Center for the Humanities

Spring 2021

Ephemera

Pamphlets, photos, postcards, pixels, sketches, scribblings, notes, newspapers, bits, bytes, zines, memes, clouds … the forms of ephemera that define and mediate everyday life are myriad and multifarious (the Encyclopedia of Ephemera catalogues over 1,000 types). Transient and fluctuating by design, they are also fragile, fleeting, insubstantial, and ever-shifting. Easy to discard, yet often cherished and collected as souvenirs or mementos, they materialize the mutability of memory, while challenging the capacities and contingencies of media storage. How might our conceptions of the past, present, and future shift when we move from monumental objects and hegemonic sites of analysis to ephemeral ones? What happens to our modes and means of narrating and recording cultural events when we shift our attention from the permanence of traditional archives as sites of memory and knowledge production, and as sources of state, legal, social and economic authority, to focus on the fleeting, the forgotten, the happenstance, the affective, the sensory? What furtive connections—and missed or misconnections—are prompted by the circulation of ephemeral texts and objects in unofficial, heterodox, neglected, marginalized, minoritarian, and queer counter-archives? In this semester, we invite ruminations on the roles of the haptic, sensory, transitory, ornamental, occasional and incidental in producing new—even if (and especially if) fleeting—socialities, and disrupting old ones.