Monthly Archives: March 2017

American Studies, Contemporary, Culture, Text and History, Gender and Sexuality

YouTube, iPads, and Videotape: archives of HIV/AIDS activism

Featured image: Living With AIDS (1987-1999), Gay Men’s Health Crisis records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

by Dan Udy, LAHP/ AHRC PhD researcher working on “Going Viral: Queer (Re)Mediations in the YouTube Decade”

When Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard began filming interviews for the ACT UP Oral History Project in 2002, the history of HIV/AIDS activism was largely consigned to videotape. Having aligned with the emergence of handheld camcorders, it was the first political movement to be documented on video and from within its ranks: amateur recordings, artist tapes, and independent TV productions all formed a staggering cultural archive that tracked how marginalized communities took healthcare, research, and advocacy into their own hands during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

NYPL ACT UP Oral History iTunes - Ann Northrop
Veteran activist and broadcaster, Ann Northrop, NYPL ACT UP Oral History Archive

For over 20 years these tapes were consigned to personal collections and institutional archives such as the New York Public Library (NYPL), where the Manuscripts and Archives Division holds the most extensive public collection of such videos in the world. Here, facsimiles of original tapes could be watched on monitors, but the analogue nature of these materials made it difficult to circulate them beyond the library’s walls. Continue reading YouTube, iPads, and Videotape: archives of HIV/AIDS activism →

20th - 21st Centuries, Culture, Text and History, Modernism

On the trail of Doris Lessing

by Lara Feigel, Reader in Modern Literature

My research over the last few years has taken me to some unlikely places. You wouldn’t expect to find the papers of the very British novelist Rebecca West in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or the wartime diaries and letters of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene in Austin, Texas. It’s odd spending a day in London in the Blitz and then emerging out of the air-conditioned archive into the Texan heat. One evening I even found myself being taught to two-step by a cowboy alongside a couple of other British academics.

But the most adventurous research trip I’ve been on was to Zimbabwe, where I went in August on the trail of Doris Lessing. Lessing grew up in Southern Rhodesia, as it then was, on a farm in the bush. She then moved at the age of eighteen (in 1937) to the capital city of Salisbury (now Harare) where in the space of the next decade she married twice, had three children, devoted herself to communism and wrote the novel that would make her name.

The Grass is Singing, first American edition cover, 1950.
The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing, first American edition cover, 1950.

My books seem to be becoming increasingly personal. I still tell students that it’s the text that counts and that it’s important not to use the biography as a kind of code-breaker, enabling us to work out the intention or ‘true’ meaning of the text. But I’ve abandoned my early conviction that the life is irrelevant to the work, and have started to think that often it’s the intersection between the two (the way that the work is shaped by the life and, perhaps more interestingly, the way that the life is shaped by the work) that I have most to say about. With Lessing, though, I’ve decided to take the risky step of making it autobiographical as well as biographical, bringing myself into the narrative. Continue reading On the trail of Doris Lessing →

20th - 21st Centuries, Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

From Broadcast to Podcast: Reflections on Radio, Resistance and Legacies of the BBC World Service

by Sejal Sutaria, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow, English Department, King’s College London, and Pragya Dhital, PhD (2016), Religions and Philosophies Department, SOAS

My journey into radio research began when a series of happy accidents led me to discover the ‘British in India Oral Archive’ at the British Library, SOAS, and Imperial War Museums. The interviews here were conducted by history writer Charles Allen, best known for his books on Indian colonial history, Rudyard Kipling, and Tibet. As someone working on a project about how the global circulation of migrants, capital and ideas shaped Indian resistance to colonialism and fascism, my access to these first-hand accounts of life in India during the forties led me to link ideas of literary life-writing with oral history. When the World Service Project at King’s invited proposals from researchers working on radio, Elaine Morley and I decided to organise the ‘BBC and the World Service: Debts and Legacies’ conference.

Continue reading From Broadcast to Podcast: Reflections on Radio, Resistance and Legacies of the BBC World Service →