Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory : Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

by Blouin, Francis X., Jr.

• ISBN13: 9780472114931
• ISBN10: 047211493X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-04-03
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, artifacts of culture, and places of uncovering, archives provide tangible evidence of memory for individuals, communities, and states, as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. By assigning the prerogatives of record keeper to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. Far from being mere repositories of data, archives actually embody the fragments of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. The essays in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memoryconceive of archives not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies. Francis X. Blouin Jr. is Professor of History and Director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History, University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	vii
PART I. Archives and Archiving
Introduction	1	(3)
``Something She Called a Fever'': Michelet, Derrida, and Dust (Or, in the Archives with Michelet and Derrida)	4	(16)
Carolyn Steedman
The Problem of Publicite in the Archives of Second Empire France	20	(16)
Jennifer S. Milligan
Not Dragon at the Gate but Research Partner: The Reference Archivist as Mediator	36	(7)
Kathleen Marquis
Between Veneration and Loathing: Loving and Hating Documents	43	(11)
James M. O'Toole
Archiving/Architecture	54	(7)
Kent Kleinman
``Records of Simple Truth and Precision'': Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control	61	(28)
Joan M. Schwartz
PART II. Archives in the Production of Knowledge
Introduction	85	(4)
Out of the Closet and into the Archives? German Jewish Papers	89	(12)
Atina Grossmann
German Jewish Archives in Berlin and New York: Three Generations after the Fact	101	(5)
Frank Mecklenburg
Medieval Archivists as Authors: Social Memory and Archival Memory	106	(8)
Patrick Geary
The Question of Access: The Right to Social Memory versus the Right to Social Oblivion	114	(7)
Inge Bundsgaard
Past Imperfect (l'imparfait): Mediating Meaning in Archives of Art	121	(13)
Nancy Ruth Bartlett
An Artifact by Any Other Name: Digital Surrogates of Medieval Manuscripts	134	(10)
Stephen G. Nichols
The Panoptical Archive	144	(7)
Eric Ketelaar
Archival Representation	151	(18)
Elizabeth Yakel
PART III. Archives and Social Memory
Introduction	165	(4)
Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory	169	(13)
Terry Cook
Creating a National Information System in a Federal Environment: Some Thoughts on the Canadian Archival Information Network	182	(11)
Laura Millar
Archives, Heritage, and History	193	(14)
David Lowenthal
How Privatization Turned Britain's Red Telephone Kiosk into an Archive of the Welfare State	207	(8)
Patrick Wright
Archives: Particles of Memory or More?	215	(4)
Joan van Albada
Lookin' for a Home: Independent Oral History Archives in Italy	219	(6)
Alessandro Portelli
The Public Controversy over the Kennedy Memorabilia Project	225	(12)
Robert M. Adler
Classified Federal Records and the End of the Cold War: The Experience of the Assassination Records Review Board	237	(8)
William L. Joyce
``Just a Car'': The Kennedy Car, the Lincoln Chair, and the Study of Objects	245	(12)
Judith E. Endelman
PART IV. Archives, Memory, and Political Culture (Canada, the Caribbean, Western Europe, Africa, and European Colonial Archives)
Introduction	253	(4)
Memories of Colonization: Commemoration, Preservation, and Erasure in an African Archive	257	(10)
Frederick Cooper
Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form	267	(13)
Ann Laura Stoler
The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895--98)	280	(11)
Rebecca J. Scott
Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean	291	(10)
Laurent Dubois
Redemption's Archive: Remembering the Future in a Revolutionary Past	301	(20)
Paul K. Eiss
Documenting South Africa's Liberation Movements: Engaging the Archives at the University of Fort Hare	321	(12)
Brian Williams
William K. Wallach
``The Gift of One Generation to Another'': The Real Thing for the Pepsi Generation	333	(10)
Ian E. Wilson
Social History, Public Sphere, and National Narratives: The Social Origins of Valencian Regional Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Spain	343	(10)
Monica Burguera
The Influence of Politics on the Shaping of the Memory of States in Western Europe (France)	353	(8)
Paule Rene-Bazin
The Role of the Swiss Federal Archives during Recent Politico-Historical Events and Crises	361	(7)
Christoph Graf
Television Archives and the Making of Collective Memory: Nazism and World War II in Three Television Blockbusters of German Public Television	368	(14)
Wulf Kansteiner
PART V. Archives and Social Understanding in States Undergoing Rapid Transition (China, Postwar Japan, Postwar Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans)
Introduction	379	(3)
Revolution in the Archives of Memory: The Founding of the National Diet Library in Occupied Japan	382	(11)
Leslie Pincus
The New Masters of Memory: Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Postcommunist Bosnia-Herzegovina	393	(9)
Robert J. Donia
Writing Home in the Archive: ``Refugee Memory'' and the Ethnography of Documentation	402	(15)
Penelope Papailias
Qing Statesmen, Archivists, and Historians and the Question of Memory	417	(10)
Beatrice S. Bartlett
The Role of Archives in Chinese Society: An Examination from the Perspective of Access	427	(9)
Du Mei
Archives and Histories in Twentieth-Century China	436	(7)
William C. Kirby
Archives and Historical Writing: The Case of the Menshevik Party in 1917	443	(8)
Ziva Galili
Russian History: Is It in the Archives?	451	(8)
Abby Smith
Archiving Heteroglossia: Writing Reports and Controlling Mass Culture under Stalin	459	(7)
Serhy Yekelchyk
Ethnicity, Memory, and Violence: Reflections on Special Problems in Soviet and East European Archives	466	(14)
Jeffrey Burds
Hesitations at the Door to an Archive Catalog	480	(10)
Vladimir Lapin
The Historian and the Source: Problems of Reliability and Ethics	490	(7)
Boris V. Ananich
Contributors	497