How can the tools of the poet enrich the writing of memory? How can poetry reflect and redirect collective memory? This workshop will explore how poetry and poetics can create new memory landscapes able to preserve and amend history, re-narrate the past, and build toward democratic futurities. The three scholar artists will briefly present on their own poetic approaches to faltering memory narratives before turning to a group archival activity.
Drawing from the works and methods of scholars in Black Atlantic, Latin American, US Central American, and Chicane Studies, each scholar will discuss new methodologies which re/member violent histories of the past to craft more capacious, multidirectional memory landscapes in the present. Analyzing the ways in which artists before us have utilized poetics to disrupt memory narratives and theorizing new methods of poetic interventions in memory narratives in our own work, we will propose poetics as a tool of resistance, a historical method, and a means of intervening in archives and memories in need of rewriting. Our archives include memories of the colonial Jewish Latin American archive, the Salvadoran Civil War, and (mis-) translations of 17th century Nahuatl texts. How can poetry offer diasporic Salvadorans of the postmemorial generation access to forms collective memory and intergenerational resistance? How can the poet historian acknowledge the partial and often violent ways in which the past reaches us? And how can translation serve as a critical tool for variably re/membering the Nahuatl archive towards new forms of continuity, belonging, and futurity?
The majority of the workshop will be an activity in which authors and participants collectively engage with a selected archival text and create together a palimpsestic poetic form that translates and amends the archive into new story. We hope to end the workshop with several new poetic forms, imagined together.
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresPERFORMANCE: The poetics of re / membering the past: the colonial archive and its afterlivesSV404 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
