Please join the NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar on Monday 10th December to discuss an essay coauthored by Cristina Vatulescu and Anna Krakus. “Foucault in Poland: A Silent Archive,” searches for the archival traces of Foucault’s reminiscence of a 1959 honey trap set up by the Polish secret police (SB) with the help of Foucault’s lover. Our research spanned over almost a decade and seven archives, including the SB archives. Its finds and no-hits lead us to reconsider Foucault’s call for an archeology of silence. The article was recently accepted for publication by Diacritics as a “contribution to Foucault studies but also theories of the archive more broadly.”
We will use the story as a starting point for a communal discussion of the meeting points between Eastern and Western surveillance and archiving theories and practices. Refreshments will be served. The event will start at 6.30pm in the Event Space at 244 Greene Street.
A version of Vatulescu's chapter is attached to this email. Feel free to skip the details of the archival research twists and turns (pages 7-23) if your interest is mainly theoretical. For your convenience, we put this section in italics. Please do not cite or redistribute.
Cristina Vatulescu is associate professor in Comparative Literature at NYU. Her book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford UP, 2010), a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, won the 2011 Heldt Prize and the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. She is also the co-editor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a Perspectives on Europe special issue on Secrecy (2014). Her articles have appeared in Diacritics, Comparative Literature, Poetics Today, Law and Literature, Film and Literature Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cristina is currently working on a project entitled Archival Revolutions: Medium, Embodiment, Silences.
For more details on any of the above, please contact Emily Foister (emf387@nyu.edu)
The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative aims to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists. It is supported by the Department of English, NYU.
More information at http://www.nyuenglish.com/culturesofwar