Experiencing yourself as impossible is a form of precarity; you are made differently vulnerable.

For many Black, brown, and Global South people, this is felt knowing, and it is experienced as impossibility. The field has understood oral history’s goal as documentation. But in this moment—when the spaces where we gather and meet our ways of knowing are being defunded, censored, and cut off from one another—oral history needs to do different work. 

Who holds the knowledge of an otherwise for oral history? In this session we apprentice to the elder forms of oral history, thinking from inside Black and Caribbean memory practices and Global South relational ontologies. These practices built architectures that could host our possibility in the meanwhile of foreclosure—carnival, ritual, gathering—oases within which we could otherwise be. There we met ourselves free and occasioned freedom for each other. This too is oral history: a relational memory practice. 

Lensed through relational ontology, remembering does not dictate a past; it gathers the relations that constitute who we are in the present tense of being. To be remembered is to be born a relation. Remembering is an enactment of ontological authorship. What architectures of remembering might this occasion for oral history?

Listening, in my practice, is an encounter that occasions another person’s possibility. It has taken form as interviews, group dialogue, ritual, and otherwise architectures of communal remembering. Across these spaces, Black, brown, and Global South practitioners and keepers of everyday archives have come to me reaching for a practice of listening that could host their mothers, their communities, their kin, yet feeling a tension with the field's best practices—a shared hunger for a different kind of hospitality.

I propose a listening praxis from that otherwise ground—an attunement to listening as decolonial practice in intimate space. Not one designed to ‘include’ otherwise subjectivities or ways-of-being in relation, but one for which that relational ontology is the ground on which the whole praxis stands. The practice does not welcome our subjecthood; it is organized by it.

This session is figured as an enactment of the practice: an encounter with your own ways of knowing and with one another’s—an invitation to think and speak from your geographies of memory, toward what this attunement might occasion for your listening and oral history work.

About Nyssa Chow

Nyssa Chow is a memory worker, oral historian, artist, and writer from Trinidad whose practice thinks from inside the memory practices of the Caribbean and the Global South. Her work attends to the poetry of ordinary lives: the ways of being and knowing held by those who live at the margins of agency. Through installation, social practice, and documentary art, she builds otherwise architectures for remembering: histories at the scale of intimate disclosure, place-based, communal, embodied, relational.

She served as Interim Director and Core Faculty of the Oral History Masters Program (OHMA) at Columbia University, was the 2019–2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Humanities Council for four years. With documentary filmmaker Stephanie Owens, she co-founded the DocX Fellowship at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, a funded residency for documentary practitioners that has supported artists across the Global South and diaspora. She was Co-Director of the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project at Columbia University . Her civic artwork Trace: A Memorial has been recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives, the New York State Senate, and the New York City Council, and The Story of Her Skin was awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History.

www.tellinghistories.com