Visual Media Workshop – ‘What Is Seen and What Can Be Said About It’: Visual Turns in the Anarchive

ECS Visual Media Workshop
Wednesday, April 21
4:30 pm EDT
Lia Brozgal, UCLA
‘What Is Seen and What Can Be Said About It’: Visual Turns in the Anarchive

Virtual workshop via Zoom
Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95270226054

Open to Princeton community and the public.

Brozgal is most recently the author of Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (Liverpool UP, 2020). She will be delivering a talk on this book, which concerns the 17 October, 1961 events in Paris. On this day, the French police violently suppressed peaceful protests for Algerian independence, namely by arresting over 10,000 Algerian men, injuring countless and massacring 200—most famously by drowning. This event is, as Brozgal puts it, “the deadliest episode of colonial violence to take place on metropolitan soil.”

In its aftermath, ‘the government censored the press and publishing houses, ordered cameras and film rolls seized and destroyed, and quickly deployed crews to whitewash accusatory graffiti spray painted along the riverbanks, claiming, “Ici on noie les Algériens” (Here we drown Algerians). The police archives were sealed and would remain classified for the next five decades.’ In spite of this censorship, many stories have been told about October 17. Absent the Archive closely examines these stories dating from 1963 to the present, which are collectively gathered and studied as an anarchive or counter-archive.

If interested, we would highly recommend that you read the introduction of her book to familiarize yourself with the events of October 17, 1961 (pp. 1-5), available here on JSTOR (https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19cw9xh.5) or available via email (send a request to akrish@princeton.edu).