Professor Romeo García, University of Utah: Archives and (Decolonizing) Archival Impressions in Times of Modern/Colonial Technologies

With recent interest in delinking from and decolonizing Eurocentrism, this talk considers how a rhetorical, technological, and decolonial-centered analysis might afford more comprehensive versions of settler rhetorics and richer notions of the rhetoricity of their enterprise. Presenting on settler archival research conducted at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley Special Collections and Archives, García unpacks and spells out entanglements between rhetorics of modernity and logics of coloniality in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Putting forth a theory of archival impressions—entries imposed by some [things] or the ideas and ends of some [one] with the desire to cover over, impress new meaning, and reconstruct new places images and myths—García turns to the technology of settler advertisements to illustrate the invention of “the Magic Valley” and “Gringoland” that added to and strengthened a modern/colonial and settlerizing archive. Arguing the past continues to shape the present and that the present continues to reimagine the past, García appeals for the initiating of decolonizing archival impressions.

Romeo García is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. His research appears in College Composition and Communica-tion, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Across the Disciplines, and Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture. García is co-editor of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions (with Damián Baca), Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives (with Gesa E. Kirsch, Caitlin Burns, and Walker Smith), and Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Future (with Ellen Cushman and Damián Baca).