The first article in this special issue of CTR starts in a cool air-conditioned room in a Calcutta public archive, far removed from the intense humidity and the afternoon sun outside its protective state-sponsored walls. It is in this space that the archival visitor opens a nineteenth-century scrapbook, the fragile pages letting go of the grip of the powdery, now-disintegrated glue that once locked its contents in place. Today, more than a century later, these remains spill onto the desk, activated by the curiosity of the scholar, who is enthralled by the materials in her hands. We might ask whose lives will be outed through this archival visit, and whether the positionality of the archivist herself will be outed in tow. How has she come to have access to this protected and well-ventilated space? What will the exposures of this visit mean to the lives of those who produced the scrapbook and what will it mean for her own life and scholarship? This critical acknowledgement of the interdependence between the lives of those buried in archives and the lives of scholars and artists who breathe life into them is central to the enquiries that have been brought together in Outing Archives, Archives Outing.Archives are dominantly understood as white, Western, heteronormatively gendered endeavours, and, in the context of South Asia, the property of caste privilege. This special issue critiques such received notions of archives, with a view to theorising them instead as always already embodied sites through which histories and practices can be interrogated, critiqued, and rewritten, rather than simply replayed. In this, the editors are keen to consider 'outing' as a decolonial tactic and methodology that, through a challenge to varied prevalent hegemonies, opens up alternate and embodied possibilities through which histories
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Peca is based in Berlin, Alexandra Pâzgu in Giessen. To make use of Romanian-American playwright Saviana Stănescu's terms, immigrant authors constantly live 'on the bridge of inbetweenness: negotiating between two cultures, […] two cities […], between the West and the East', in a world of 'hyphenate[d] identities ' (in Modreanu 2019). This complexity is paralleled by the situation of Romanian theatre directors: many of the canonical figures have achieved their international careers in exile (such as Lucian Pintilie, Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Șerban), whilst the most innovative Romanian artists of today (the likes of Mihai Măniuţiu, Gianina Cărbunariu, Radu Afrim, and Radu Jude) are operating as truly transglobal artists (Modreanu 2020). It is crucial to stress, however, that irrespective whether these dramatists and theatre makers actually live in Romania at present, their work is rooted in and greatly fuelled by their experience of being brought up in Romania, and is regularly published and produced in their country of origin. Some of these playwrights continue to express themselves in the Romanian language, in addition to which many of them also write in the languages of their adopted countries (not unlike fellow Romanian-born author Eugéne Ionesco); Matéi Visniec, for instance, produces multiple versions of the same text whereby he essentially engages in an act of self-translation. The work of several authors, including Alexandra Badea and Saviana Stănescu, is translated into Romanian by other important literary figures (such as Eugen Jebeleanu and Alina Nelega), thus generating synergies between authorial voices and artistic preoccupations. Furthermore, the recently founded Teatrul Dramaturgilor Români (Theatre of
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