Montage-based poetics and archival hauntology are mobilized to expose how postwar border-making, US empire, and neocolonial governance fracture nation, family, and subjectivity into migratory “orphan memories,” where grief becomes both historical method and political resistance. Minor-language practices (Deleuze/Guattari), Glissantian opacity, and anti-assimilationist translation/nontranslation dismantle the “naturally convincing” authority of documentary and official narrative, reconfiguring witness and solidarity across time’s traumatic loops toward the fragile proposition that peace remains thinkable.

Archives—whether state repositories, search engines, or leak platforms—are purposive, power-laden assemblages whose omissions, access regimes, and ranking systems actively manufacture historical legibility and political legitimacy. By mobilizing Gadamer’s productive “prejudice” and Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the text frames interpretation as an inescapably situated, ideologically mediated practice in which digital personalization, censorship, and curated disclosures (Snowden/WikiLeaks) convert truth-claims into contestable narratives where meaning is governed less by facts than by interpretive control.