[Commlist] CfP Archives of Indian Cinema: Methodologies, Creativities and Urgencies

*Archives of Indian Cinema: Methodologies, Creativities and Urgencies*

De Montfort University (UK), Savitribai Phule Pune University (India), 
Loughborough University (UK),

Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd October 2022

In person: Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune

This conference is part of the UKRI UK-India funded project /Creative 
Archives: Producing, Preserving and Showcasing Transnational India Film 
Heritage/(https://www.ukri.org/news/ukri-india-announces-new-initiatives-during-uk-pms-visit-to-india/), 
which aims to produce a number of public engagement events to scope 
creative ideas on how to think about archives through co-creative practices.

Archives, for a long time, have been conceptual, critical and, 
certainly, methodological spaces and terrains for historical pathways of 
research across a range of disciplines in the Humanities and social 
sciences. Much like in many disciplines, the term archive and archives 
has been proven to be elastic and flexible in terms of what they form 
and how they are formed. However, such flexibility inevitably poses the 
problem of how archives are constituted, what is the responsibility of 
archivists and what are, in light of the ever-changing panorama of 
Indian cinema, the policies to make and preserve film history.

Ines Schaber (2019) in /Notes on Archives/, dedicated to 
archival practices and methods, draws on a photographic collection from 
the Wadi Ara Valley archive in Israel to reflect on how visual archives 
can shed light on forgotten stories, as well as how archives can 
inherently produce lacunas and silences. By reflecting on the archive as 
a space of lacunas and consecutively of possibilities, this conference 
seeks to bring together the first round of conversations pertaining to 
archival practices, archival urgencies and the development of visible 
and invisible networks pertaining to film heritage. This network will 
include collectors, family collectors, citizen and community collectors 
and more institutional bodies to address unvoiced histories of Indian 
cinema. Equally, the conference aims to address also the methodological 
urgencies (Michelle Castwell 2021) beyond the standard liberal archival 
solution to build a framework that reassess hetero-patriarchal 
supremacies and inequalities within the realm of film heritage of India.

Unsettling dominating narratives and the centrality of how archives are 
formed around collections, and how they produce traditional narratives 
of Indian history across multiple institutions, this conference will 
interrogate how power – social, political, and institutional – is 
deployed in archival context in order to build critical understanding of 
how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledge and 
human subjectivities.

We invite contributors to broadly interrogate how far can we go to 
define archives of Indian cinema as elastic and flexible?

The paper's aim should be to explore the critical and creative 
approaches to archives of Indian cinema, both institutional and 
non-institutional. We would particularly welcome papers that will be 
able to engage with questions pertaining to restorative Indian cinema 
histories, creative histories, non-extractive methodologies, 
interdisciplinary approaches, and silences and absences in Indian film 
heritage.

We would like to welcome papers interested in presenting on the 
following indicative themes:

  * Material culture, paratexts and archives
  * Family collections
  * Citizen archives of Indian cinema
  * Silences and absences in archives
  * Economies of collections
  * “Special” collections (the special of special collections)
  * Trash archives
  * Neoliberal archives
  * Decolonisation and archival practices
  * Digital archives and digitization
  * Creative approaches to archival studies and strategies
  * Unpacking bias in the study of archives
  * Institutional archives
  * Inequalities in the archives
  * Building and undoing archives
  * Reparative archives
  * Consuming archives

    The list of themes provides an orientation for the authors, but it
    does not intend to be an exhaustive list.

    How to apply:

    Please send a 250-word abstract, including a biographical note, to
    Dr Monia Acciari ((monia.acciari /at/ dmu.ac.uk)
    <mailto:(monia.acciari /at/ dmu.ac.uk)>) and Dr Madhavi Reddy
    ((madhavirk /at/ unipune.ac.in) <mailto:(madhavirk /at/ unipune.ac.in)>) by the
    *20th July 2022*.
    Should you have any queries regarding your submission, do please get
    in touch with us by (mailingCreative_IndianCinemaArchives /at/ dmu.ac.uk)
    <mailto:(Creative_IndianCinemaArchives /at/ dmu.ac.uk)>And
    (dmcsunipune /at/ gmail.com)

    Early submissions are encouraged. The selection panel will inform
    you if your abstract has been accepted by the end of August 2022.

    This is an in-person conference, so that we can go back to
    interacting personally with all the participants, except under
    exceptional circumstances, which we will evaluate on a case-by-case
    basis.


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