Archives, Memory, and Family
This week's post is going to be a little scattershot, and it's going to serve a two purposes. First, I did some more reading this week on archives and identity (focusing especially on family identity) as a way to get a little more focus for the kind of study I can do for a potential project. Second, I want to use this post as a place to discuss this reading in terms of what I might do for this project.
The book I focused on this week was Alexandra Hidalgo's Pixelating the Self: Digital Feminist Memoirs, chosen from the list of Intermezzo titles. I chose this book because (1) it seems directly related to ideas I would like to further pursue, and because (2) it is an open acess text, going along with the open access principles we have been discussing in class this semester. While I'm not entirely sure that all my research will be similarly open access, I can at least start here and be conscious of where I'm finding material.
Pixelating the Self is an edited collection of eight multimodal memoirs written by women who utilize archives (digital and otherwise) to put together some portrait of either themselves or their families. These works range from full video (Hidalgo's Introduction) to a combination of video, audio, image, text, poetry, and even recipes. In her introduction, Hidalgo describes the need and goals for the project:
As our students and faculty become as diverse as our nation, we need narratives that will help us theorize what it is like to inhabit and make our way through the world from varying perspectives that until now have been mostly absent from the stories we tell in rhetoric and composition. As these daring and innovative pieces show, blending the digital with analyzing and theorizing our personal experience results in vibrant, generative scholarship.
Both of these chapters use extremely personal examples, but use these personal examples to get at a broader scholarly question. Hutchinson, for example, ties these archival examinations of grief to the ideas of embodiment and orientation, the idea that objects, bodies, and technologies "take shape" and are often defined by how they are "oriented toward each other" (Hutchinson, discussing Ahmed). A photograph, for example, is just an object on its own, but in interacting with a viewer, it becomes more, evoking memory and feeling. More, when that photograph is combined with other objects, the way they are positioned against one another and in relation to the viewer changes the way that they are seen.
It is a useful idea that I am hoping to work through for my own project. I'm currently thinking of a story my grandfather Wayne Weech used to tell. The short version is that he and a friend took an old car up Mount Graham, the mountain near their hometown in southeastern Arizona. Circumstances led to other circumstances, and my grandfather somehow ended up riding an out-of-control car down the mountainside. He survived, and--the way my family tells it--his friend ran up to the car at the bottom of the hill and shouted "Beans, Wayne, are you all right?"
Many of my family stories center around this mountain (including some of my own childhood experiences), but for some reason this story is referred to the most. Even my brother in law, not born into the family, on occasion says "Beans, Wayne!" For one family reunion, we had shirts with "Beans, Wayne!" printed on them (there are pictures, but they're from my pre-Facebook days so it may take some work to find them). I'm fascinated by this story, not only because it's an entertaining story (it is, especially when Grandpa told it), but also because I'm curious to use this story as an examination of something deeper in family archives. In this case, I'm leaning towards using the story to dig into questions of memory and delivery, how the memory and delivery of family stories can potentially lead to a sense of family identity, and even how digitizing some of those memories affects things.
The book I focused on this week was Alexandra Hidalgo's Pixelating the Self: Digital Feminist Memoirs, chosen from the list of Intermezzo titles. I chose this book because (1) it seems directly related to ideas I would like to further pursue, and because (2) it is an open acess text, going along with the open access principles we have been discussing in class this semester. While I'm not entirely sure that all my research will be similarly open access, I can at least start here and be conscious of where I'm finding material.
Pixelating the Self is an edited collection of eight multimodal memoirs written by women who utilize archives (digital and otherwise) to put together some portrait of either themselves or their families. These works range from full video (Hidalgo's Introduction) to a combination of video, audio, image, text, poetry, and even recipes. In her introduction, Hidalgo describes the need and goals for the project:
As our students and faculty become as diverse as our nation, we need narratives that will help us theorize what it is like to inhabit and make our way through the world from varying perspectives that until now have been mostly absent from the stories we tell in rhetoric and composition. As these daring and innovative pieces show, blending the digital with analyzing and theorizing our personal experience results in vibrant, generative scholarship.
Both of these chapters use extremely personal examples, but use these personal examples to get at a broader scholarly question. Hutchinson, for example, ties these archival examinations of grief to the ideas of embodiment and orientation, the idea that objects, bodies, and technologies "take shape" and are often defined by how they are "oriented toward each other" (Hutchinson, discussing Ahmed). A photograph, for example, is just an object on its own, but in interacting with a viewer, it becomes more, evoking memory and feeling. More, when that photograph is combined with other objects, the way they are positioned against one another and in relation to the viewer changes the way that they are seen.
It is a useful idea that I am hoping to work through for my own project. I'm currently thinking of a story my grandfather Wayne Weech used to tell. The short version is that he and a friend took an old car up Mount Graham, the mountain near their hometown in southeastern Arizona. Circumstances led to other circumstances, and my grandfather somehow ended up riding an out-of-control car down the mountainside. He survived, and--the way my family tells it--his friend ran up to the car at the bottom of the hill and shouted "Beans, Wayne, are you all right?"
 |
| Fig 1: Mount Graham, Gila Valley, Arizona. |
Many of my family stories center around this mountain (including some of my own childhood experiences), but for some reason this story is referred to the most. Even my brother in law, not born into the family, on occasion says "Beans, Wayne!" For one family reunion, we had shirts with "Beans, Wayne!" printed on them (there are pictures, but they're from my pre-Facebook days so it may take some work to find them). I'm fascinated by this story, not only because it's an entertaining story (it is, especially when Grandpa told it), but also because I'm curious to use this story as an examination of something deeper in family archives. In this case, I'm leaning towards using the story to dig into questions of memory and delivery, how the memory and delivery of family stories can potentially lead to a sense of family identity, and even how digitizing some of those memories affects things.
Comments
Post a Comment