Archive Stories

by Burton, Antoinette; Ghosh, Durba (CON); Sahadeo, Jeff (CON); Robertson, Craig (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822336884
• ISBN10: 082233688X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-12-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them-about the effect that the researcher's race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives which are to be "found" there.Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan's newly formed Central State Archive, which censors the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives Nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely though the efforts of one family member. Still others explore how current events impact the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive-and what counts as history-as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized.Contributors: Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé SentillesAntoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she holds the Bastian Chair in Transnational and Global Studies. She is the author of Dwelling in the Archive and At the Heart of the Empire. She is the editor of After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nationand a co-editor of Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, both also published by Duke University Press. With Jean Allman, she edits The Journal of Women's History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories	1	(24)
Antoinette Burton
PART I Close Encounters: The Archive as Contact Zone	25	(132)
National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India	27	(18)
Durba Ghosh
``Without the Past There Is No Future'': Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan	45	(23)
Jeff Sahadeo
Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport	68	(19)
Craig Roberston
Mr. Peal's Archive: Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empire	87	(24)
Tony Ballantyne
A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories	111	(25)
Horacio N. Roque Ramirez
Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace	136	(21)
Renee M. Sentilles
PART II States of the Art: ``Official'' Archives and Counter-Histories	157	(140)
``What Is an Archive?'' in the History of Modern France	159	(25)
Jennifer S. Milligan
The Archive and the Case of the German Nation	184	(25)
Peter Fritzsche
On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive	209	(23)
John Randolph
Creating the ``Suffragette Spirit'': British Feminism and the Historical Imagination	232	(19)
Laura Mayhall
Archives of the Unbuilt Environment: Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Twentieth-Century Kohler, Wisconsin	251	(23)
Kathryn J. Oberdeck
Fiction's Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper's Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt	274	(23)
Marilyn Booth
PART III Archive Matters: The Past in the Present	297	(78)
In Good Hands: Researching the 1976 Soweto Uprising in the State Archives of South Africa	299	(26)
Helena Pohlandt-Mccormick
The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia	325	(26)
Adele Perry
The History of Killing and the Killing of History	351	(24)
Ann Curthoys
Select Bibliography	375	(6)
Contributors	381	(4)
Index	385