TheBeeKingdom

The Bee Kingdom fundraiser

Photo: The artist's mother, Hoda Abushady (ca.1930), at home in The Bee Kingdom, Egypt.


This initiative was funded on January 1, 2014 through Hatchfund:

www.hatchfund.org/project/the_bee_kingdom_archive

The Bee Kingdom archive (aka The Abushâdy Archive) includes the private papers and correspondence of Dr. A.Z. Abushady, examples of his scientific and literary publications, books from his personal library, illustrations, diagrams and patents for beekeeping inventions, published and unpublished poems, artworks by artists in his circle, manuscripts, radio addresses, librettos, ephemera, and photographs. Abushady was drawn to innovative gadgets like the handheld Kodak camera, and many of these photographs are 'snaps' taken by colleagues, family members, and Abushady himself to document meetings among poets and writers, or his progress in the laboratory and apiaries.

These materials were in turn preserved by Abushady's three children, Safeya, Ramzy, and Hoda, who strove to keep their father's legacy intact in the face of wars, displacement and death. My task has been to gather the pieces from each of their collections and organize them into one unified archive.

My ultimate goal is to digitize The Abushâdy Archive and make it accessible to historians and scholars. The first step was to secure and organize the physical archive. With support from contributors, I was able to bring all these materials together in one place, in the archive's current home in Brooklyn, NY, and to purchase archival storage boxes and sleeves to house them. Thanks to everyone who has supported this 3-year process.

The Archive: Collections and Counter-Collections - Middle East Studies Association 2014

 

2014 Annual Meeting - Middle East Studies Association

November 22-25, 2014 Marriott Wardman Park Hotel Washington, DC

Panel:

The Archive: Collections and Counter-Collections

Panel Sponsor: Middle East Librarians Association (MELA)

Organizer: Laila Shereen Sakr (aka VJ Um Amel)

Chair: Robin Dougherty

Discussant: Khaled Fahmy

In the contemporary world, there is an archival impulse at work that represents something palpable--an opportunity to provide a counter-collection, standing against the monumental history of the state. Such an impulse has resulted in new public archives, individual projects, digital archives (including digitization of old manuscripts, as well as collecting digitally-born information), fictitious archival projects, and collections of urban histories. This panel critiques historical information on the contemporary Middle East by engaging with independent archival projects that collect information currently under siege, in real time and place, as cultures change and are lost in conflict. Recent scholarship has taken the subject of the archive and investigated it as a cultural object in and of itself. From the Journal of Visual Culture to the Arab Studies Journal, both academic journals have dedicated their most recent issue on the archive. As Timothy Mitchell explains in Colonising Egypt, the practice of science and systems of ordering national standards are modern projects that enable governments to maintain discipline and surveillance. A cog in the colonial project, the science of documenting every political act reflected a "tendency of disciplinary mechanisms," as Michel Foucault has called these modern strategies of control "not to expect and dissipate as before, but to infiltrate, and colonise." Participants in the panel will discuss logic behind independent archives. How might they be engaging with the public and public institutions? Or how research that draws from the press and cultural ephemera rather than state documents and "official" archives tell a slightly different version of the story of modernism in twentieth century Egypt, for example. This panel will shed light on alternative appropriations of 'the archive' as a transformative site of knowledge production.

 

Papers
"The Bee Kingdom: An Accidental Archive." Presenter: Joy Amina Garnett

"A Sand Castle in the Tide: Qatar's Primary Sources."Presenter: Tammi Moe

"Archives of the Palestinian National Movement: A Battle Over the Production of History‬." Presenter: Hana Sleiman

"UMAM Documentation and Research." Presenter: Kelly Stedem

"Archivisme is a local disease." Presenter: Nadia von Maltzahn

 

Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Archive at NYU's Radical Archives Conference

Figures and Sphinx, Gizeh, c.1945. Courtesy the Abushady Archive. Presented in the paper "Joy Garnett: Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Family Archive."

 

Radical Archives Conference at NYU, April 11-12, 2014

Organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice, by which we mean: archives of radical politics and practices; archives that are radical in form or function; moments or contexts in which archiving in itself becomes a radical act; and considerations of how archives can be active in the present, as well as documents of the past and scripts for the future.

 

PANEL: No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving:

With artists Joy Garnett and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michelle Wong on her research at Asia Art Archive and Ian Alden Russell on his work with the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. Moderated by Steffani Jemison. Saturday 4/12, 4:45-6:00 pm

 

RadicalArchives.net is an online companion to the April 2014 conference at NYU, organized by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh of Index of the Disappeared and presented by NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute as part of their 2013-14 residency. The conference is co-sponsored by NYU's History Department, Moving Image Archive Program, and Archives and Public History Program, along with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Asia Art Archive in America, and media partner Creative Time Reports. The conference website is built to grow over time and serve as a resource for teaching, research and networking.

http://www.radicalarchives.net