Event Type
This panel explores how artists and scholars use non-linear storytelling to resist the dominance of white supremacy, colonial history, and cultural erasure. Linear narratives privilege coherence and permanence—qualities often aligned with the authority of the archive. By contrast, non-linear artistic practices and embodied actions open space for contradiction, silence, and multiplicity, aligning more closely with what Diana Taylor has called the repertoire: ephemeral, embodied, and improvisational forms of cultural transmission.
Panelists will share diverse approaches, from weaving with foraged plants and poetry to reworking archival fragments and theorizing family narratives. While the archive holds documents, objects, and records, the repertoire emphasizes performance, gesture, and the living act of telling. We ask: How can creative practices activate both archive and repertoire, not as opposites but as entangled modes of reckoning with history?
Our conversation will consider how weaving, collage, and performance-based methods disrupt the authority of “heroic” family stories, how gaps in the archive can be transformed into generative sites of inquiry, and how community-based projects can bring repertoire into dialogue with archival traces.
This session will be of interest to artists, scholars, and cultural workers engaged with social practice, memory studies, and racial justice. By weaving together practice and theory, the panel will highlight how art can counter the rigidity of whiteness and create spaces for accountability, repair, and new ways of belonging.