MMLA 2026 Call for Papers

"After the Archive"

Note: AV Not Supported*

In an era marked by converging crises — from ecological degradation and the digitization of memory to renewed political pressures on knowledge production — we invite scholars, teachers, artists, creative writers, and community leaders to reflect, in their research, classrooms, creative practices, and community engagement, on what it means to work after the archive. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, the archive is never a neutral repository of the past, but rather a site of institutional authority that governs the preservation, interpretation, and exclusion of historical traces, which is structured as much by what it defers or represses as by what it preserves and legitimizes. Read in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s work on discourse and authority, the archive emerges as a system of power shaped not only by who is permitted to speak at a given moment, but also by which records of that speech are allowed to endure. To work after the archive, then, is not simply to study what remains, but to confront the forces that govern preservation and erasure, shaping both the memorial past and present cultural discourse. 

The theme for this year’s Midwest Modern Language Association convention, After the Archive, explores the unstable and open-ended afterlives of documentation, repositories, and cultural memory: the silences, the gaps, the archival practices reshaped by climate risk, digital mediation, decolonial critique, and public intervention. This theme invites participants to examine the archival impulse across media, languages, and cultures, asking how literature, film, art, music, criticism, and pedagogy respond to — and increasingly reimagine — the power structures embedded in acts of collection, classification, narrativization, and memory. If archives have traditionally claimed to secure the past, what happens when archives are themselves transformed, threatened, or dismantled? What new practices emerge in the ruins of the archive — in digital interfaces and delocalized repositories, in subaltern oral histories and repressed cultural memories, and in dissident voices that contest institutionalized narratives while privileging noncanonical forms of cultural discourse? How do writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers, scholars, cultural historians, and community leaders remake archival legacies for futures marked by uncertainty, repair, and planetary interdependence? And how can acts of repair and restitution open space for futures not yet foreclosed — and what role might literature, teaching, and the humanities play in shaping them? 

In asking these questions, After the Archive adopts an expansive understanding of the “archive” and welcomes work that intersects with themes of reparative futures — investigations of how fields of literature, language, and culture engage with damage, care, and renewal — and planetary literacies — interpretive and pedagogical practices that read cultural texts across ecological, temporal, and geopolitical scales. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Counter-archives and archival refusal, including strategies of restitution, reconstruction, and the ethics of remembering;
• Literary, cinematographic, and visual engagements with archival silence and loss;
• Digital archives, metadata, and the politics of social visibility;
• Indigenous, decolonial, and diasporic archival practices across linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions, as well as archival afterlives in literature, film, music, and hybrid media;
• Archives under threat, whether from political censorship and oppression, climate change, or environmental degradation;
• The role of artificial intelligence in reshaping memory and documentation. 

*Installing and maintaining projectors and screens in the convention venue’s presentation rooms is cost-prohibitive, so the MMLA will not be supplying the AV equipment needed to support PowerPoint, Keynote, etc., slide projection at its 2026 convention.  Presenters interested in supplementing their spoken remarks with visual aids are encouraged to bring printed handouts to distribute to audience members attending their sessions.  Alternatively, presenters may wish to distribute QR codes enabling audience members to view a remote slide presentation on their mobile devices, as described in the YouTube video linked here.  Please direct all technical questions about such alternatives to the information technology support staff at your institution.