MONUMENT, DOCUMENT: FROM ARCHIVE TO PERFORMANCE
The 2003-04 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar

Co-convened by Elizabeth A. Fenn and Richard J. Powell

Project Description

How is human experience preserved, remembered, recast, represented, and communicated? What do societies preserve, and what do they discard? How do we recover lost or censored art, documents, and experience? How do societies and individuals reinvent themselves through records and representation? What new sources can we seek? And how can we reread the sources already extant?

In the word “monument,” we recognize the way constructed forms embody knowledge and experience. Monuments might include memorials, buildings, planned settings, museums, parks, squares, plazas, and other spatial structures and landscapes dedicated to peoples, events, ideas, and ideals. With the word “document,” we call for a reconsideration of the problems and possibilities presented by accounts, recordings, recollections, and proceedings that capture past events in written, illustrated, photographed, filmed, or videographed forms.

“Archive” and “performance” call our attention to the preservation and enactment of experience, whether conscious or unconscious, selective or inclusive. Are the archives for this structural or historical knowledge invariably bibliotechnologic, systemic and antiquarian in nature, or can they be less institutionalized, employing instead the imagination and vernacular forms of gathering and transmission? Is there a concept of the repository that is transformative, alive, and accessible in the collective mind? Is one of the surest ways of holding onto knowledge performance—the act itself? Are we all in fact performers, reconstructing human experience with pen and paper, mortar and steel, or gongs and marimbas? How do we live out the memory of things via social showmanship or artful silence?

Whether our informants are art, architecture, literature, theater, dance, computer files, natural landscapes, or long-buried ruins, garbage heaps, and fossils, we all face interpretive opportunities and dilemmas that resonate across fields and disciplines. This Seminar will give us the chance to develop new approaches and new solutions to our research and methodological challenges.

Co-conveners

Elizabeth A. Fenn, History

Elizabeth Fenn began teaching at Duke in 2002. Her field of study is early North America, and her research focuses on epidemic disease and social history. She is particularly interested in developing a continent-wide analysis that incorporates Native Americans and African, British, Spanish, French, and Russian colonizers into a new narrative that reflects the demographic and geographic realities of the early contact era. Before she returned to graduate school to write her dissertation in 1996, Fenn spent eight years working as an auto mechanic. Her book, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82, received the best first book prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2002, and an article on early biological warfare has won three separate prizes. She is currently researching two new projects. One examines the experience of the Mandan Indians as the economic and cultural arbiters of the northern plains in the eighteenth century, and the other examines a little-known episode of the American Revolution in which British officials in Virginia promised freedom to slaves willing to fight on the side of the crown.

Richard J. Powell, Art and Art History

Richard Powell received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His research and teaching interests lie in American art, African American art, and theories of race and representation in the African diaspora. He has gained international recognition for groundbreaking scholarship in the field of African-American art history. He is also interested in the media arts and conceptualizations of the “folk” in world art and culture. His books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson and Black Art: A Cultural History. An important contributor to defining and exploring issues of visual representation and identity, Powell is currently doing research in international collections and archives on visualizations of people of African descent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Powell’s research, writing and teaching explore historical processes shaping ideas of selfhood, love, gender, friendship, sexuality, politics, and authority to open up the contingency of what now seems “just natural.”

Duke Arts and sciences Faculty Fellows

Stanley Abe, Art and Art History
Valeria Finucci, Romance Studies
Richard Jaffe, Religion
Anthony Kelley, Music
Grant Parker, Classical Studies

Duke Library Fellow

Steven Hensen, Rare Book, Manuscript, Special Collections Library

Postdoctoral Fellows

Douglas Reichert Powell, English, Northeastern University
Leigh Raiford, African American Studies and American Studies, Yale Univeristy

Duke Graduate Fellows

Simon Hay, English
Gonzalo Lamana, Cultural Anthropology