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Meeting ID: 847 2800 3520
Passcode: 826170

In a 2019 interview Craig Santos Perez describes his docupoetic approach by appealing to “an important tenet of ethnic studies: research within marginalized archives and suppressed histories is important, but it is even more important that scholars bring our research to our communities, who may not have access to the archives.” The imperative of advocacy should not be lost in how we frame the significance of documentary writing in our time, particularly as the disavowal of certain community experiences further downvotes and marginalizes voices of color, migrant, and native voices, trans voices, the truth spoken in first person accounts of the disenfranchised, and disabled via the usurpation of media by the interests of preserving American exceptionalism and heteropatriarchical White supremacy. I want to approach this discussion of craft with the added idea that for many documentary writers “our communities,” as Perez says speaking of the indigenous communities across the Pacific basin, include braided relationships that take root in small, intimate relationships, but also extend into and complicate larger civic bonds. My own approach to documentary writing, my interest in using the archive, sampling media, engaging with ethnography, and textualizing various performative repertoires seeks to advocate for truth and fact in the face of prejudice and the proliferation of negligence. Though critical of how the latter serves the maintenance of nationalism I am nevertheless interested in the assemblies that come to open a common space, that create opportunities for the aesthetic exchange of emotional matter towards the informing of a politics of belonging. In other words, aesthetic assemblies that verify Nation.

Co-sponsored by the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.

Dr. José Alvergue is the author of several books, most recently scenery: a lyric available here.