Fever-ish / Notes on Tracking Fevers

Jacques Derrida had the right idea, I think, when he began an investigation of the archives with, “Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word “archive”...”

It is the year 2026, and I have spent almost ten years of my life circling around this word. The archive is a myth, the archive is a fiction, the archive constellates around it our desires to know ourselves and others, a sickness looming (mal d’archive) in the infinite loop of grieving the finitude of how the past chooses to reveal itself. This is my starting point: what would it mean to examine my own lexicon/the lexicon given to me around the word ‘archive’? The archive fictionalizes itself, yes, and so do we as artists and practitioners, who arrive with our distinct methods and vocabularies of extraction.
There is an archive fever, and the patients are many and varied. What are our symptoms, what is the particular feverishness we are bringing?



The North American diasporic artist-practitioner axis is a particular one, and one that gathers around it a specific archive fever: one that is rooted in something called community, one that reveals something about making home in the heart of empire, one that desires to use archive as a paradigm to resolve the placelessness of diasporic conditions. To make a case for the future by reaching for the past, to make an evidentiary claim of we have always been here, to move urgently “against oblivion” (Public Culture vol. 71).

There are multiple axes, of course: activists, writers, artists, precarious workers, precarious bodies, precarious politics. I spent the last few weeks documenting every time I came across the word ‘archive’, in books, calls for papers, instagram reels, videos, art exhibits, and looking at all the desires we conjure around them.
On November 15, 2020 the Reel Ideas Symposium hosted a panel titled “Archive Means and Medium”, and I gathered some vocabulary (a vocabulary from within! The archive speaks!) to consider the (a?) web of language surrounding the materials I am paying attention to as part of this residency. On the panel, Beau Gomez asks the question, why is an archive important? Vasuki Shanmuganathan speaks about the Tamil Archive Project, born out of a frustration of “not finding ourselves in the archives”, but more importantly “finding a space where we can decide what gets represented, and not the always already colonial story”. Katrina Cohen-Palacios mentioned working with community organizer archives, and called them “records of adversity”. Vince Ha brings in the problems of visibility into the conversation, calling for an “informed visibility, that can suggest what is beyond the visible”.



The panel also makes the observation that, “Institutional archiving has historically been a white profession,” and I pause to consider this formulation of the archive. Theories of the archive have been attentive to power, of course, but what is at stake in naming the power we desire to come up against or bring down in our archival utopias? The fever finds a convergence in a desire for/commitment to a whole, un-white self. I find again and again the axis of the diasporic artist-practitioner-activist in Toronto engaged in a possibility/desire to:

● be remembered fully as a non-white subject
● to wring whiteness out of our systems
● the fever extending to a hunger for a place just ours
● our archival utopias hacking away at the inadequacy of the word ‘representation’, to provide the backdrops, the characters, the story lines, the plot twists, of being here, being human.
● The archive (we imagine) is the other-wise, the archive is a place, the archive is a future because the past has always been there.


My own fever dates back to many moons. I am feverish for a mess, one that reminds me of the mounds and mounds of fraying, decaying paper in the small script library I spent my dissertation field-work in Karachi, half-way across the world from here. I have learnt to develop a deep reverence for the hidden mathematical coordinates across historical material, and sometimes you are given the magic-trick hat of putting it all together. When I think about my own desires, I consider my own vocabulary:

TRACKING MY FEVER -

Surprise
Instruction
Wring-me-out-of-apathy
Shock
Thrill
Suspense
Stories

And the quiet desire at the end of it all, small and whittled, aspiring to be grand but actually quite simple: to be known. I am here. I am here. I have always been here. I am going to be. To be known through knowing someone else. To know your way into being known. Consider the knower desiring:
ACT X

From one of the archival folders, I pull out a newspaper clipping from 2013 heralding “the inaugural South Asian film” at the Reel Asian Film Festival. This was the year Bombay Talkies opened the festival, an anthology film directed by some of the biggest names in Hindi cinema: Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap. I pull out another newspaper clipping from the same year, lauding the festival for expanding its programming to South Asia, and casually stating that the line-up for that year featured films from India and Pakistan.

I see Pakistan listed in the news report, and am immediately uncomfortable, knowing that there might be a high likelihood of this being an error in reporting since there is no programming from Pakistan that year. I think back to the infrastructural wounds of Pakistan’s cinema industry, the 2012  burning of nine cinemas in Karachi in a single day by a right-wing group, and I think about what this error in reporting narrativizes/re-writes over. I am perturbed, and start looking more closely at previous programming.
I notice a film from USA/Kashmir in the 2012 Reel Asian festival program, Valley of Saints, which comes before Bombay Talkies, and is also listed as the inaugural South Asian film for the festival. I am now faced with an unexpected friction in the archive, one that I don’t think I was prepared for; I think about the violent histories of militarization in Kashmir, and the sanitization of this violent history of/within Kashmir in mainstream Bollywood narratives; I consider how Bombay Talkies in its Bollywood glamour becomes South Asian cinema in the news but a film from Kashmir is a film from Kashmir. I sit with this discomfort and try to keep looking. Khanh tells me that there had been community conversations around this incident, and that there are records still being made about these categorizations; Khanh points me to the fact that I am working in an archive that is still being made.

In 2013, the same year Bombay Talkies is aired, I notice another short by Oliver Hussein titled Item Number. I imagine what it would be like to have watched this short right after/a little while after Bombay Talkies opened the festival.
Bombay Talkies is an anthology film, and mythologizes the Hindi cinema industry from within. It takes its aesthetic and story-telling detours, does not mimic a blockbuster movie, but moves around it, incorporating the visual and aural languages of Bollywood into quieter, slice-of-life stories. For instance, “Sheila ki Jawani” features the story of a 12 year old boy who looks up to Katrina Kaif. He is rebuked for wanting to imitate Katrina’s moves and body, but eventually finds a way to relate to her that feels safe and joyous.



Oliver Husain’s film, on the other hand, completely takes apart the visual and aural language of the “item number”, a raunchy dance sequence that, for example, Katrina would have been part of in a mainstream Hindi film. Featuring the fabulous Kirtana Kumar, Husain’s film moves strangely through the live/lives of an actress, who, in one of her monologues mentions that for some reason, what sticks to her after a grand performance is not necessarily the flashing lights, but something quite simple and more annoying: her constipation. The film moves through ghostly silences that study a dance number anatomically, breaking down the body and its constellation with others.


I wonder about these films sharing the same programming year at the Reel Asian Film Festival in 2013. I am delighted by the contrast that Husain’s film offers to the cinematic impulses of Bombay Talkies. The newspaper clippings I found perhaps constrict the categories of South Asian cinema, but another archival holding, this short film, carefully dissects a critical component of Hindi film and stretches its categories. The archive constricts and expands; a fever grows and shrinks; we are drawn, disappointed, and then rewarded.
Archive is: a desire to know, and the responsibility to withstand the knowing.