Cari Carpenter
West Virginia University
Cari M. Carpenter is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University, where she is also a core member of the Native American Studies Committee and Interim Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She has published three books: The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Public Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864-1891, co-edited with Carolyn Sorisio (University of Nebraska Press 2015); Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (University of Nebraska Press 2010); and Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (The Ohio State University Press, 2008).
The object, the text, the database: how might archival sources and searches generate a classroom climate that values students’ engagements with nineteenth-century modes of information preservation and destruction? In what... [ view full abstract ]
The object, the text, the database: how might archival sources and searches generate a classroom climate that values students’ engagements with nineteenth-century modes of information preservation and destruction? In what ways might incorporating archival work into the classroom provoke students’ difficult yet necessary collaborations with the past, with each other, and with their current sociopolitical climate? In a recent issue of American Literary History, Matt Cohen argues that such ventures into the archives of American cultural studies may serve as “platform[s] for difficult collaborations” to “help us struggle against the rifts that seem increasingly to threaten human justice and happiness” (443). This roundtable seeks to untangle the “difficult collaborations” located within and generated by the archives, including those surrounding acquisition, organization, transcription, and access, in order to foster a classroom climate of inquiry and critical literacy—one capable of unearthing the roots of sociopolitical injustices. We contend that the literary and cultural studies classroom is an essential node within C19 archival “information ecologies” (Thomas Augst, 2017), ecologies based on collaborations and networks that can spur students’ roles and responsibilities within their own social, cultural, and political climates. The classroom, we maintain, animates the evidence-based critical thinking that emboldens students to become conscientious actors in these climates.
Panelists discuss the experience of incorporating C19 archives into the classroom, projects that requires students to evaluate sources and to substantiate arguments of reckoning variability. In “‘Diving into the Wreck’: Teaching the Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Archives," Cari Carpenter argues that these archives' varied and often unexpected materials (newspapers, clothing, even hair) provoke classroom conversations about the methods and ethics by which we should navigate these objects’ histories. The materials not present are just as important as those that are; Carpenter discusses her students’ confrontations with archival silences as part of difficult – or even refused – cross-temporal and cross-cultural collaborations. These collaborations become students’ entry point into ongoing issues surrounding American Indian sovereignty, rights, and claims to the land and its environmentally responsible stewardship. These archives may include more than just their materials.
