The establishment of the CUNY Encampment Archive is grounded in the Five Demands made by the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment:
- Divest! Immediately divest from ALL companies complicit in the imperialist-zionist genocide, including weapons, tech and surveillance, and construction companies. Commit to full financial transparency regarding CUNY’s institutional investments.
- Boycott! Ban all academic trips to the Zionist state, encompassing birthright, Fulbright, and perspective trips. Cancel all forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements, and research collaborations.
- Solidarity! Release a statement affirming the right of the Palestinian people to national liberation and the right of return. Protect CUNY students and workers who are attacked for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza and in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Reinstate professors who have been fired for showing solidarity with Palestine.
- Demilitarize! Demilitarize CUNY, Demilitarize Harlem! Get IOF and NYPD officers off all CUNY campuses, and end all collaboration, trainings and recruitment by imperialist institutions, including the CIA, Homeland Security and ROTC. Remove all symbols of US imperialism from our campuses: Rename the Colin Powell School of Global and Civic Leadership at CCNY and reinstate The Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur Community and Student Center!
- A People’s CUNY! We demand a fully-funded, free CUNY that is not beholden to zionist and imperialist private donors! Restore CUNY’s tuition-free status, protect the union, and adopt a fair contract for staff and faculty.
Betrayed by chancellors, college presidents and provosts, and the whole host of university administrators who make it their job to suck all radical energy out of the student body and professoriate, who attempt to make the People’s University a panoptical and carceral university through surveillance on and offline, on and off campus, and by calling in private and state police to trample us underfoot, we are making an archive.
We are making an archive to sustain the spirit of the encampment that was established at City College, City University of New York (CUNY) on April 25, 2024, to call for CUNY’s divestment from the genocidal zionist colony of Israel; to remember the cause of the encampment, which is the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of all colonized and oppressed people of the world, including the Indigenous peoples upon whose land CUNY is built; to inscribe the encampment into history, to the utter shame of City College President Vincent Boudreau and others who once believed in liberation but have made themselves cops; and to carry the spirit of the encampment into new sites and new works until liberation is achieved.
In those Spring days on the Quad, we read, spoke, chanted, ate, slept, cried, and fought together. And of all the lessons we learned there, this is foundational to the archive: we cannot wait on the university, and we cannot trust the university. Even as we occupied the Quad, we were collecting the material traces of our movement because we suspected the university would try to stamp out our calls for justice. The CUNY Encampment Archive is a maroon space, “an expression of a fundamental pessimism about the colony’s capacity to improve and to do so in a timely fashion” (Yannick Marshall). We are taking the fight into the realm of historiography, decamping to the archive.
The CUNY Encampment Archive is an operation in the “undercommons,” that fugitive space Harney and Moten describe: “not unitary, but connecting, disconnecting, disappearing and reconstituting, as needed and possibly endlessly,” this archive is an information undercommons, a network of people, materials and practices whose aims are to sustain the encampment and evade the university, to “sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, … to be in but not of” (Harney and Moten).
CUNY has received a $2 million grant for the creation of its institutional archive in the name of “a recent upsurge of interest in CUNY’s history as it relates to diversity, social mobility, and social movements” (Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory, CUNY Archives). But CUNY has a history of conveniently disappearing movement records (see Conor Tomás Reed’s New York Liberation School on the Morales/Shakur Center). It is hypocritical to fund and platform archives of older protest movements while violently suppressing the current one. To trade on the university’s reputation as a liberatory institution while sicking the pigs on the people who constitute the university is perverse, cynical, and ignorant of the lessons the archives themselves hold.
The risks the university poses to the memory of our movement are demonstrated by the recent seizure of confiscated encampment materials by a Columbia University archivist. When questioned about provenance, the University Archivist said: “material was taken into custody by public safety… [who] handed that over to us at our request.” As Columbia University Apartheid Divest made clear in their response, “CONFISCATION IS NOT CONSENT.”
The materials generated by the CUNY encampment are as unsafe in the university as the students and other community members who generated them. Cognizant of this fact, our mission is to protect these materials from administrative sanitization and misappropriation. They will be deposited inter alia in the Interference Archive, an autonomous organization specializing in the preservation and activation of social movement materials.
Beyond its covert collection, the CUNY Encampment Archive is fugitive and insurgent information praxis because it utilizes archival know-how across and beyond the university: to work in coalitions for the preservation of movement documentation; to share skills and knowledge with care and consideration; to resource others to combat disingenuous narratives emanating out of the CUNY administration; to train our comrades in digital and analog techniques of obfuscation, protection, and counterveillance to prepare them against the surveillant state and the familiar zionist bullying tactics of doxxing and blacklisting; and to mobilize archival records towards the realization of The Five Demands.
We call on all comrades of the encampment to share with us materials that memorialize the life of the encampment including its organization, administration, defense, and cultural and scholarly life, for example:
- Zines
- Posters
- Photographs
- Poetry
- Oral histories
- Speeches (transcript or audio)
- Schedules/event descriptions
- Social media posts/comments (we can help facilitate)
- Other organizing documents
Material containing any identifying information (names and faces) must demonstrate consent from all parties, except cops and administrators who should be on record for their brutality. If you have concerns about sensitive materials, please still contact us. We can help you store these materials safely.
Submit to: urgentarchive@protonmail.com
Our encampment has become a testament now, a commitment – a contemporaneous place for memory-work, for historiography, for archive. We remember; and in remembering, we honor those martyrs who have been subject to all forms of zionist annihilation. We must continue, scatter, reconvene, retrace, divert, coalesce—we must utilize all methods of direct and deferred action that enunciate our resolve against the violent suppression of dissent by the CUNY administration. They are afraid: they are committed to war. But “war on the commitment to war breaks open the memory of the conquest” (Harney and Moten), and we are not afraid. When administrators collaborate with state forces to harm students, they mirror the colonial logic that has served to oppress Palestinian life for these hundred years, and in doing so reinscribe the meaning of our resistance. A Free Palestine dismantles nations, crosses borders, breathes liberation, cites vigorously – the memory of conquest is the fractured becoming of liberation through social history: a vulnerability, an entanglement, a desire, a love for the people.
As we fight to end our institution’s complicity in this genocide, we must be vigilant in our documentation practices. We must not compromise our privacy and safety, and we must be conscious of shifting terrain – in the coming years there will be revision, debate, and cooptation. The CUNY Encampment Archive is a coalition working in the information undercommons, an “archive in ethical motion” (Reed), a living repository for liberation.
Divest! Boycott! Solidarity! Demilitarize! A People’s CUNY!
Free Palestine!
References
Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory, “About,” CUNY Archives, 2024, https://cunyarchives.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about/
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Columbia University Archive Theft, Instagram, 9 July 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C9N3FehyXBp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, The Five Demands
Harney, S. & Moten, F., The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013
Interference Archive, https://interferencearchive.org/
An Information Undercommons
Marshall, Y., “An Appeal – Bring the Maroon to the Foreground in Black Intellectual History,” Black Perspectives, The African American Intellectual History Society, June 19, 2020 https://www.aaihs.org/an-appeal-bring-the-maroon-to-the-foreground-in-black-intellectual-history/
Reed, C.T., New York Liberation School, Common Notions Press, 2023.
