Curating the Past, Weaving the Future: Decolonial Feminist Politics of Time and Memory

How does desire shape the world? How do people act on their embodied desires to understand the past and envision the future? These questions are at the center of my dissertation, which brings together insights from a six-year participatory research collaboration with the Toj Coman, Guatemala women’s collective and my experience as a librarian and a student on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. I bring together theorizations of storytelling and embodiment with Indigenous feminist writing on desire and refusal to understand how stories are curated politically to create desirable futures, to imagine the world otherwise. This dissertation is split into three stand-alone research papers and stills from a digital exhibit created in collaboration with the Toj Coman Guatemala women’s collective between 2018 and 2019. The first paper, “Mujeres Tejedoras del Conocimiento: Mam Maya Women Curating Past and Present to Weave the Future in Guatemala” discusses the product and process of Photovoice and exhibit curation work with the Toj Coman women’s collective, drawing on feminist geography, Indigenous theorizations of desire and refusal, cuerpo-territorio, and writing on colonial patriarchy. In the second paper, “Body of Evidence: Time and Desire in Embodied Archives,” I bring what I learned from my work with the Toj Coman collective to UNC’s campus and Wilson Library. Drawing on two examples from Carolina, I argue for a view of archives as webs of relations whose objects and knowledge are animated by the actions, interactions, and desires of individual actors, communities, and institutions across time and space. The final paper in this dissertation, “Woven Futures: The Politics of Textile Exhibition, Preservation, and Embodied Practice,” was coauthored with Communication Studies PhD Candidate and textile artist Amrut Mishra. We write about weaving as future-oriented and embodied work, a process of transformation that can be flattened, made dormant, and disembodied through archival or museum display. The stills from the digital exhibit, “E Qya Chmolte Ojtzbil: Visiones del Colectivo de Mujeres Toj Coman, Guatemala,” tell the story of the Toj Coman women’s collective through their own photography, textile arts, and words translated into Mam Maya, Spanish, and English.