This talk builds on the collaborative project “Archive and Genre” (with Florian Sedlmeier) which posits and explores a dialectic between the two: Both archives and genres are social institutions, with their capacity to function as institution depending on ritualized ways of gathering, grouping, storing and circulating cultural memories, and modes of belonging; and with both using their status as institution to implement social hierarchies. Our working hypothesis is that conjoining the two enhances our understanding of both. Definitions of archives as physical sites quickly reach their limits when confronted with the placelessness of genres, as “fields of knowledge” (Dimock 2007) that always undercut their own categorization. This is especially helpful in conceptualizing diasporic archives or counter-archives that have a complicated relation to place. Conversely, grounding genre in archive can help to challenge the still dominant (post)structuralist paradigm of genre theory: Considered with archive, notions of genre as ordering practices and social institutions gain the media-material basis that remains underexplored in theories of genre. But what if archives and genres are not only institutions, but also infrastructures? What changes, and is possibly gained, when viewing them and their dialectical relation this way? In answering these questions, I turn to recent developments in the study of institutions and infrastructures, as well as to my own work on “race as infrastructure” and the entanglement of genre within that infrastructure, both in erecting and in contesting it. And I will especially turn to William Still’s The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes, and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others Or Witnessed by the Author: Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers of the Road to elaborate my case.

Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Reading for Democracy (Metzler 2025), Belonging and Narrative (transcript 2018), and Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007). Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Narrative, Parallax, Studies in American Naturalism, Amerikastudien/American Studies and ZAA. She is a member of the DFG-funded Research Group “Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply,” where she leads the project “‘Race as Infrastructure’ and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance.” Together with Philipp Loeffler, she is currently co-editing two special issues: “After Contemporary Literature” for American Literature, and “What was Contemporary Literature? Or: The End of Periodization as We Know It” for Post45.