No archive will restore you

At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci’s summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself. “I am in love with this book. It is so smart, so lucid, so necessary, so honest, so compelling, so edifying, so terrifying, so poignant, so wise. No archive may restore us, but Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times.” “If Gramsci proposes the task of archiving – and analyzing – the detritus that history has deposited in us, Julietta Singh has a counterproposition for what to do with that depository. What to call her method: Anarchivist? Gynarchivist? Though steeped in theory, it’s adamantly corporeal, and deeply moving. Returning to various crime scenes, she examines the traces left upon her body by ravages historical, political, physical and sentimental. But she also courageously accounts for the shit she herself produces: ‘I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.’ Attending carefully, even lovingly, to all that’s come into and out of her body – food, pain, flesh, life, feces, feral moans, poetry – she invites you, reader, to take stock of the fecundity of your own dis-ordered archive.”