Archival ambience and sensory memory: Generating queer intimacies in the settler colonial archive

ABSTRACT

The shift to archives as rhetorical places creates opportunities to examine environmental accessibility, the role of archives in legitimating official public memory, and tactics to evoke memory at the margins. I conceptualize the relation between archival environments, feeling, and memory as “archival ambience.” Ambience challenges modern theories of invention and foregrounds the entanglements of sensory culture, corporeality, sensation, feeling, and memory. Ambience reimagines invention and circulation as the relational materiality of bodies and as central to the generation of intimacies. This essay models a sensory engagement with archives at the American Heritage Center and Grace Hebard and Agnes Wergeland collections. Guided by the settler colonial environment of the American Heritage Center (AHC) and what remains of Hebard and Wergeland, I craft a queer sense of their “intimate friendship” and argue that perception of Hebard and Wergeland's intimate friendship takes shape through the sensory culture of the AHC and that their queerness is an effect of the archive.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• sensation
• memory
• affect
• queer

Notes on contributors

Dr. E. Cram is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Performance and Communication Arts Department at St. Lawrence University. I sincerely thank Dillon Vrana, John Louis Lucaites, K.J. Rawson, Colin Johnson, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Robert DeChaine, and the three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and citations as this essay developed across earlier versions. I thank the American Heritage Center for their assistance in accessing the Hebard and Wergeland Collections. This essay is derived from the author's dissertation, and part of an ongoing book project, Violent Inheritance and Queer Generation: Landscape Memory and Movement in the American West. Correspondence to: E. Cram, Performance and Communication Arts, St. Lawrence University, 105 Noble Center, 23 Romoda Drive, Canton, New York 13617. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1. Antoine Predock, “American Heritage Center and Art Museum University of Wyoming, Laramie 1986/1993,” http://www.predock.com/Wyoming/wyo.html.

2. Ann Laura Stoler, “Archival Dis-Ease: Thinking through Colonial Ontologies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 215–19; See forum, “The Archive's Rhetorical (Re)turn,” in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, ed. Charles E. Morris III, no. 9, 2006; Morris, “Archival Queer,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (2006): 145–51; Kelly Jacob Rawson, “Archiving Transgender: Affects, Logics, and the Power of Queer History” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2010).

3. K.J. Rawson, “Accessing Transgender//Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics,” Archivaria 68(2010): 128–30; Morris, “Archival Turn,” 114; Antoinette Burton, ed, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

4. Special issue of Radical History Review, “Queering Archives: Historical Unravelings,” ed. Daniel Marshall et al., Fall 2014.

5. Christopher Nealon, in Charles E. Morris III, “Portrait of a Queer Rhetorical/Historical Critic,” in Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris III (Columbia: South Carolina Press, 2007), 3.

6. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), xii.

7. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 16.

8. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4–5.

9. I deploy “queer” in a number of registers. First, queer is shorthand for an imagined public of sexual minorities. Second, queer acts as process, verb, method, and orientation to criticism. I use it relative to a phenomenological sensibility to “disorder” and “disorient” how modern archival imaginations encourage following “straight” lines. When I use the word “lesbian,” I do so in recognition of how presexological female friendships and intimacies have shaped lesbian public culture.

10. Morris, “Archival Queer,” 145.

11. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 14–15.

12. Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties, 16–19.

13. Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 186.

14. Lilian Faderman and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have most prominently discussed sentimental culture and female friendship, yet their approaches have been criticized for determinism and lack of historicism. In contrast, Coviello's notion of “earliness,” in addition to Kathryn Kent's historicization of sentimental culture that refuses a teleological certainty, animates my reading. See Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties, 211n24; Kathryn Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

15. Predock, “American Heritage Center.”

16. On the distinction between Wister's “wild west” and Hebard's “civilized west,” see Tiffany Lewis, “Marking America's Progress in the West: Grace Raymond Hebard's Domestication of Wyoming, Women's Rights, and Western Expansion,” Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies 13:1 (2013): 48–49.

17. Rawson, “Archiving,” 44.

18. Marshall et al., “Queering Archives,” 4.

19. Ibid., 3.

20. Ibid., 3.

21. Ibid., 2.

22. In addition to Boag, see Colin R. Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 2013.

23. See Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, ed., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69 (2005): 85–108; “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47; “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 215–39; Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press), 2004; Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13 (2003): 39–56; Isaac West, “PISSAR's Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 156–75; Joan Faber McAlister, “Collecting the Gaze: Memory, Agency, and Kinship in the Women's Jail Museum, Johannesburg,” Women's Studies in Communication 36 (2013): 1–27.

24. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, xv. This sense of materiality and context also appears in Shome, “Space Matters”; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007); West, “PISSAR;” Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest;” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 257–82.

25. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 9. Carol Blair, “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16–57.

26. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 29.

27. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 34.

28. On queerness as undecidability, see Erin Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 22ff.

29. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 27.

30. Rawson, “Accessing,” 128.

31. Powell, cited in Rawson, “Accessing,” 128.

32. This summary is premised on Carolyn Steedman's reading of Derrida and Michel Foucault relative to the archive as “a way of seeing, or a way of knowing; the archive as a symbol or form of power” (2). Steedman, Dust, cites Antoinette Burton to describe archival absence (5). Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

33. Ibid., 69.

34. Ibid., 81.

35. Ibid., 83.

36. On queer archives as absence and presence, see Marshall et al., “Queering Archives,” 1.

37. Leah DeVun and Michael Jay McClure, “Archives Behaving Badly,” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 122

38. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendancies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), xii.

39. Charles E. Morris III, “Hard Evidence: The Vexations of Lincoln's Queer Corpus,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 185–213.

40. José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 (1996): 6.

41. Peter Simonson, “Reinventing Invention, Again,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44 (2014): 301.

42. Simonson, “Reinventing Invention,” 312–13.

43. Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 2–17.

44. Although the sensory as object and method spans multiple disciplines, my reading of the relationship between the senses, sensation, feeling, and mediation borrows from the “ethnography of sensory culture” because of vernacular perceptions of material culture. An ethnography of the senses bridges physical and cultural dimension, articulating how values are entangled within sensory regimes. For communication studies, sensory culture enables criticism of the physicality of distinctions between perception, form and content, circulation, and the relation between sensation and feeling. See Constance Classen, “Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal 49 (2010): 401–12; Classen, ed. The Book of Touch (New York: Berg, 2005); Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture (New York: Berg, 2006).

45. See the double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “On the Visceral,” ed. Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, 20: 4 (2014) and 21: 1 (2015).

46. Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonialization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 18; Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (2010): 53.

47. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki's Buffalo Bill Museum essays document remembering and forgetting violence in the American West.

48. “Heritage,” Oxford English Dictionary Online.

49. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: A&C Black, 1999), 1.

50. Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 5. Veracini makes this distinction to justify settler colonial studies as a field analytically distinct from colonial and postcolonial studies. At stake in the distinction is the capacity to describe structural differences and phenomena. Or, in an oft-cited passage by Patrick Wolfe: “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Intellectual genealogies, geographic locations, and flows of modern capital further impact these distinctions. My intention is not to settle any distinction between decolonial and settler colonial studies, but rather to mark an ongoing and generative engagement that centers the confluence of historical and geopolitical contexts and epistemic concerns. See Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 449–514; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Nationalism and the Imagination,” Lectora 15: 75–98; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), especially 11ff.

51. Morgensen, Spaces Between Us, 42.

52. See Mariá Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22 (2007): 186–209; “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25 (2010): 742–59.

53. Smith, “Queer Theory,” 47.

54. Muñoz, cited in Smith, 47.

55. Virginia Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 114.

56. Geraldine Clifford, “Introduction,” Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities 1870–1937, ed. Geraldine Clifford (New York: City University of New York, 1989), 3.

57. Clifford, “Introduction,” 30.

58. In Memorium: Grace Raymond Hebard, 1861–1936. The Faculty of the University of Wyoming, June 1937, 3–4.

59. Frank Van Nuys, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship 1890–1930 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2002), 33–69.

60. Virginia Scharff, “The Independent and Feminine Life of Grace Raymond Hebard: 1861–1936,” in Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities 1870–1937, ed. Geraldine Clifford (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New Work, 1989), 127–45.

61. Kent, Making Girls into Women, 6.

62. American Heritage Center Reference Archivist, e-mail message to author, September 19, 2012.

63. “Grace Raymond Hebard and Maren Michelet Correspondence,” Box 40, Folder 7, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

64. “Letter to Hon. William Michelet and I. Michelet from Grace Raymond Hebard, March 24, 1932,” Box 40, Folder 7, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

65. “Letter to Grace Raymond Hebard from Belle K. Middlekauff, March 20, 1933.”

66. “Letter to Belle K. Middlekauff from Grace Raymond Hebard, March 24, 1933,” Box 40, Folder 7, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

67. Red Journal, “Norske Kvinder 1914–1924,” Box 47, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

68. “Letter by Grace Raymond Hebard to Miss Belle K. Middlekauff, April 17, 1933,” Box 34, Folder 32, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. It is worth noting that this letter is archived with materials related to the memorial of June Etta Downey, a close friend of both Hebard and Wergeland.

69. “Letter by Belle K. Middlekauff to Grace Raymond Hebard, April 20, 1933,” Box 40, Folder 7, Grace Raymond Hebard Papers, 1829–1947, Collection Number 400008, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

70. Scharff, Twenty, 102.

71. Maren Michelet, Agnes Mathilde Wergeland: Glimpses (Minneapolis, MN: Folkebladet Publishing Company Press), 1916.

72. “‘Thy Hand,’ Sept. 17, 04. 10 P.M.” Box 4, Agnes Mathilde Wergeland Papers 1882–1916, Collection 400012, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

73. I extend Louise Michelle Newman's argument that evolutionary categories of race permeated the discourse of the women's suffrage movement. White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8.

74. Newman, White Women's Rights, 8.

75. Wergeland, “Thy Hand.”

76. The AHC has four photographs of Hebard and Wergeland together. Given public acknowledgement of their close relationship and shared living, and photographs of Hebard alone at “the Doctor's Inn,” it is noteworthy there are not more preserved of them together.

77. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as Objects,” in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), especially 3–6.

78. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, “Preface,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ix.

79. Lugones, “Decolonial Feminism,” 747.

80. Lugones, “Decolonial Feminism,” 753.

81. Wanzer-Serrano, New York Young Lords, 181.