future

Destiny Made Manifest in a Pattern of Stars

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This could be the new flag of the United States of America. Fifty-one stars. In November 2012, Puerto Rico voted in a referendum to become the fifty-first state of the USA. The measure now awaits approval from the U.S. Congress. Whether the representatives of the fifty states will invite in Puerto Rico, currently a U.S. territory, depends, of course, on a number of factors: culture, taxes, how it would change the political dynamics of the country, among others. But there's another big deciding influence at play here, though it is less tangible, and that is how a fifty-first state would change the appearance of the U.S. flag. Why would that matter? Because the arrangement of the stars on the flag has everything to do with belief in Manifest Destiny. 

Archiving the Past, Archiving the Future

A stylized image of Bel Geddes' _Futurama_ exhibition.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Archives are by definition past-oriented.  The very act of “archiving” renders an object an artifact of a specific past, although its orientation within that past depends on the disciplinary practice of the archivist.  20th century archival studies have made considerable movements toward standardization, and alongside this standardization of archival methodologies comes an expansion of that which we consider worthy of being archived.  Thus, we no longer operate under the assumption that 20th century archives will be composed exclusively of objects from a distant, exclusively white Western patriarchal past—we compose queer archives, postcolonial archives, feminist archives, and, perhaps, in the case of Bel Geddes, even archives of the future.   Join me as I explore the idea of a future archive and its relationship to the archival ethos of the Harry Ransom Center, in part by exploring exhibition visitor’s own “visions” of the future.

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