Embodying archives: using comics in archival research

Rachel Rys (2019) argues that comics are valuable for feminist scholarship because they insist on the embodiment and situated position of the author, they can dialogically incorporate multiple and conflicting voices, and they represent time in non-linear ways that enfold past, present and future, local and global, personal and systemic - disrupting norms of knowledge production and academic writing. This paper reflects on the production of a collage research comic as a way of articulating the embodied practice of archival research, specifically research engaging with theatre and performance archives, as part of my research work-in-progress on cartoon theatre - an approach to performance that emerged in the alternative theatre movement of the mid-1960s to early 1990s, which appropriated cartooning as a visual mode and the structure and iconography of comics. Drawing from the work of a growing number of practice-based illustration researchers who use illustration to engage with archives (to uncover and reconstruct hidden histories, work through the contradictions, multiplicity and silences of archival records, and enliven archival material for wider audiences), I argue for the affordances of comics in visualising the process of archival research, conveying the materiality and polyvocality of archival sources, and activating archival material in ways that enable 'solidarities between past and future‘ (McManus in Kat 2023, p.50).