Turning Archival

The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

DANIEL MARSHALL AND ZEB TORTORICI, EDITORS

The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.

Daniel Marshall is Associate Professor of Writing, Literature, and Culture at Deakin University. Zeb Tortorici is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

A Conceptual History RHIANNON STEPHENS

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Rhiannon Stephens is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900, and coeditor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa

December 2022

312 pages

Linguistics / History / African History / African Studies

Rights: World