Analog Absences: Cassette Tapes and the Materiality of Forgetting

What effect does it have on us when the voices of the dead resurface? How can we engage with the traces and voices of our families in once-lost, analogue, and dead media? This presentation is an ethnographer’s reflection on the discovery of decades-old family oral histories recorded on cassette tapes. The cassette is an outdated and frail, yet durable medium for preserving voice. Through the voices of her maternal ancestors and the imperfect medium of a tape player, she explores Nuyorican family histories of forgetting and the pain and comfort found in women’s silences and their refusals to remember.