To Those, Still, Only Left Alive: Archival Blanks & Speculative Fabulation

 

There is always that one image that comes out of any archival digging only to resist everything: it comes with the excitement and promises of clarification, documentation, and explanation. And yet it gives nothing. It cares very little for tracks, footnotes, and answers. It resists the mission that, in all honesty and full passion, the historian, the ethnographer, the memory writer, and the all-things-pictures-nerd set out to do. It resists what we could call “regimes of hypervisibility”: the trials of facts, proofs, and truth that academic writing requires. The picture demands us to pause and ponder: could we, as researchers and writers of traces, find ways to work not against or around the blanks but through them? Is there a way for the historian to take in the emptiness of the archive in its entire fullness? Could the anthropologist account for ethnographic refusals beyond the anxious quest for observations?

 

In this talk, Emiko Stock started with a single photograph, one taken among Chams—members of the Muslim minority—during the Cambodian 1960s pre-war era: an annihilation regime marked, notably, by a complete visual erasure, and the systematic destruction of archives, photographs, and family memorabilia. As Stock tried to work with the picture and its call to respect opacity, Stock discussed the potential for SF / Speculative Feminism / Speculative Fabulation to open alternative ways of thinking, analyzing, and writing with reparative generosity. For in the end, what those one-too-many pictures might be asking of us is to wonder: could there be other approaches to bring us into an actual resonance with humanity? A resonance which could have little to do with extensive documentation and studies of humans at large and more with a close attunement toward each other.

 

 

Emiko Stock is a multimodal anthropologist working on questions of historical and diasporic erasures, silence and absence, feminist praxis, and counter-archival orientations. Using writing, images, and soundscapes to resist medium specificity, her compositions dwell between pixels and emulsions, stillness and movement, facts and fabulation. Her short films The Wedding (2021) and Commute (2015) advocate for a sensory ethnography anchored in the experimental and have been screened in international film festivals and universities. She is the co-curator of The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference and co-founder of CoMMPCT (Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers). She is based between Cambodia and Egypt, where she teaches at The American University in Cairo. She previously taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University where she received her PhD. She is currently working on her book project For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen: Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility. Some of her most recent publications include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Material Religions and a short piece in Otherwise Magazine.