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'In a profound meditation on the complex genre of autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois,
toward the end of his extraordinary life, wrote: 'What I think of myself, now and in
the past, furnishes no certain documents proving what I really am. Mostly my life
today is a mass of memories with vast omissions, matters which are forgotten
accidentally or by deep design' (cited in Sundquist 3). Situated in the context of Du
Bois' haunting meditation on loss, memory gaps and historical omissions, I want to
ask the following question: What if some of these vast omissions, forgotten
accidentally or because of the violent historicidal forces of assimilation, were
recuperable through the staging of an archaeology of one's body, through the
reflexive examination of the self as repository of so many dense cultural
sedimentations and as archive of accumulated histories and practices? The question,
then, that I want to pose in the course of this paper is: In what ways may our lived
bodies be seen as living, corporeal archives, repositories of historical practices and
inventories of almost invisible traces?' (Author's abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 Mar 2012 13:35:52
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http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/2170/2623
Embodied Archives
JASAL
Subjects:
- The End in the Beginning : Re(de)finding Aboriginality : 1994 Wentworth Lecture 2003 single work essay
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