politics of Shame in the English- Speaking World” International Conference hosted by CREW & PRISMES research centers at Sorbonne Nouvelle University

Sorbonne Nouvelle University (CREW/PRISMES)Maison de la Recherche (Salle du Conseil)4 rue des Irlandais 75005 Paris

3-4 December 2021

Programme

FRIDAY 3 DECEMBER 2021

8:30 Morning coffee and conference opening


Panel 1 (9:00-10:15am): Uncovering Narratives of Shame


Chair: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Elizabeth Marie SZANTO (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Archives of Shame in Shakespeare’s Drama.”
Neela CATHELAIN (Sorbonne Université): “Cheeks Burning: Shame and the Novel.”
Virginie STRACHSLER (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Poetic Justice: Addressing Collective Shame.”


Coffee Break


Panel 2 (10:30 am-12:15pm): Excavating Memories of Shame


Chair: Bénédicte Miyamoto (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Béatrice FUGA (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Retrieved from De Profundis: The “Real” Trial of Oscar Wilde”
Véronique ALEXANDRE (Université de Caen Basse Normandie): “Clothing as Excavating Tool to Address Various Instances of Shame in Four Children’s Books.”
Fabrice MOURLON (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “The Kincora Scandal in Northern Ireland: Shame, Confusion, Chimera”

12:15-2:00 Lunch Break (Buffet at the MDR)


Plenary Lecture (2:00-3:00pm)Chair: Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Clair WILLS (University of Cambridge, Murray Edwards College): “Reading Shame without an Archive: the Irish Family and Unmarried Motherhood.”


Panel 3 (3:00pm-4:30pm): From Exhumation to Exhibition
Chair: Fabrice Mourlon (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Nathalie SEBBANE (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Magdalene Laundries Oral History Projects: Collecting Stories, Archiving Shame”
Lauren GUTTERMAN (University of Texas at Austin): “No More Secrets, No More Lies: Lesbian Feminist Leadership in the American Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors Movement, 1979-1985”
Rémy BETHMONT (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis): “Unashamed Archives: Religious Gay Shame and LGBTQ Anglican Narratives about Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies.”


4.30-6.30 pm: Drinks and light buffet


SATURDAY 4 DECEMBER 2021


Panel 4 (9:30-10:45am): Shame in the Flesh

Chair: Christen Bryson (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Florence PELLEGRY (Université de la Réunion): “Shameful Narratives of Late Victorian Sexuality”
Anne LEGIER (Aix-Marseille Université): “Pregnant and Ashamed: Tracing the Archives of an Intimate Experience Before Roe v. Wade (1973)”
Maryam MIRZA (Durham University): “Partition Fiction: An Archive of Sexual Violence and Gendered Shame?”


Coffee Break


Panel 5 (11:00am-12:30pm): Making Art, Archiving Shame
Chair: Catherine Lanone (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Lauren SARAZEN (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Art Monsters, Money and Shame”
Alexandra POULAIN (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: Decolonizing the Archive”
Mae FERRON (ENSAD) et Mathew STAUNTON (PRISMES): “Shame is a Kind of Inverted Explosion: Resilience as Archive”


Special guest lecture (12:30-1:30pm)
Chair: Clair Wills (University of Cambridge, Murray Edwards College)
Alison Lowry (Glass artist, Ireland): “Using Art to Address our Hidden Truths”
https://alisonlowry.co.uk


Scientific Board:
Emmanuelle Avril (Sorbonne nouvelle, CREW)
Claire Davison (Sorbonne nouvelle, PRISMES)
Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Sorbonne nouvelle, CREW)
David Lloyd (University of California Riverside)
Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne nouvelle, PRISMES)
Bruno Poncharal (Sorbonne nouvelle, PRISMES)
Clair Wills (University of Cambridge, Royaume-Uni


Organizing Committee:
Emmanuelle Avril (Sorbonne nouvelle, CREW)
Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Sorbonne nouvelle, CREW)
Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne nouvelle, PRISMES)
Bruno Poncharal (Sorbonne nouvelle, PRISMES)
Contacts: Emmanuelle.avril@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr ; Alexandra.poulain@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Call for papers

The very notion of identifying, excavating or revisiting “Archives of Shame” is grounded in paradox: shame is an intimate, negative emotion which usually produces silence, self-erasure or effacement; it is by definition that which resists narrativizing and inscription; it lingers awkwardly on, half-hidden, unspoken, unmentionable. Typically, testimonies and avowals recording supposedly shameful acts, be they those of an individual, a group or a nation, are likewise suppressed, whether edited, censored, manipulated or destroyed. When official or state archives exist,they are frequently classified, thereby scrupulously protecting contents from the inquisitive or critical eye. In some cases, the very existence of archives is kept illegally secret —the British colonial archives regarding the Mau Mau rebellion,for example, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, for which certain records were produced, others withheld, and some quite simply destroyed.

The possible approaches and perspectives that this second edition of the network project hopes to explore are inevitably wide-ranging. One possible start would be to consider the “archive of shame” — with “archive” in the singular — as defined by Derrida, notably in relation to Freud’s “mystical writing block” (See Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression). This could be examined in terms of how the concept of the archive and of archivization is renewed, even subverted by the advent of the digital age and the development of social networks, which in turn have so often become instrumental in the shaming process — circulating, disseminating shame in a way that renders it virtually indelible, or, for that matter, only makes its indelibility manifest.

Alternatively, material archives of shame may have to be reconstituted out of the gaps and silences of official and historical narratives; they may also solicit new historical and critical methodologies to enable shaming or shameful narratives to be teased out of such institutionalized gaps. An eloquent case in point is the lack of archives to testify to child abuse in Ireland (as evidenced by Mathew Staunton’s research), or archives predating widespread literacy, when testimonies were merely the summaries of verbal statements noted down by a court clerk or even a prosecutor. Political and diplomatic archives, meanwhile, are frequently accessible only once oaths of allegiance or corporate silence have been concluded, or when answerable authorities have long since vanished; beyond closed circles, legislation (the thirty- or seventy-year rule) or professional immunity often ensure they remain closed for decades, protected from scrutiny.

On the other hand, archiving is not always about concealment. Archives can be constituted with a view to document shameful actions, raise public awareness and produce social and political change. For instance, the atrocities (mass murder, enslavement and forced labour and a punitive system based on the mutilations of adults and children) perpetrated in the Congo by King Leopold’s private forces at the turn of the 20th century

were revealed to the world thanks to the photographic archive created by English missionary Alice Seely Harris (1870-1970), who lived in the Congo between 1898 and 1905, then toured the US with her husband, showing magic lantern screenings of her pictures. In 1908, due to public pressure, the Belgian government put an end to Leopold’s absolutist rule and claimed the Belgian Congo as a colony. Documentary photography is often mobilized in this way, as are documentary films. Time is an issue as archives may be exhumed and made available after a specific event, to address denial or controversy, or due to the imminent disappearance of direct witnesses.

From a different perspective, archives that would now be deemed shameful may often not have appeared shame-ridden at the time of constitution. For instance, Western great game hunters in the African plains posed proudly in front of their kill; newspapers proudly vaunted the shooting prowess of state leaders (Roosevelt father and son). Victorian collectors vied to shoot the last of endangered species, and so enrich their museums and private collections. Ethnographic archives (photographic and otherwise), and pseudo-scientific archives based on formerly “respectable” methods (such as craniometry and phrenology) were constituted with a view to legitimizing narratives of “scientific” racism. Likewise, photographs of the lynching of black men in the South of the United States, from the abolition of slavery in 1865 to the middle of the twentieth century, were widely used as signs of festive events for White audiences and portrayed in postcards sent to family and friends. The lurid gap between how such archives were once perceived and how they are understood today invites reflection on shifting historical dimensions and perceptions of shame.

“Archives of shame” may also record the shame experienced by marginalized and stigmatized communities; for instance, LGBTQ+ archives. This raises the question of who constitutes archives (from individuals and families to private or public institutions), who controls archival material, or lack thereof, and to what end? Is reclaiming the archive a way of working through the shame collectively? Or, in the case of LGBTQ+ archives, should the experience of shame itself be reclaimed and valued as the basis for new forms of queer community and solidarity, as suggested by Eve Sedgwick and others?

This raises the question of what gives “value” to the archive and what constitutes an “archive” (i.e. worthy to be seen or heard). History-from-below approaches have turned the focus on common often marginalized or “deviant” groups of people – rather than leaders and officials (e.g. the work carried out by the oral history department of the Imperial War Museum collecting the testimonies of ordinary soldiers). This in turn prompts questions regarding the process through which a personal collection may become an “archive”, and how fragments of life are selected and ordered so as to formulate a story – a change of status which involves the exercise of a specific power and authority.

The place of the body as, in itself, as “archive of shame” also calls out to be explored: what stories of shame are told by scarred bodies, hungry bodies, bodies still bearing the inscription of disciplinary measures in all their guises (as in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”)? Again, images (photography, cinema and painting) have a part to play when we piece together and retrieve these silent archives.

Literature and the arts meanwhile, poised as they are on the troubling boundary between public and private, mimetic and confessional, flaunted and fantasized, reinvent and revisit “Archives of Shame” in their own ways: the picture secretly stored by Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray acts as a visible, ongoing archive of his shame; Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas reads as an expanding archive of quotes, newspaper articles and biographies which testify to the rise of fascism and its long-standing domestic correlatives, via silenced women’s voices, and lives hidden from history in the interests of economic, secular and spiritual authority. Postmodern fiction has established a mode or even genre through real and fabricated archives, for example in Martin Amis’s explorations of the outrage and offence of re-excavated war crimes in The Zone of Interest and Time’s Arrow, or M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, an experimental collection of poems created exclusively out of the words of the legal decision “Gregson v. Gilbert”—the only extant public document related to the massacre in 1781 of 150 African slaves who were being conveyed on the slave ship Zong, and who were purposefully drowned so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Literature on the experience of slavery and colonization, or about demeaned and exploited populations in general may expose shame and can offer a voice to those whose testimony and experience of shame were not readily available, were distorted, or were simply disregarded.

Please submit a proposal in English of around 500 words followed by a short biography of each author to the following address: shame@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Deadline for proposals: 2 juillet 2021.
Please note that confirmed participants will be encouraged to send a long summary of their paper (1000-1500 words) a few weeks in advance of the conference.

Contacts:

alexandra.poulain@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr emmanuelle.avril@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Shame Network blog: https://shame.hypotheses.org/

Scientific Committee:
Emmanuelle Avril (Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW), Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW), David Lloyd (University of California Riverside), Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle, PRISMES), Bruno Poncharal (Sorbonne Nouvelle, PRISMES), Clair Wills (University of Cambridge, Royaume-Uni).

A few references:

  • Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019.
  • Battaglia, Julia, Jennifer Clarke and Fiona Siegenthaler (eds.) Bodies of Archives/Archival Bodies, Special Issue, Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 36, N°1, 2020. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15487458/2020/36/1
  • Cvetkovich, Ann. The Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1995. (Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Transl. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
  • Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Farge, Arlette. Le goût de l’archive. Paris : Editions du Seuil, collection « La librairie du XXe siècle ». 1981. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. (The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
  • Manoff, Marlene. “Theory from the Archive from Across the Discipline”. Libraries and the Academy, vol. 4, N°1, 2004: 9-25.
  • Pollock, Griselda. Encounters in the virtual feminist museum: Time, space and the archive. London: Routledge, 2007.
  • —. Differencing the canon: Feminist desire and the writing of art’s histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Ridener, John. From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory. Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009.
  • Sekula, Allan. 1983. “Photography between labour and capital.” In Mining photographs and other pictures. Photographs by Leslie Shedden, ed. B Buchloh and R Wilkie, 1948-1968. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983: 193–268.
  • Sekula, Allan. “The body and the archive.” October Vol. 39, Winter 1986: 3–64.
  • Stoler, Ann L. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
  • Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
  • Walsham, Alexandra. “The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe”. Past and Present, vol. 230, Issue 11, November 2016: 8-48.