With support from the Global Arts + Humanities (GAH) and Wexner Center for the Arts, Puja Batra-Wells (Associate Director of GAH) and Harmony Bench’s (Dance) edited volume, Archival Entanglements, will be released in autumn 2026 by The Ohio State University Press. This volume is the second in GAH’s series, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities.

Archival Entanglements arrives in the wake of the archival turn in the arts and humanities. What humanists call “the archive” has been challenged, deconstructed and reinvented, but the conversation about the archive is far from over. In this interdisciplinary collection, contributors from digital humanities, performance studies, labor studies, race and ethnic studies and more come together to shed new light on how objects, knowledges, environments, bodily practices and identities are entangled with the archive. 

Showcasing a range of approaches from traditional essays to artistic engagements, Archival Entanglements posits the archive as both a generative site of knowledge production and a constricted force of consolidation around dominant narratives ― essentially, as a complex web of theories and practices with which the arts and humanities are fundamentally entangled.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Contents

Introduction from editors Puja Batra-Wells and Harmony Bench 

Section I: Gaps, Erasures, and an Ethics of Recognition 

• The End of a World / As We Knew It 
  By Mimi Ọnụọha
• Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Archival Poetics: ‘Comfort Women’ Testimonies and Literary Justice in A Cruelty Special to Our Species 
  By Martin Joseph Ponce
• Marginalia 
  By Iñaki Bonillas
• Caring, Keeping, and Kinship Making: Unaffiliated Ancestors in the Space of the Archive 
  By Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
• Archival Instabilities: From Ephemerality to Newfound Significance 
  By Amy Shuman
• Archival Forethought 
  By Brian Eugenio Herrera

Section II:  Networked Memories and Minor Histories 

• Wearing Gay History: Understanding Queer Nightlife Histories with the Wearing Gay History Archive 
  By Eric Gonzaba
• Archival Encounters: Lesbian Newsletters and Rural Visibility 
  By Mariah E. Marsden
• Forest Listening Rooms 
  By Brian Harnetty
• Countering Environmental Narratives with Archival Latencies 
  By Nicole Wood
• Imagining Digital Bibliography as Archival Intervention 
  By Leigh Bonds

Section III: Ancestral Practices and Otherwise Archives 

• Indigenous Meaning Making, the Limits of Archives, and the Promise of Practice 
  By Michelle Wibbelsman 
• The Laws of Movement: The Natyashastra, Caste, and the Archives of Indian Classical Dance 
  By Anurima Banerji
• Labor History, Social Death, and the Birth of the Black Worker 
  By Franco Barchiesi
• What Else: Gesture and Glitch in What is a Better Life 
  By Rebecca Schneider
• Slow Scrape Event Scores 
  By Tanya Lukin Linklater with Prelude by Kelly Kivland
• mookii, agaasaa: poems 
  By Johannah Bird