Description
"We've gotta get in to get out." ["[You]'ve got to get in to get out."] With this line from the British rock band Genesis, Roland Spiller sets the tone for Beyond the Archive, a collection that takes archives not as neutral repositories but as charged sites of power, memory, and imagination. To enter an archive is to submit to its conditions; what re-emerges is never quite what went in. The seventeen contributions gathered here, from literary criticism and performance studies to film analysis and oral history, trace the archive across its transcultural and transmedia dimensions: colonial documents and forensic records, textile counter-archives and migrant literary magazines, cinematic re-significations and embodied repertoires. Their geographical range spans Latin America - Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, Mexico - as well as Spain, Germany, Lebanon and Palestine, West Africa, and the Pacific, reflecting a shared conviction: that archives do not merely preserve the past but actively shape the futures of those who must negotiate their terms. This third and final volume of the Frankfurt Trans.Arch series is, fittingly, itself an archival act - at once a scholarly summing-up and a personal testament - closing with the last public lecture of historian Walther L. Bernecker. Dr. Roland Spiller ist Professor im Ruhestand am Institut für Romanische Sprachen und Literaturen der Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main.
