The Melodramatic Archive

Melodrama is often faulted for granting visibility while withholding it at the same time. Manuel Vogelsang argues that American writers and artists turned this double bind into a method for constructing a usable past. Spanning two centuries of literature, film, and photography, from Poe and Hawthorne to Willa Cather, Terrence Malick, Todd Haynes, and John Dugdale, he reads self-reflexive melodrama as a theory of the archive. He shows how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the erasure of queer lives are enacted formally as well as physically – and how artists have turned these strategies against their oppressors.