Abstract
ABSTRACT: This essay was co-written by the members of the graduate seminar War and Everyday Life. It uses the capstone project of the course as the basis for discussing the conceptualization and design of an archive of “mundane militarisms.” The digital publication-exhibition called Mundane Militarisms creates an aesthetic of mess to visualize the question of what makes something archivable. The essay takes this question of archivability as a guide for rethinking the historiography of imperial war and the politics of the digital form. In compiling everyday objects like canned meats, cardboard boxes, and contaminated plantains as archives of mundane militarisms, we stage messiness as a heuristic that disrupts definitions of war as a conclusive or exceptional event. We conclude with a reflection on how our class’s “collaboratory” process relates to the outward-facing mandate of the public humanities. Another version of the essay—a draft that we co-wrote as a final paper—can be found on the Mundane Militarisms website (mundane-militarisms.com). The website version puts into practice our own ethics of collaboration and the project’s central motif of quotidian mess.
Published Version
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