"FOLLOW THE PERSON": Archival Encounters

Abstract

Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and critical essayist extraordinaire, Ammiel Alcalay’s intrepid work has always moved across geographic, chronological, political, and linguistic borders. “FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters gathers a dizzying array of texts by Alcalay written over the past fifteen years, all of them having something to do with archival materials. In Alcalay’s case, however, these archives range from more traditional, institutionally-held materials and personal collections to the use of his own experiences and memories as sources for redrawing cultural maps that have too long been divided along sectarian lines of one kind or another.

Moving from the Beats and the Black Arts Movement to the Middle East, “FOLLOW THE PERSON” recalibrates our sense of living history while offering new possibilities for encounters that have been relegated to oblivion or never even imagined. Culled from a variety of eclectic sources and contexts, encountering these essays together offers a completely different experience of Alcalay’s essays, one that argues for a methodology based on minutely recorded events and historical contexts, and for necessary human and cultural encounters that provide models for a new, reinvigorated critical vocabulary.

As Miriam Nichols writes in her Introduction, “Follow the tenuous threads in this collection of writings and you may end up at the looted National Museum in Baghdad during the American invasion, or in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where most Iraqi state archives wound up. You may find yourself at Bashcharshiya, the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, or in Palestine, on May 14, 1948. Maybe, if you are keen, you will pick up the thread that leads to 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, or perhaps you will stay in New York, rummaging through garbage cans with Diane di Prima, looking for journals and letters tossed out by a lover.” Whichever path you take, you will find multiple worlds, all rendered by Alcalay with light and compassion.