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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 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.