When They Have Their Own Historians

Gymnopedie, 1139 Bushwick Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11221

Thursday, Nov 6, 7–8:30pm

Memory as Resistance

When They Have Their Own Historians is conceived as a multimedia immersive installation and performance that seeks to excavate the buried, silenced, and fragmented histories of women of color in diaspora. This work begins from the recognition that memory itself is a political act. To remember in a world structured by violence, colonization, exile, and systemic erasure is already to resist the mechanisms of forgetting imposed by dominant powers.

The project positions remembrance as a form of autobiographical re-rooting: telling one's personal story beyond what has been permitted, taught, or required by authorities. Memory is an active practice of reclaiming the self, one's ancestors, and one's community. In this sense, the project stages memory as both counter-history and living insurgency: a process through which women of color become their own historians.

Diaspora and Erasure

Diaspora entails movement across geographies as well as the fracturing and remaking of memory. Diasporic bodies become spaces for negotiating national memory and identity, dynamic intersections where histories of loss, reinvention, and imagined futures collide.

For communities of color, migration is rarely voluntary or neutral; it is shaped by displacement, colonial economies, racialized labor, and survival under systemic exclusions. The dominant historiographies often treat these communities as appendices to the nation-state, their stories recorded only as footnotes to the grand narrative of modernity.

Against this backdrop, When They Have Their Own Historians refuses the erasure of diasporic women. It proposes that the memory of the marginalized is foundational, that the hidden lives, everyday labors, and embodied knowledge of women of color constitute the actual fabric of history. In them, we see the wounds of loss as well as the seeds of reinvention and the outlines of imagined futures.

The Body as Continuum

The project is based on the central principle that the body is a continuum. Long before institutions codify events into records, memory resides in flesh, in gesture, in voice, in sensory triggers that evoke what is unspeakable. Trauma is narrated and somatically inscribed, in scars, in breath, in the involuntary shudder when the past interrupts the present.

In this sense, the body becomes a vessel for what Boym calls imagined homelands: intimate, fragmentary geographies carried within, assembled from partial memory and affective resonance. By foregrounding the body as continuum, the project challenges the authority of textual and institutional history, situating women of color as living vessels of memory, transmitting histories across generations in defiance of being measured or pathologized.

From Wandering Womb to Wandering Story

The histories of women have long been tethered to oppressive metaphors: the "wandering womb," a discourse that pathologized women's instability and difference. When They Have Their Own Historians displaces this framework with an alternative: it is no longer a question of the wandering womb; it is the question of the wandering story.

These stories are survivals reinvented, wandering as a gesture of resistance, never as a symptom of loss. Like the reflective mode of nostalgia, wandering stories acknowledge fragmentation and incompleteness, while insisting on their power to reconstitute meaning in exile.

Sense Memory

The project insists that sense memory is social in character. To smell, to touch, to hear, resonances across communal histories. In the context of diaspora, sensory memory is the strongest thread tying displaced people to ancestors: the taste of food, the rhythm of a song, the textures of labor.

Yet sense memory also entails confrontation. It can rupture the present with the shock of an impossible past, reminding us that memory is volatile, unfinished, and unstable. Remembering unfolds as a becoming, remaking itself through rupture, survival, and the refusal of erasure.

Alternative Female Mythologies

To remember differently is to narrate differently. When They Have Their Own Historians proposes the creation of alternative female mythologies as frameworks for history. These mythologies emerge from cyclical, intergenerational, and embodied forms of knowledge.

In this sense, myth-making becomes an act of what Boym calls reflective nostalgia. This poetic, fragmentary counter-history honors grandmothers, migrants, caregivers, healers, and workers as the true carriers of continuity. It goes beyond restoring an idealized past, using fragments to weave a future of belonging.

Loss, Reinvention, and Imagined Futures

Loss marks the story with an aperture, an opening that takes the shape of absence. Diasporic life reveals that every rupture generates the conditions for reinvention. What is broken reconfigures itself in altered gestures, emergent languages, and newly forged rituals.

In this sense, memory operates as a laboratory of futurity, where fragments of the past are recollected and recomposed into outlines of possibility. The women once consigned to erasure return. Not as static figures of mourning, but as active interlocutors in the work of imagining otherwise temporalities.

The project navigates this tension: to bear the weight of grief while also harnessing it as raw material for invention. What surfaces are fragile yet insistent visions: futures delicately stitched from the remnants of memory.

The Immersive Space: Installation as Archive

The space itself becomes a diasporic body: a temporary home built from ephemeral traces of memory; an archive of the senses that gathers fragmented histories; a performative site where stories are enacted and transmitted, collapsing the boundaries between witness and participant. Like Boym's vision of post-communist cities as dynamic intersections of loss and reinvention, this immersive environment materializes memory as a site of ongoing negotiation and imagined futures.

The Politics of Remembering

To remember is to open toward futurity. This politics rejects the confinement of marginalized groups into "memory ghettos" and insists instead on shared spaces of encounter and transformation.

In this way, When They Have Their Own Historians enacts reflective nostalgia: it lingers in the past's fragments, cultivating a historical consciousness that is critical, insurgent, and open-ended.

Becoming Our Own Historians

When They Have Their Own Historians calls for women of color to reclaim the right to tell their own past. To remember is to resist erasure, to insist that what was once hidden is the proper ground of history.

The future of nostalgia lies here: in making visible the fragments that remain. To remember is to use memory as a lamp—casting light on the present, opening paths into the future.