#alternative archives

So if Jon and Georgie are swapped in the au, then I assume what happens with Melanie in the og happens to Martin, right? Or does anything play out differently in the au with Martin?

your alternate archives comic inspired me to write an au that i've now written over 4k words on omg, your art is so cool

hiiiiii just wanted to say that I absolutely adore the way you draw Melanie. I am a humble lesbian and the one you did of her in Alternate Archives of her in business casual did things to my heart.

Your tags for Slaughter!Melanie said that the Alternate Archives would feature her.

[Michel-Rolph] Trouillot has observed of history that “what matters most are the processes and condi-tions of production of narratives,” and examining these processes and conditions reveals “the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others” (25). When institutionalized through hegemonic sites of power such as legal and religious apparatuses, testimony, along with its claims on history and memory, can be purged of its critical epistemic and its reparative potential, not to mention its creative and poetic power. As such, the making and maintenance of alternative archives is necessary to offset the power imbalances in traditional histories. The Farming of Bones grants epistemic authority to oral narratives as well as imaginative narrative modes, which coalesce with corporeal testimony to form The Farming of Bones’s novelistic archive.

[Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones] crafts its testimonial archive by privileging what Diana Taylor terms the “repertoire” in the production of subaltern historical archives. The “repertoire” includes a range of non-scriptural practices, varying from oral stories and gestures to dance, cooking, and ritual prayer (20). Distinct from this “so-called ephemeral repertoire” is the “archive of supposedly enduring materials,” which includes written documents, buildings, maps, archeological remains, literary texts, and so on (19). “Archival memory” has traditionally been privileged over the “embodied memory” of the repertoire in the hierarchy of knowledge, granted hegemonic epistemic value, and mythologized as unchanging (19–20). Yet, as Taylor’s lengthy study demonstrates and Danticat’s novel dramatizes, this Eurocentric model, which delegitimizes many other forms of knowledge production and recording, is not only colonialist but also inaccurate because “[e]mbodied and performed acts [do indeed] generate, record, and transmit knowledge” (21). In The Farming of Bones, the oral stories told by Haitian laborers and the bodies they use to express their testimonies provide accurate testament against the state’s repression and disappearances. I argue that the novel enacts the ways in which imaginative, oral, and embodied modes of communicating and recording collectively generate testimonial histories.