Alternative Archive Research Articles

Early–middle Holocene relative sea-level oscillation events recorded in a submerged speleothem from the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Geomorphological and biological archives of relative sea-level change in the western North Atlantic-Caribbean region following the Last Glacial Maximum have traditionally supported the hypothesis of a punctuated rise towards the present sea level. Such records, however, are often at insufficient resolution to discern centennial-scale changes. In caves where the water table is closely controlled by sea level, active periods of speleothem growth constraining maximum sea level, used in combination with marine overgrowths constraining minimum sea level, are a promising alternative archive recording sea-level variability at higher resolution. Here, we present a U-Th-dated early–middle Holocene speleothem record from a submerged cave on the tectonically stable Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Our record shows that polychaetes (Annelida, Polychaeta) colonised a sub-aerially deposited stalagmite during four individual submergence events. Submergence events occurred at approximately 8.9, 8.6, 8.4 and 6.0 ka, which we attribute to previously unrecognised minor sea-level oscillation events (OE1–OE4) above and below −6.12 ± 0.1 m relative to present sea level (r.s.l.). Combining these results with mangrove-derived relative sea-level constraints from another submerged cave on the Yucatán Peninsula, we are able to suggest that OE1 and OE2 did not reach as high as −5.26 m r.s.l., but that OE3 and OE4 exceeded −5.22 m r.s.l. We conclude that subsidence of the North American ice-load bulge was the main cause of relative sea-level rise. Superimposed on the glacio-isostatic adjustment were periods of widespread northern hemisphere cooling and ice margin re-advance, resulting in a relative sea-level fall on four occasions during the early–middle Holocene.

Collecting, kitsch and the intimate geographies of social memory: a story of archival autoethnography

This paper engages recent creative approaches to the archive in geography to explore an approach I term archival autoethnography: collecting and contributing to the archive ourselves, and critically engaging with those practices. I use my own collection of kitsch souvenirs of the 19th‐century southern California novelRamona– nearly all acquired aftereBay auctions transformed the geography of collectibles sale and acquisition – to show how collecting such objects transformed my research, lending insights into tourist experiences more than a century old and revealing how kitsch souvenirs help build intimate geographies of social memory. Publishing with illustrations from my collection drew public attention to the collection and eventually aided in the reinterpretation of two historic landmarks long linked to the novel. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of kitsch then, this paper reveals the cultural and political agency of kitsch souvenirs in shaping social memory. I show how moving derided objects into the realm of my scholarly research enabled me to build an alternative archive that shed new light on a historical topic, leading to the unexpected impact of my research in the broader community. I reveal how collecting and contributing to the archive ourselves, and analysing those practices in archival autoethnography, become valuable geographical research practices.

(Un)Lawful Subjects of Company

This essay engages Cape Town – a city founded as a tavern of the seas linking Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes – by tracing the ways in which its foundation as seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company settlement resonates as metaphor through which to approach the contemporary corporate city. Rereading the Journal of Jan van Riebeeck through the lens of Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret and, particularly, Dan Sleigh's Islands, it explores the Journal's mutually informed production of crime and profit. It then turns to a set of recent thrillers – by Andrew Brown, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Mike Nicol and Joanne Hitchens – as a way of reading the post-apartheid city. Finally, it engages Lauren Beukes' Moxyland, in which corporate Cape Town takes concrete form in a virtual society, before closing with reflections on the limits of the Company archive, the alternative archives it overwrote and erased and the potentialities of what it forecloses, including the common and the creole.

Chaiqian/Demolition: Reflections on Media Practice

In 2008, I spent three weeks filming a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province. I collaborated with migrant workers, site managers, and city dwellers to produce the feature‐length film Chaiqian (Demolition), which offers a sensual and open‐ended portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemerality. This essay presents a set of reflections on the production process and aesthetic choices of the film, and draws on sensory ethnography, phenomenology, and the concept of cinephilia to explore the ontological differences between written ethnography and film. I observe that the conventional approach to media production in anthropology has tended to limit the multitude of meaning inherent in images and sound by reducing them to mere illustrations of an argument and/or cultural data. While this dominant approach has its specific uses, especially in terms of pedagogy, I argue that equal value ought to be placed on an approach to media anthropology that not only embraces sensuality and ambiguity but also appreciates the multivalent powers peculiar to sound and image, and refrains from constraining visuality and aurality to the wholly linguistic and propositional. The essay concludes with a meditation on the value that such an approach—with its accommodation of multiple interpretations of the image—possesses for historiography and the construction of alternative archives.

Embodying the evictees of Asian Olympic cities: Video documentaries of demolition and relocation in seoul and Beijing

Preparations for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008 involved the large-scale demolition of dilapidated houses in the old towns of Seoul and Beijing and the forced relocation of their residents as the urban poor. Two activist video documentaries in South Korea and China, Kim Dong-won’s Sanggyedong Olympics (1988), Seoul, South Korea, Purn-yeongsang) and Ou Ning’s Meishi Street (2006), Beijing, China, Alternative Archive), bear witness to those detrimental effects that the urban transformation linked to the two cities’ hosting of the Olympics had on their communities. This article examines the ways in which the two film-makers used the capacities of video technology, such as spontaneity and portability, and the relative ease with which the amateur can access and handle it, to capture the truth of demolition and relocation in the observational, realist aesthetics, and to develop alternative modes of documentary subjectivity for representing the poor residents’ embodied knowledge and emotion. The use of an amateurish female voice-over in Sanggye-dong Olympics, and the casting of a male resident as an amateur documentarian who operates a video camera in Meishi Street testify to the extent to which video technology enabled the film-makers to develop the ‘participatory’ and ‘performative’ modes of documentary in which the residents could be empowered to speak for themselves. It is through the modes of subjectivity, this article argues, that the two political documentaries succeed in bringing into the public consciousness the interests and issues of the social actors who are neglected by the host countries’ official media and authorities.

History, Memory, and Ambivalence: Testimonio as Alternative Archive

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and was promoted as a way to extend the right of United States (U.S.) citizenship to Native, African, and Mexican Americans. In reality, the government reneged its responsibilities for federal protection of the rights of its new citizens, and constructed an empire that elevated Euro-Americans' social, economic, and class status, while diminishing the status of others. This article examines how the land grant adjudication process in postwar New Mexico formed a new political economy that adversely affected Mexicana property rights. As my primary source, I use testimonios from the Spanish Archives of New Mexico taken by the U.S. Surveyor General's Office from 1854–1890 to discuss how the testimonios are memories better categorised as an alternative historical archive within the officialised records. Thought of in this way, the testimonios counter traditional historical accounts that elide the importance of matrilineal links to the process of land acquisition in pre-American society, reveal the ambivalence of the land grant adjudication process, and serve as historical memories that reveal the position of Mexicanas as important actors in matters of property ownership, which in turn affected the way Mexicanos were represented within the space of the U.S. courtroom. Further, the testimonios reveal the complex relationship between marginalised and dispossessed Mexicana/o communities and the U.S. government.

‘Route Work’ through Alternative Archives: Reflections on Cross-Disciplinary Practice

ABSTRACT The Five Hundred Year Initiative stresses the value of cross-disciplinary perspectives in investigating the antecedents of contemporary southern African societies, with archaeological sources playing a prominent role in its associated projects. To produce effective histories, these projects require analytical attention to both the processes that gave rise to contemporary societies and those that shape history making in the present. In this article, I build on Paul Gilroy's notion of ‘route work’ (by comparison to ‘root work’) to explore the value and methodological challenges of constructing historical understandings that simultaneously attend to the dynamics of past cultural practice and the processes through which our understandings of those practices are produced. Drawing on examples from Ghana, I argue that a methodological engagement with the negotiated quality of historical understanding – an approach that brings into view our processes of ‘coming to know’ – lays the groundwork for an ethically engaged and responsive, at the same time as empirically grounded, understanding of past socio-historical processes.

Calcium isotope ratios in calcitic tests of benthic foraminifers

We analysed Ca isotope ratios of the infaunal foraminiferal species Cassidulina laevigata, Elphidium spp., Gyroidinoides spp., and Uvigerina peregrina as well as the epifaunal Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi over a depth–temperature gradient. The calcium isotope ratios of the benthic foraminifers' tests show a distinct anomaly around 4 °C. This anomaly is observed in both epi- and infaunal species, but there are also characteristic differences between both. The δ 44/40Ca characteristics of benthic foraminifers may be explained by the interference of temperature and carbonate chemistry of the fluid on Ca isotope fractionation. We suggest that Ca isotope composition of benthic foraminifer tests is dominantly controlled by temperature at temperatures higher than 5 °C, while in the temperature range below 5 °C, calcite saturation ( Ω Cc) becomes an increasingly important controlling factor, due to the non linear shape of the Ω Cc– δ 44/40Ca relation of actively transported calcium. The potential applicability of Ca isotope ratios in benthic foraminifers for reconstruction of either temperatures or δ 44/40Ca sw is limited by the complex fractionation pattern below 5 °C. However, due to the minor temperature dependence in the temperature range above 5 °C, benthic foraminifers might provide a possible alternative archive for δ 44Ca sw avoiding some uncertainties associated with planktic records (relocation, habitat/calcification depth, short time climate variability) as long as a defined bottom water temperature above 5 °C can be secured.

Methodologies: silences, secrets, fragments

The idea of archive crucially informs my thesis on images of Islam in South African media and culture. In repositories of authoritative texts the thesis tracked the dynamics that render Islam visible in South Africa. I examined official and parallel archives, finding images of Islam in overlooked and insignificant places such as cookbooks, jokes and stories and, through them, explored interior and resistant meanings. In the thesis I analysed novels, paintings, plays and poetry, and examined the patterns and emphases in the visual repositories on Islam in the South African National Library and the catalogue of the Museum Africa in Johannesburg. I looked also at what is lacking from such archives, conducting what Martin Hall called an ‘archaeology of absences’. I pointed to the existence of alternative archives of Islam in South Africa generated through forms of self-organization such as mosques that developed parallel and in opposition to official colonial institutions. Beyond documents, I accessed through interviews more evanescent occurrences such as jokes, visiting customs and burial rituals. Through interviews as well as analyses of recipe books I explored practices surrounding food. I offered these different ways of speaking about Islam not as the ‘true story’ but to show what lies beyond the view of Islam as picturesque and exotic.

Special Reviews Section: Archaeology on the ground: the memory practices of David Webb: Diggers Alternative Archive, website and photography by David Webb: www.archdiggers. co.uk/diggers/frameset.html

Special Reviews Section: Archaeology on the ground: the memory practices of David Webb: Diggers Alternative Archive, website and photography by David Webb: www.archdiggers. co.uk/diggers/frameset.html

Dust and Joys: A Tale from the Alternative Archives

Dust and Joys: A Tale from the Alternative Archives

Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature by Sonia Saldívar-Hull

402 WAL 36.4 WINTER 2002 Feminism on the Border: Chicana Qender Politics and Literature. By Sonia Saldivar-Hull. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 226 pages, $45.00/$16.95. Reviewed by Francine K. Richter Sul Ross State University, Rio Grande College, Uvalde, Texas In a daring contribution to contemporary Chicana feminist theory, Sonia Saldivar-Hull offers readers a significantly different text of literary and cultural criticism. She recounts her own very personal experience and development as the first child of a traditional and repressive (for the females) Hispanic family, through her young teenage years, and on to becoming the dutiful working wife of a medical student. In taking this particularly subjective approach, SaldivarHull opens herself up to possible complaints of unreliable methodology, but this is a necessary circumstance for the author, who states that “[a]s Chicanas . . . our specific experiences as working-class-origin, ethnic women under the law of the fathers undergird our theories” (12). Besides describing in depth her personal journey to political conscious­ ness, Saldivar-Hull atypically seeks out “alternative archives” and discourses in place of the sanctioned historical archives, many of which leave out women’s stories. She agrees with following feminist critical practices, such as gendered analyses of historical records, and she poses the difficult questions that earlier historians so often neglected. The alternative archives include such cultural spaces as “late-night kitchen-table talks,” gossip, rumors, and stories passed down from one female to another. The author explains that different methods must be employed when it comes to Chicana feminist criticism because race, gender, and the specificity of their existences demand an alternative approach. Saldivar-Hull’s brand of feminism was born and bred on the border (literally and figuratively) between the United States and Mexico in the deep Southwest. It developed because of a quite specific material experience and is never ahistorical . The concerns of brown women of this geopolitical area are vastly differ­ ent from those of Anglo-Saxon Protestant women who do not experience the constraints and oppressions peculiar to Chicana women’s moment and place in history. Anglo feminism does not begin to address these crucial issues for women of color. Perhaps one would have to live on the border to understand, but even as a White, urban, Northern-bred academic, I cannot help but share Saldivar-Hull’s assessment of Chicanas’ subaltern place in border society. Just last semester, one of my young female students could not finish her work because her parents saw no reason for her to continue her education when she was getting married and the husband would then be responsible for her support. The three Chicana authors whose work is discussed in detail by SaldivarHull likewise differ significantly from mainstream criticism and authorship. Gloria Anzaldua, for instance, advocates a “New Mestiza consciousness,” one that “illuminates how to enact a (border) crossing, from marginalized other to B O O K R E V IE W S 403 whole woman” (66). Her type of feminism occurs in “a borderland grounded in but not limited to geographic space” (66). Sandra Cisneros, too, is driven by a cultural, gendered imperative: by virtue of her own history, she is com­ pelled to record the previously ignored history of women of color on the bor­ der. One ofher literary acts of resistance is that the “borderlands” in The House on Mango Street is meant as anywhere Mexican Americans have gathered as a group, thereby extending the arbitrary borders that the United States observes politically. Helena Maria Viramontes seeks viable alternatives for women’s lives in her cuentos (usually “stories,” but here “cultural artifacts”). In her work, the concept of the Chicano family does not need to be erased; rather, it needs to be transformed and reworked. As another border literary artist, Viramontes embraces oral history and other “historias,” the tern used by Saldivar-Hull to describe forms of testimonio (personal witness). This project began for Saldivar-Hull in the 1980s, and one can tell from its depth and insight that it would take a great many years to articulate so strongly and lucidly the contemporary feminism of the border. & Call for Papers W E S T OF H ER E...