Toward a performative epistemology of the archive: archival enactment as Rum futurity

Abstract

This article maps the alternative archives of the Rum community, those that do not fully align either with national mnemonics or the minority’s dominant archival politics. I demonstrate how the Rum minority performs and enacts its archives—what I define as archival enactment—in order to claim grassroots agency in its mnemonic preservation. Despite their sociopolitical and cultural significance and their important potential for the study of archival science, the Rum minority’s archival practices have been almost entirely ignored in the scholarship. Rum enacted archives call for a methodological shift from what the archive is—which is a definitory inquiry—to what the archive does and what worlds its transference constitutes—which is a question regarding archival performativity. Drawing upon rigorous multi-sited archival and ethnographic research, I show how the Rum minority performs its archives not just as documents of the past in need of interpretation but, most importantly, in the present as part of its envisioning and enacting of alternative futures. Blurring the boundaries between everyday performance, as expressed in familial and community settings, and artistic performance, as expressed in theatre, Rum archival enactment offers a great site for developing a dialogic practice of archival research that suspends the power differential between the archive and the researcher. I thus propose a performative epistemology for studying the archive that employs performance not only as archival content but also as transference and production.