Chapter 1 argues that thinking about boxes will allow us to comprehend the reparative work that comics can do in approaching transgenerational Holocaust memory and trauma. What would it mean to read Maus as a Jewish text in our moment of global attention to Jewish identity and Holocaust memory? Building upon Hillary Chute’s landmark scholarship on Spiegelman’s Maus and comics and/as archives, I show how Spiegelman’s slippery, evocative metaphor of comics panels as built boxes links his magnum opus to Jewish traditions surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts. Reconsidering Maus together with boxes, in light of what can – and can’t – be enclosed and contained, illuminates formal congruences between Maus, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the textual practice of Midrash. Unpacking these congruences in turn reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his inherited trauma and his own Jewishness.

This introduction lays out the primary thematic concerns of the collection, drawing attention to the insider/outsider dynamics at play in New Orleans literature as well as the legibility and illegibility of certain literary archives from the city’s past and present, including literary materials related to Spanish colonial Louisiana, Asian-American Louisiana, and underappreciated Black New Orleans authors. It offers suggestions for pedagogically useful linkages between various themes and chapters from the volume, and it ends with suggestions for new lines of scholarly inquiry, tracing the ways musician autobiographies, Black female spirituality, and political chicanery appear as recurring themes through a wide range of New Orleans literature.

The Isleños – descendants of Canary Islanders who immigrated to Spanish Louisiana between 1778 and 1783 – maintained a degree of isolation in St. Bernard Parish that enabled the preservation of their distinct traditions well into the mid-twentieth century. In the absence of an extensive written corpus, Isleño literary culture is best understood through oral tradition, most notably in the form of décimas, narrative ballads with Iberian roots which both communicated and commemorated local history and social values. Relying on documented Spanish and English lyrics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this chapter examines Isleño décimas as a form of vernacular literary production and explores the ways Isleños singers reshaped the genre and emphasized collective experience and ties to the local landscape to strengthen communal bonds. Such analysis suggests that Isleño décimas operated not only as entertainment or folklore but as a literary mode that preserved memory, affirmed attachments to land and community, and sustained a largely stable cultural identity across generations through the mid-twentieth century.

This chapter draws from research the author has undertaken into the politically charged circumstances of life and death in situations of state violence in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence. It reflects on the author’s engagements with the morgue record book of the Institut médico-légal (IML) in Paris for the year 1961, which is stored in the archives of the Prefecture of the Paris police. This ledger includes entries on corpses received at the morgue. Through the fall of 1961, there were a number of entries for corpses received at the IML in which no identifying name was listed. Instead, persons were listed with the title “inconnu” – “unknown,” “unidentified,” unrecognized.” With many of these entries, small photographs were affixed to the sides of the pages. In reflecting on the presence of these photographs of the unidentified dead, the author delves into the complicated play of death and life, and actuality and imagining, that marks the unsettling appearance of these photographs. The haunting aftereffects of the photographs tie into questions of image, memory, body and corpse, the phenomenon of death life, and representations of violence in histories of French colonialism.

This chapter enacts a practice of “critical commonplacing” to assemble a new global archive of Romanticism, taking as its examples twentieth- and twenty-first-century remediations from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tokyo. Commonplacing a new Romantic archive finds a model in the world of collecting, which valorizes marginalia, marks, scratches, cut-and-pastes – capturing flashes of ephemera over static texts and images. From Japanese depictions of Mary Shelley’s creature as bakemono, to Julio Cortázar’s biography on John Keats during the Latin American Boom, to Audre Lorde and Diane Di Prima’s schooldays clique “The Branded,” this chapter expands the archive of Romanticism beyond 1780–1830, across different languages and media. Turning away from the anthology and canon, this approach replaces static texts with the dynamic media of seemingly fleeting forms, often ephemeral and ghostly dispersed. Each example showcases the experimental quality of commonplacing, aligned with progressive youth culture, learning, and play.

The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

This chapter deals with Allen Ginsberg's enormous personal archive. It includes the history of how the archive was created, what the contents of the archive are, and how it came to be located in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University's library. It details some of the many uses of the archive today and in the future.

The extensive collections of manuscript and printed scores, cuttings and correspondence spanning Elizabeth Maconchy’s career have in recent years enjoyed increasing attention from academics and musicians alike. The performances of her music and the exciting academic scholarship resulting from her archives are testament to an exceptional and important collection charting a unique career. The Maconchy archives are preserved across a number of repositories. The majority of Maconchy’s surviving music manuscripts (MS) are held on deposit at the Library at St Hilda’s College, the University of Oxford. Following the transfer of the material from the Maconchy family home to the College archives in 1994 the challenging task of boxing, listing, intellectually grouping MS scores by genre (choral works, songs for children, solo instruments, etc.) so that they would be easily searchable and accessible needed to be undertaken. The collection at St Hilda’s is a rich, varied, and large one. The MS and printed scores alone are contained within some ninety-three boxes. Librarian Maria Croghan and Archivist Elizabeth Boardman had the foresight to seek the expertise of musicologist Jennifer Doctor in overseeing this project. Doctor worked on producing an early database of the scores and began to arrange them by genre and then by piece.

Chapter 9 is on the different motives and ways through which social actors destroy images, and the consequences of these actions on different forms of image ‘death’. Analysing image destruction could show the different dynamics of what is tolerated in the public space, what is deemed appropriate, representable, and visible, and what is deemed offensive and needs to be made invisible. Methods for researching absences will be presented and applied on the case example of digital memes.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.

This chapter explains the rationale of the book and discusses Murakami Naojirō’s significance for Japanese historical scholarship. It sets the stage for exploring the practices institutionalized academic historians employed in constructing narratives of early modern Japan’s progressive foreign relations. Translation and hegemonic knowledge claims were major factors in this process, which had lasting consequences for global intellectual trajectories and perpetuated unequal power relations. The imperialist agenda of Murakami and his colleagues was at the forefront of hegemonic thinking about how history ought to be studied: which sources were relevant, whose actions and achievements were important, which groups had histories worth implementing into meta narratives, and whose voices were to be heard and included. The introduction also elaborates on key methodological frameworks such as entangled biography, empirical imperialism, and implicit comparison, and finally discusses important concepts as well as spatial and temporal dimensions of the study.

The chapter addresses the problem of the nation-state centrism of transitional justice through an ethnographic analysis of the self-lustration trial of a Polish academic historian, who was revealed as a secret communist agent by a powerful rightwing politician in the local media. The chapter studies closely the evidentiary process, court testimonies, and courtroom performances to show how law mediates and reproduces the relations of domination and inequality, as it becomes an arena for critical engagement with and even deconstruction of the terms of lustration by revealing, even if sporadically, the largely overshadowed histories of friendship and solidarity. In particular, the chapter highlights that lustration’s nation-state centrism, which manifests itself in its extensive dependence on state security archives and the court’s reliance on the testimonies of former security officers, poses crucial challenges for the court in ascertaining ambiguities and settling suspicions, and thereby gives ample room for the political instrumentalization of law, especially by rightwing groups.