Spotlight
Interviews with authors of new books on migration and mobility
Gina Caputo interviews Cristina Vatulescu about the book Reading the Archival Revolution Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024)
About the author
Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford UP, 2010) won the Heldt Prize and the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. She is also the co-editor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a Perspectives on Europe special issue on Secrecy (2014). Her most recent book is Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford UP, 2024), and she has started work on a new book project entitled Arts of Attention: A Literary Seed Bank.
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About the interviewer
Gina Caputo is a second-year Master's student in NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement program. She is an interdisciplinary (im)migration researcher who is concerned with the essential dignity, right to self-determination, and mobility of people on the move. Her research focuses on the U.S. and Italy, with an emphasis on how law and bureaucracy impact people's lives. Outside the classroom, Gina works as an immigration paralegal and organizes with Yonkers Sanctuary Movement. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College. You can find more about Gina's work at linktr.ee/ginacaputo.
Gina Caputo: The book is as much a meditation on reading as it is an exploration of declassified Soviet secret police archives. In the archives, you encounter rumors, censorship, literary fiction, informant reports, interrogation transcripts, and bureaucratic marginalia; photographs, film stills, even an x-ray. You structure each chapter around a different "reading challenge": silences, mediums, fictions, and data. How do you deal with these challenges?
Cristina Vatulescu: Many archives are multimedia. In some ways the secret police archives are hybrid or multimedia on steroids, because the preservation requirements that we usually have in archives that keep photographs away from text, or x-rays, etc., here are overwritten by forensic imperatives that require keeping all these materials together. One of my case studies is the secret police investigation file of a 1959 Romanian bank heist. It contains all sorts of text: wiretapping transcripts, investigation records, and confiscated novels. It also contains family photographs, identity photographs, state photographs, and a reenactment film that the secret police made, in which they cast the arrested suspects themselves.
I argue that the secret police archives make meaning and wield power not within one medium, and not even within neatly separated multimedia, but through intermedia: the crafted collusion of different mediums. A photograph in a secret police file doesn't make its point unless it has a caption, right? It could be someone's lover that you see in a photograph, and for the police it could be a criminal. This connection between word and image is really important, posing a real challenge to our specialized, very disciplinarily specific methodologies. I take inspiration from contemporary artists and filmmakers in Eastern Europe to devise technologies with which we can reclaim this archival hybridity for our own reading purposes.
GC: Your book investigates archives in various locations (Romania, Poland, France, the former Soviet Union) and languages. What have you learned in this process that might help guide future migration researchers?
CV: Important migration documents can be found in these and other hostile archives. There have been many forced mass migrations, deportations, and relocations that are most extensively documented from the point of view of the state/those carrying them out.
In the book, I look at the files that the Romanian Securitate (secret police) dedicated to the German minority and their mass exodus from Romania to Germany in the 1980s. This was a minority that had been there for over a thousand years. It's probably in the secret police documents that we have the most comprehensive statistics, as well as really granular information about how people made decisions about leaving their home. In wiretapping transcripts, you have people's conversations around the kitchen table about what made them decide to emigrate. I look at the 46-volume "problem file" on the Germany minority and files of individual writers who went through this emigration process.
In dealing with files located in archives in different parts of the country, or in different countries, and multilingual files, collaboration is key. One of my chapters is co-authored with Anna Krakus, who did the research in the Polish IPN archives. For the chapter on Herta Müller and the German minority, I got help from my husband and his family.
Lastly, my book's main grounding in declassified Eastern European archives shows that a transnational peripheral perspective on Soviet and Russian centers of power yields not just access, in cases where Russian archives are now often closed, but also fresh insights and the potential to dislocate the long-unquestioned Russocentrism at the heart of Russian, Eastern European, and even Eurasian studies.
GC: Visiting the secret police archives, you encounter prison interrogation transcripts, informant reports, and surveillance documentation on people like Herta Müller, Michel Foucault, and Monica Sevianu. How do you prepare yourself for these visits?
CV: One of the most obvious ways to prepare is to learn the jargon and the history of these archives and these institutions so that you can decipher their specialized language. Secret police archives have different kinds of files: personal files focused on one individual; agent files for informers; and "problem files" covering specific questions. Some of the Romanian Securitate's problem files concerned minorities, literary circles, and Radio Free Europe.
You can't ever stop at the deciphering stage. It's easy to become complicit in the secret police's ways of reading and representing people. Their language tends to bleed into our language, which carries really important consequences as to how you look at people, for example, how you could look at a minority as a "problem."
We all bring strategies that we've honed through our lifetimes to the archive room. I bring everything I've learned in literary studies to the table: my early training in deconstructive reading is really important to deconstruct the power of these documents. There's also close reading, distant reading… different documents and voices require very different approaches. When you read an interrogation transcript, you have to read in a paranoid, hypercritical way of the secret police, and you have to try to do some reparative reading for the sake of people represented there, yourself, and your readers. So it's really bringing everything you've got to the archive.
Watching people coming to the archives to read documents related to their families, I've noticed certain gestures. The way that people sometimes bend down to look at a document reminds me of the way that people bend down at graves.
GC: Can you speak about the sensory aspects of the archives?
CV: When I take my students to the archives, one of the first things they note is what a powerful sensory experience it is to encounter the bodily traces of people who may be long gone: their handwriting, their fingerprints, their photographs, the way that they folded a paper or an envelope… People talk about getting goosebumps in the archive.
Oftentimes as we become professionalized, we either become more numb to this, or we put up a facade, or a shield, and retreat into a cone of objectivity, which I think is quite fictional. Archives remind us of something that digital and even print readings make immaterial and invisible: the embodied encounter between traces of others and our own embodied, perceiving body that reading is. Secret police archives do that at a very intense level. There is a long history and tendency of overlooking the body in the archive, the archived body, the perceiving body. I think there is a real ethical, political potential in admitting and even tapping into this embodied encounter that reading can be. I developed a practice of embodied polyphonic reading, which works against this illusion of a transparent, unaffectable, objective reader.
GC: Current fiction seems preoccupied with archives, which hide earth-shattering revelations or hold back supernatural forces. Your book shows that secret police archives hold fewer secrets than we might imagine. You examine the Romanian Securitate archive for documents regarding author Herta Müller, who believed that her personal file had been partly destroyed. You conclude that her file seems incomplete because agents routinely overlooked women and left many acts of violence, torture, and harassment unrecorded. What do you make of the distance between what we imagine these archives hold and their actual contents?
CV: The two chapters about silences are also really about expectations. I find something that Ann Stoler also finds in colonial archives: these archives and the powers that created them were much less omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, than people have imagined. They're often full of hesitations, muttering and stuttering, and agents' frustration. That's interesting. At the same time, how does this help the people who lived their lives thinking that they were followed by this omniscient regime, and who made decisions on what to tell their families based on the fact that there might be a wiretapping device in their home?
People who were in the secret police's power tend to over-estimate that power, even Herta Müller, whose novels are some of the most amazingly nuanced representations of living under a police state. When it came to her own file, she over-estimated, and I think she also indulged the kind of terrified fantasies that people have about their own files. The same thing with Foucault: he's the father of archive theory, and his understandings of the archive are of course in his theoretical texts extremely sophisticated. When it came to his expectations of what would be in his Polish secret police files, or how he would be followed, he's as full of clichés and as simplistically terrified as the next guy.
GC: Who do you hope will read this book, and what kind of impact would you like it to have?
CV: People who work in hostile archives, whether in Eastern Europe or in colonial contexts, are my direct audience. More broadly, this book is about the challenges and potentials of reading, at a time when the experience of reading is changing so drastically. Ultimately, I hope that anyone interested in our present reading crisis might be interested in this book. It's a book about reading documents and fictions and each other, conceiving of these three as a continuum rather than distinct realms.
You can purchase the book here.
You can RSVP for the book launch on February 4 here.