Panel 21: Nation Building
Melissa Autumn White (Women’s Studies, York), “The Politics of the Queer
Immigration Archive”
After over a decade of activism, lobby efforts and legal challenges by groups such as
LEGIT (the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Taskforce) and EGALE (formerly Equality for
Gays and Lesbians Everywhere), Canada’s 2002
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act extended formal sponsorship eligibility to “same-sex” couples through an expansion of the “family class.” Since then, over 3000 “same-sex” bi- and trans-national couples from the United States, China, Mexico, Britain, Australia, the Philippines and over 65 other countries have filed family class immigration claims (CIC 2008, stats developed and on file with author). Common to all of these immigration stories is the importance of the
“proof of relationship” dossier, or the intimate archive couples must submit to
“substantiate” their sponsorship claim. Poignant “theses of love”, as one of my research participants put it, these archives are also exemplary of what Ann Cvetkovich has termed
“ a problem archive : one that raises questions about how its materials got there and what materials are left out” (2003: 133, emphasis added).
In a sense, all archives are problem archives, and all archives might be considered to have intimate contents or implications. In this paper, I draw on my qualitative research with self-identified LGBTQ couples who have secured family class immigration claims since
2002, to explore the politics of the queer immigration archive. Variously comprised of photographs, love letters, letters of support from friends and family, travel documents, relationship essays, and evidence of joint economic holdings, these intimate archives construct narratives of desire, commitment and—crucially—also work as indexes of recognition, longing, belonging, and (hetero)normativity. My paper poses the questions:
How are queer immigration archives— intimate archives
—shaped and shaping of nationalized “structures of feeling” (Williams 1961)? How do queer desires, intimacies, and relations become commensurate with or recognizable within nationalized affective economies?
In a sense, I work through the intimate archive as a method of exploring a constellation of power relations I have come to think of in terms of affective governance
—that is, a contemporary (post-Foucauldian) form of governance that works through affective alignments and emotional economies. …
But what does it mean to take an archive as a method?

Cóilín Parsons
(English, Cape Town), “Mapmaking and the Everyday: evidence from an Irish archive”
Space is a central feature of discussions of the everyday, in part because our restless, everyday movements define our worlds spatially.1 Yet maps—visual depictions of social space—and the everyday are usually thought of as incompatible. Michel de Certeau, for example, juxtaposes the normative idea of “place” with “space,” the practised, messy element of “place” that we inhabit and make our own.2 The former is the world of maps; the latter is the world of the ordinary, of the people whose lives do not appear on maps.
What I seek to do in this paper, which is part of a book project on Irish maps and the development of Irish literature, is chip away at the notion that cartography and the everyday are foreign to each other. In order to do that I take a fresh look at the archive of a major colonial cartographic undertaking: the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1824-41).
I wish to look at a small number of Ordnance Survey maps, as well as a sample of letters about those maps from the field to the headquarters of the Survey. These letters depict the processes and the everyday encounters that inform the product that will emerge. The letters document the daily lives of not only the field operatives, but those among whom they work. Their moment of writing is a moment of loss of the vernacular language, yet the letters themselves are part of a massive effort to rescue cultural information from its slow disappearance in an increasingly unspoken language. In short, the work of the
Ordnance Survey in Ireland is a countrywide effort to document the everyday, and it is played out on the margins of a cartographic enterprise.
But this archive is not just interesting because it allows us to find traces of the everyday in colonial cartography. These letters are witty, frustrated, informative, terse, errorridden, aspirational documents that cast shadows over the maps and give us glimpses of the processes of archive formation. They offer evidence that, as Ann Laura Stoler writes, archival “grids of intelligibility were fashioned from uncertain knowledge.”3
While our understanding of mapping in the nineteenth century is that it projects a totalising vision of state power, the Ordnance Survey in Ireland offers a model for us to rethink maps as depictions of an everyday life that is recalcitrant towards the state. The
Survey can also be a place for us to rethink the Irish colonial archive in line with exciting work that is being done for other colonial sites. From its base in a specific archive, my paper will engage with and intervene in ongoing conversations about colonial archives, the everyday, and cartography.
1 See, for example, Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space , trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964), Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge:
Cambridge U.P., 1999).
2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: U. of California P., 1984), 117.
3 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton U.P., 2009), 1.

Kristy Warren (Sociology, Warwick), “The Colonial Archive and Independence debates in the British Oversees Territory of Bermuda”
An investigation of archives is crucial in attempting to understand Bermuda’s colonial history and its present status as a British dependency. The archival sources in question include not only those held locally but also those held at The National Archives at Kew in the United Kingdom. An analysis of these documents will assist with learning how historical narratives frame present day understandings and discussions about social relationships between Bermudians, and subsequently how ones understanding of the past impacts upon contemporary debates about independence, and what it means to be a
Bermudian.
Of critical importance in this investigation will be an analysis of histories that have in the past been omitted or obscured. Despite their obvious dedication to their work, Bermudian historians of the mid 20 th century were later attacked for excluding black Bermudians from their historical narratives. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Bermudians discarded segregation and began to attempt to work towards a more equitable society, a handful of
Bermudian historians worked to reverse this problem. At the same time, young people, belonging to local radical black organizations, were finding their way into the archive to view the island’s earliest documents for themselves. However, this initial fervor appears to have died down during the 1980s and 1990s as the island became increasingly wealthy and attempted forget the upheaval of the previous two decades.
However, with the election of the opposition labour party in 1998 a new era began. The desire to see a development of a local identity that included the island’s majority black population was exhibited in several ways. The airport and several schools were renamed for Black ‘trailblazers’. Monuments were erected commemorating alternate heroes and heroines such as Sally Bassett who was burned in the 18 th
century after a poison plot was discovered. Historical research previously conduced in obscurity has found its way into the daily newspaper and also proved the foundation for the revision of the islands’ historical narrative. At this juncture, an investigation of the archive, and its role in this revived interest in Bermuda’s social and political past, is key to understand current political debates.

Karen Stanworth (Education & Art Therapy, York), “Historical narratives, museum objects and colonial subjects of the archive”
This paper takes up the challenge of the everyday in the archive through an examination of a late 19 th
-century moment when notions of what is science and art began to affect the categorizing of objects and the narrative positioning of their national histories. Opening up the debates that underpinned the formation of the ROM, the Toronto Art Gallery and the parallel, yet different, debates in Quebec over who controlled the writing of Quebec history and its associated object collections [archives, museum, and historical society].
These debates are haunted by the question of the authority of the archeon – who gets to tell which story? Considering the museum as an archive that circulates around national identities, I explore the ways in which shifting notions about what constitutes national knowledges, and how those should be represented, affected the collections of two key institutions in the formation of early civic and colonial identity in the two Canadas
[Canada East and Canada West] and their attempts to bridge national identity after confederation. The emergence of localized versions of nationalist identities exposed the fragility of culturally-constructed notions of identity; museum collections participated in the continuous reiterations of unstable visions of historical progress, the civilizing affect of colonial privileges and the consolidations of modern citizenry. Collectors of found objects sought to organize these into categories of the historical, the pedagogical and the performative present. If the museum which results can be understood as an archive making visible a history of the present, then perhaps a revisiting of the moments of shifts in the envisioning of historical narratives that come to constitute museum objects and colonial subjects can provide a way of understanding the legacy of colonial collections
[and trouble current attempts to recast - and in the case of the ROM, literarily reshape and build anew - the object collections and their relations to authorized national identity narratives].