Introduction: Outing Archives, Archives Outing

The first article in this special issue of CTR starts in a cool air-conditioned room in a Calcutta public archive, far removed from the intense humidity and the afternoon sun outside its protective state-sponsored walls. It is in this space that the archival visitor opens a nineteenth-century scrapbook, the fragile pages letting go of the grip of the powdery, now-disintegrated glue that once locked its contents in place. Today, more than a century later, these remains spill onto the desk, activated by the curiosity of the scholar, who is enthralled by the materials in her hands. We might ask whose lives will be outed through this archival visit, and whether the positionality of the archivist herself will be outed in tow. How has she come to have access to this protected and well-ventilated space? What will the exposures of this visit mean to the lives of those who produced the scrapbook and what will it mean for her own life and scholarship? This critical acknowledgement of the interdependence between the lives of those buried in archives and the lives of scholars and artists who breathe life into them is central to the enquiries that have been brought together in Outing Archives, Archives Outing.

Archives are dominantly understood as white, Western, heteronormatively gendered endeavours, and, in the context of South Asia, the property of caste privilege. This special issue critiques such received notions of archives, with a view to theorising them instead as always already embodied sites through which histories and practices can be interrogated, critiqued, and rewritten, rather than simply replayed. In this, the editors are keen to consider ‘outing’ as a decolonial tactic and methodology that, through a challenge to varied prevalent hegemonies, opens up alternate and embodied possibilities through which histories can be (re)examined. Of course, the term outing has been traditionally associated with LGBTQI* studies and identities. While we recognise the histories of this term, we wish to position the making visible or (re)construction of archives vis-a-vis decolonial actions, activisms, and performances.¹ For this reason, we are playing with tautology and repetition in the title to emphasise the double gesture of visibility and performativity and their mutual reliances. Additionally, the issue also extrapolates the term ‘archive’ as both a noun and a verb; both the material and immaterial objects in and through which past and current knowledge is contained as future objects of inquiries (the archive), and the sets of actions through which this very knowledge is produced, preserved, transmitted, and transformed (to archive). We are moving between the archive as a source of scholarship to – what we deem a more productive interrogation – the archive as a subject of scholarship. Thinking about archives beyond their hegemonic construct as positivist systems of categorizations enables us within theatre, dance, and performance studies to always be alert to the critical slippages between objects and actions in our embodied fields of knowledge-making. The archive, even in its inception, is inherently doomed to failure for it can never contain all that it sets up to archive. Yet its impact on civic spaces, nationalism, and collective imaginaries requires critical interrogation. In effect, we are ‘outing’ the archive and its limits.

The co-editors came to this collection from three different projects. Royona Mitra’s experience of Akram Khan’s final solo XENOS (2018): a piece that as part of the UK’s World War 1 centenary celebrations critiques and exposes its white-washed archives by foregrounding the lives and experiences of Indian colonial soldiers whose contributions and accounts have been systematically erased from these narratives. This performance prompted deeper considerations of the implications of such embodied outings of archives as vital for contemporary rewritings of what constitutes archives in the first place. It further enabled this special issue to seek beyond the passivity and silence of archives,² so we could examine and think through archives as noisy,³ active agents in and of themselves. Finally, it made us reconsider the burden of shared responsibility that lies with us as scholars and artists engaging with them, in order to ensure histories can be rewritten. Following on from these considerations, we framed this special issue to approach archives from twenty-first-century broader minoritarian and minoritised perspectives. For Melissa Blanco Borelli, the challenges in conceptualizing and creating a digital archive based on Afro-Colombian and indigenous embodied practices and memory despite the atrocities of the armed conflict in Colombia immediately highlights how messy and contentious archives are. What to include? How much of it? How to ‘organize it’ and visualize the data? Archives exist between ‘tradition and oblivion’ as Michel Foucault writes.⁴ He demands a redefinition of the ‘historical archive’ that might consider it as ‘a general system of the formation and transformation of statements’.⁵ Ultimately, the archive of memories and embodied practices by and about these marginalized communities in Colombia demands a reevaluation of the historicisation of the Colombian armed conflict that focuses on the afterlives of coloniality and its insidious effects on those communities considered outside Colombia’s simplistic mestizaje national origins narrative. For Bryce Lease, the project of curating a digital archive on drag and transqueer performance in South Africa’s Western Cape, ‘Sequins, Self & Struggle’, led to questions concerning the archive as a form of public space: firstly, by considering the outward performance of sexuality in the public sphere and its explicit shaping of nationhood in the debates around the new South African constitution; and secondly, by making public the lived archives that characterise and give representation to queer identities. The archive in these projects is not something found or readymade. Rather, we share an interest in and a commitment to interrogating what materials come together and find recognition as archive.

A number of questions condense the theoretical currents that frame these articles: How does one archive memory? Culture? Affect? How does an archive expose the expansiveness of human ingenuity yet also demarcate the limits of its representational capacity? Is an archive a thing unto itself or, as we understand it, a material production of power through the production of knowledge? What kinds of knowledges are deemed worthy of archiving? Whose knowledges are archivable and what are the ways in which these knowledges are selected and documented? Who is considered an/the archivist? Who can curate and archive?

The notion of ‘outing’ is articulated and newly theorised in this issue by Broderick Chow, who, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s canonical study, considers the epistemologies of the closet in his critique of the public/private, hetero/homosexual binaries. The locker room provides a particularly productive site for this investigation, where men are invited to look at one another but not necessarily to see or to desire. As Chow observes, the binaries produced through the formalisation of a homosexual subject go beyond the flat distinction of gay/straight to produce a host of interconnected oppositions, such as masculine/feminine, majority/minority, art/kitsch, hidden/known. ‘Outing’ is not simply the opposite of the closet, which is itself ‘a speech act initiated by a performance of silence’.⁶ Outing is also not synonymous with liberation – it can be an act of (self)sabotage, punishment, or defiance. To draw these questions that have been discursively linked to queer theory into decolonial activism allows scholars to consider the colonial archive along a similar grain. The closet has spatial dimensions that, as Chow suggests via Michael P. Brown, makes visible ‘social relations by which […] power/knowledge gets materialised in the world’,⁷ and this alternatively opens up and forecloses the discussions of colonial forms of archival world making. In other words, ‘outing’ has productive ambiguities that can be, in turn, acts of repair or a redoubling of colonial violence. Naming in decolonial contexts needs to move beyond fixed and loaded vocabularies. Zethu Matebeni and Thabo Msibi move away from asking who is queer – a process of uncloseting that is still determined by queer Western epistemes, and which is often the focus of ‘salvage anthropology’ that seeks archival evidence of same-sex desire – to ‘problematising the languages, methods, and discourses that veil non-normative sexual and gender diversities in Africa’.⁸ In doing so, they advocate a focus on the ‘relational, contextual and embodied ways in which everyday sexuality is negotiated’.⁹ While new approaches to the archive consider the quotidian, we might also heed Keguro Macharia when he asks what we might lose when we fixate on or privilege one historical moment.¹⁰ Sometimes it is the historical era that needs outing, though, as Eleanor Roberts cautions in this issue, our understandings of situated historical practices should not be allowed to settle and calcify.

While we submit queer vocabularies to decolonial interrogations, acknowledging that queer studies have historically been ‘unacceptably Euro-American in orientation’,¹¹ we do not deny that decolonial movements have not always embraced queer lives and argue that it is crucial for engagements with the archive to ‘account for multiple genealogies’ of political homophobia. Sustained focus on homophobia, on the other hand, can just as easily render queer lives invisible.¹² This raises crucial questions about ‘outing’: by whom and for whom? Archives outing whom? Outing what? These evoke the unspoken ‘how?’

It is important to distinguish between postcolonial and decolonial actions. Thinking through Mignolo, Anurima Banerji reminds us, while both are committed to an undoing of Western coloniality, the former remains a project of Western modernity, and signals a chronological relationship to coloniality, the project that follows coloniality while simultaneously critiquing it. The decolonial, however, shares a different relationship to this undoing because it ‘refuses both modernity and its time’. Banerji notes further that ‘[i]f the postcolonial is attached to the postmodern, then the decolonial is anti-modern. In place of the “universalizing” gesture, the decolonial intervention is to propose “pluriversal” praxis’.¹³ The decolonial asserts the multiplicity of ‘the real’ and calls for a radical relationality based on interdependence, co-emergence, and re-existence. Moving through the pluriverse requires a deep, constant, and consistent way of thinking and questioning one’s own daily practices where we are constructed as being separate. In Colombia, for example, the Afro-communities in Buenaventura stress an ideology of Ubuntu: soy porque somos (I am because we are). This ontological understanding of selfhood radically reframes one’s relationship with a world where plant, human, land, and animal exist and thrive interdependently. As a methodology, the decolonial constantly questions categories and their genesis demanding a multifaceted perspective.

In bringing together the decolonial and the queer we must also take into account Anjali Arondekar’s cautioning against the emphasis placed on archival practices that uncritically (and emphatically) emphasise recovery; the need to move away from ‘the notion that discovering an object will somehow lead to a formulation of subjectivity – from the presumption that if one finds a body, one can recover a person’.¹⁴ Tavia Nyong’o recently questioned this assumption in his analysis of a student production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915 (2014). The play stages a group of students who approach the German colonial archive with seemingly equitable equivalences. There are the same numbers of women as men and Black and white students staging this archival query. However, as Nyong’o notes, the subjectivity of the German characters materialises through existing archives. Students have a sense of these European historical figures, even as perpetrators, to an extent that allows for a fully fleshed and voiced characterisation. The archive does not extend so far for the massacred Namibians. Through theatrical devices, Drury’s text explores ‘the paucity, infelicity and bias of the archive itself, which constrains (or seems to constrain) which stories can be told fully, and how’.¹⁵ Considering Carolyn Steedman’s argument that the archive as a site of ‘mad fragmentation’ means one cannot be ‘shocked at its exclusions, its emptinesses [… i]ts condition of being deflects outrage’,¹⁶ Dominic Johnson reminds us that we can indeed be shocked and outraged by the histories we are shown and told – ‘stories of tacit exclusions, willed oversights or biases’ – and that performance invites us to think again and differently about our responsibility to archival traces.¹⁷ In ¡Presente!, Diana Taylor again asserts the political urgency of presence and claims, ‘I cannot in the colonialist gesture of assuming a field absent other voices and perspectives’.¹⁸ Thus ‘outing’ gestures towards a resistance to the active, though often disavowed or sanitised, process of absenting.

The question of presence for theatre, performance, and dance scholars is crucially also one of embodiment. Contributors build on studies that trace historical and cultural constraints that render sex, gender, race, and sexuality culturally intelligible and see subjectivity as composed by ritualized, public dramatisations of the body. For this reason, to think queer and decolonial archives together means taking account of vulnerability in public spheres. In his ethnographic study of the linkages between Christianity and queer lives in Kenya, Adriaan van Klinken draws on Judith Butler’s argument about the centrality of our bodies in the social constitution of our subjectivities, that is, the body ‘as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed’, in order to conceptualise queer transgressions of heteronormativity that turns vulnerability into strength.¹⁹ ‘Outing’ takes up this dual form of presence, resisting the body as a site of binary opposition and acknowledging the body’s ability to evidence both structural and historical trauma and desire and love, in order to enable new forms of queer and decolonial imaginings. Disciplining legacies of colonialism creep in through every fissure – how might we resist and subvert the ‘repetitions of colonial epistemes?’²⁰ Bodies resist and the colonial archive stretches out to meet them. In mapping out the potentials of a Queer African studies, Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George remind us that we must ‘account for the shifting agility of resistant bodies’, both in relation to ‘their experience of intimacy and pleasure’ and their strategies ‘to fight pain and suffering’.²¹ This has methodological implications. Throughout the issue, contributors chart the methodological shift identified by Ann Laura Stoler, a movement from ‘archive-as-source to archive-as-subject’ that no longer treats the archive as an extractive exercise but as an ethnographic one.²²

Articles and Documents

Carolyn Dinshaw’s argument that queer historical touches can ‘form communities across time’ resonates in several articles.²³ Clare Croft takes us into the physical homes of Jill Johnston’s documentary remains, and offers a spectrum of embodied experience, from the policing of her presence in the women’s bathroom to the ‘coming in’ of lesbian scholars and volunteers in the Herstory Archive in New York. This spectrum speaks to the archive as a highly haptic space of encounter, which adds texture to Croft’s analysis of the repertory of lesbian touches in the archive. Aleksandra Gajowy also considers touch as a desire for exteriority and a form of embodied archive in her intentionally irreverent analysis of Jerzy Grotowski’s approaches to physical training for actors. Offering an original interpretation of Grotowski’s work on bodily impulses, she conceptualises touch as a willingness to fantasise and to desire and be desired in her discussion of Karol Radziszewski’s confrontation with the entrenched legend of the experimental Polish theatre director.

Prarthana Purkayastha’s haptic experience with the material remains of an illicit past offers multiple points of entrance into the red-light world of early twentieth-century colonial Calcutta. She equally invites critical self-reflection making her positionality as a scholar evident as she unpacks both the literal and archival remains of Indubala’s scrapbook. This tension between ‘outing’ a private journal in greater service to ‘outing’ the colonial archive of a then British Calcutta through the lives of dancers and performers serves to think about the ethics of ‘outing’ archives. What does it mean to scholarly interrogate private archives and put them in service of a critique of nation? How might we read silences and intimacies in an ethical way that is informed by feminist and queer practices of disclosure and disidentification? What capacious understandings of nation do queer and illicit outings offer?

Through her focus on British-Asian dance artist and choreographer Akram Khan’s swansong and full-length solo XENOS (2018) Royona Mitra interrogates the predominant whiteness of WW1 archives, and demonstrates how the piece exposes the erasures of Black and brown bodies, voices, and experiences from both these archives and present-day public discourses and reimaginings of the Great War. The article examines how Khan’s brown dancing body can disrupt the whiteness of these archives, by positioning itself at the heart of these reimaginings of histories and present-day realities through critically and creatively exploring the boundaries between legitimacy and imagination, fact and fiction, and the material and the ephemeral, enabling silenced voices to speak from their systemically buried pasts. Eleanor Roberts then interrogates regimes of visibility for artists of colour within art institutions that fail to account or take shared responsibility for burdens of representation in their tokenistic attempts to diversify programming and curation. Roberts focuses on artists Rasheed Araeen and David Medalla in order to engage with broader anti-racist and postcolonial scholarship and configurations of the archive. Drawing the 1970s into the present, this essay offers a generational account of performance and conceptual art histories and proposes a methodological approach that includes both visibility and refusal in our understanding of artistic works that might retain their radicality in the archive. Arguing that Araeen and Medalla challenged uncritical connotations of cohesive or unified subjectivity through performance art’s perceived access to authenticity, she asks how ‘how decentred, seemingly quotidian, institutionally “unauthorised”, fabulative, and queer forms of culture and knowledge can be engaged in ways that sustain generative modalities of contestation’ (p. 55).

Anurima Banerji’s article offers a critique of the Natyashastra, the Indian dramaturgical treatise, and its global reputation as a master archive that has regulated, censored, controlled, and written-out bodies and peoples through prescriptive social and aesthetic laws that have governed movement in Indian dance. Claiming that there is no ‘outing’ for this archival text which has always been explicitly gendered and casteist, Banerji draws timely attention to its oppressive foundations. In his analysis of a performance in Tel Aviv that takes over the equally oppressive space of state archive, the former town hall (Beit Ha’Ir), Raz Weiner shapes the contours of what he calls a ‘dramaturgy of misalignment’ to prize the archival building itself out of ‘its naturalised place in spatial and historical narratives’ (p. 221). This performance action contests the hegemony of a homogenised national identity and forms of remembering, outing a structure that was clearly in view but, at the same time, out of sight.

Approaches to the digital archive reverberate in several of the articles. Melissa Blanco Borelli and Olga Sorzano Montana write about their experience constructing a digital archive (Corpografias) of embodied performance practices by Afro-Colombians and indigenous (Guna Dule) affected by the Colombian armed conflict. While the creation of the digital archive stems from a decolonial commitment to centering their memories, practices, and voices, the article addresses the epistemological and methodological challenges faced in this type of collaborative work. It also considers the efficacy and significance of symbolic justice especially when, in the Colombian context, the state refuses to fully consider its role in creating the marginalised and terrorized status of these citizens. Despite these challenges, Corpografias (as archive, process, and research) highlights the ways in Afro-Colombian and indigenous cultural memories function as necessary counter-archives to the national script of the Colombian armed conflict. The resilience and convivencia (coexistence) of these communities serves as a model to rethink the nation and move beyond modernist conceptualizations of transitional justice and reconciliation.

Bryce Lease analyses the ways in which communities in South Africa are innovating their own forms of self-archiving through and against social media, arguing that such innovations are a fundamentally queer practice that evoke the performative effects of realness. Reflecting on the ‘Sequins, Self & Struggle’ archive that he co-developed as part of a research team alongside transqueer and drag performers in the Miss Gay Western Cape pageant, he considers the rogue potential of Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. Marginalising social media or simply condemning it as a neoliberal space of political manipulation and data mining does not offer us nuanced understandings of dissident performance online. Lease claims that within the challenging and uneven terrain of digital space it is crucial to synthesize analyses of social media with other online archives to come to a deeper understanding – and a broader activation – of queer collective memory. Such memory is sought out by madison moore in queer nightlife. Scrutinising what has been forgotten, relegated as rubbish, or simply left behind on the dancefloor in a hurried departure, moore curates a rich archive of queer lives. This approach challenges the usefulness of existing concepts of the archive as structured, organised, respectable, and instead prompts us to imagine forms of knowing in the ‘residues of sleaze’ – that is, the trashy, smutty, fleshy, disorderly, and uncategorisable. While tracing the ‘undocumented elsewhere where anti-respectable pleasures can flourish’ (p. 196), moore argues that it is no coincidence that queer nightlife takes place on the fringes of society.

Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende’s jointly authored document invites us into their collaborative performance project Black Holes, an Afrofuturist retelling of the history of the universe. It counters white dominant narratives ‘which impact beliefs in white-led societies (including arts sectors) about who Black people are, what our origin stories may be, the kinds of spaces and agency we have’ (p. 197). We experience segments of the script alongside Hemsley and Chimutengwende’s retrospective critical and phenomenological reflections on them. Poetic and piercing, the document weaves in and out of deep meditations on their collaboration, on racism, on Black aesthetics, on their script as an archive, and more – ultimately reminding us that beyond the immediacy of their words on the page, it is they themselves who are the living archives of Black Holes through their ‘lived knowledges of Black experiences’ (p. 198).

Brian Singleton interviews director Louise Lowe and creative producer Lynnette Moran of ANU Productions on their production Faultlines that stages a crucial galvanising moment for the formation of LGBT organisations in 1982 following a series of high profile queer bashings and murders of gay men in Ireland. Singleton brings this performance of queer archives into conversation with the successful 2015 Irish referendum that allowed marriage between two people without distinction as to their sex. Indeed, reading the list of changes to laws in the Republic of Ireland between 1993 and 2018 – from the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the end of the ban on divorce to women’s increased control over their own reproductive rights – demonstrates how disciplining systems of governance can change at an accelerated pace if citizens are offered the public space for open debate. What’s more, the discussion maps how artists can confront historical negations of civil rights and engage audiences in incubating new cultural imaginaries at the very site of the outed archive.

Taken together, collectively and urgently, the featured articles and documents from theatre, dance, and performance studies in this special issue respond to critical archival studies’ call to create a field that is committed to ‘liberate, interrogate, and usher in a “real democracy”, where power is distributed more equitably, where white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity and other forms of oppression are named and challenged, where different worlds and different ways of being in those worlds are acknowledged and imagined and enacted’.²⁴ As we write this editorial at the beginning of 2021, the news has just reached us that Mark Donough, the co-producer of the Miss Gay Western Cape pageant in South Africa, has died as a result of COVID-19. We dedicate this issue to all those who have fought and lost their battles with this hideous global pandemic, which, as with the production of hegemonic archives, has struck those who endure colonial histories with inequitable brutality. Our intellectual labour here is not to merely foreground the historical violences of said archives, but to offer methodologies and epistemes that can enable a more equitable and just world (making).

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease, Royona Mitra

Backpages, Reviews & Interventions

For the re-reading in this issue, Catherine M. Cole returns to a formative text in archival studies: Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (2003). Cole notes the ways in which Taylor’s work productively refocused a number of key ideas in performance studies, and celebrates its emphasis on action rather than debates over terminology, and on persistence rather than ephemerality. Reflecting on the book in the midst of Trump’s recent election campaign, and in the continuing context of COVID, she finds hope in its implication that new scenarios can emerge, offering us the ‘chance to perform our world differently’ (p. X). Following Cole’s re-reading, the first few book reviews in this issue feel particularly timely, as they attend to works concerned with digital dance, confinement, and loss. The reviews section also surveys recently published titles on Scottishness, site-based performance, and musical theatre. As we turn to the Backpages section, it has been set up to focus inevitably, in part, on theatre projects re-imagined and/or made during lockdown due to COVID-19. Oliver O’ Shea describes the process of reconfiguring Pilot Theatre’s production of the adaptation of Alex Wheatle’s Crongton Knights from live tour to streaming. Selina Busby eloquently walks readers through a week-by-week Coronavirus time capsule devised with teenagers co-creating with Company Three in London. Hannah Thompson, consultant for the sound and light installation of Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Jose Saramago’s Blindness at the Donmar Warehouse that opened after the first lockdown in London, reflects upon the piece through the lens of disability. Eve Leigh, meanwhile, muses on the unreliability of memories of experiencing live performance and the ghostly sensations and thrills that remain in the mind long after a performance and production have closed. The issue is bookended with two pieces: one that looks at the rise of new play publishing in the UK and what its future may be documented by playwright David Edgar, and another by scholar Stephe Harrop, who offers a close reading of Kate Tempest’s phrasing and use of breath control in their work The Book of Traps and Lessons. From the printed page to the exhalation of breath in performance, this issue travels far and wide through an interior landscape when the theatre industry has been shuttered and at the same time finding new ways to be heard and to share air, if not bread, with audiences. A companion issue to ‘Outing Archives, Archives Outing’ is also live on our online site, Interventions, featuring short essays, multi-media pieces, interviews and dialogues that extend the conversation in this double issue.

Caridad Svich, Broderick Chow, and David Calder

Notes

1. We signal here Walter Mignolo’s framing of the decolonial as an undoing of US and European imperialist epistemes. But we simultaneously acknowledge that, in the guise of the decolonial that seeks to decentre colonial power towards achieving self-determined sovereignty, previously colonised nations such as India are exercising fundamentalist nationalisms that manifest as neo-colonialist stances upon its own minoritised communities in the twenty-first century.

2. Prarthana Purkayastha, ‘The Problem with Dance’, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies; Special Issue ‘Decolonizing Dance Discourses’ (2021), 28–29. https://dancestudiesassociation.org/publications/conversations-across-the-field-of-dance-studies/decolonizing-dance-discourses.

3. Jasmine Johnson, ‘Black Laws of Dance’, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies; Special Issue ‘Decolonizing Dance Discourses’ (2021), 25–27. https://dancestudiesassociation.org/publications/conversations-across-the-field-of-dance-studies/decolonizing-dance-discourses.

4. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 146.

5. Ibid.

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3.

7. Michael P. Brown, Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–3.

8. Zethu Matebeni and Thabo Msibi, ‘Vocabularies of the non-normative’, Agenda 29, no. 1 (2015), 3–9: 4.

9. Matebeni and Msibi, ‘Vocabularies’, 7.

10. See Keguro Macharia, ‘Archive and method in Queer African Studies’, Agenda 29, no. 1: 140–46.

11. Phillip Brian Harper, ‘The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge’, in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 110.

12. Macharia, ‘Archive and method’, 143, 144.

13. Anurima Banerji, ‘Introductory Remarks for Agonistic Acts: Anti-Racist and Decolonial Interventions for Dance Studies’, Closing Plenary at Dance Studies Association’s Annual Conference, University of Malta, 2018. Unpublished.

14. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 21.

15. Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Does Staging Historical Trauma Re-Enact It?’ in Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms (London: Methuen Drama, 2019), 202.

16. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68.

17. Dominic Johnson, ‘How Can Performance Disrupt Institutional Spaces?’ in Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, ed. Bleeker, Kear, Kelleher, and Roms, 251.

18. Diana Taylor, ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 7.

19. Adriaan van Klinken, Kenyan, Christian, Queer (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 141.

20. Anjali Arondekar, ‘Border/line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities, or How Race Matters Outside the United States’, Interventions 7, no. 2 (2005): 236–50, 250.

21. Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George, ‘Queer Studies/African Studies: An (Im)possible Transaction?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016), 281–305: 293.

22. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 44, 47. Stoler herself treats archives not as state repositories but as colonial repertoires.

23. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 36.

24. Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand, ‘Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction’, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017), 1–8: 6.