Archive Stories : Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History

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 that are “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 severely limits 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 through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on 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 Sentilles Annotation Despite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with themabout the effect that the researchers 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 that are 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 Uzbekistans newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits 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 through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on 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 archiveand what counts as historyas 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 Ramrez, Jeff Sahadeo, Rene Sentilles Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Antoinette Burton - Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories 12 Part I - Close Encounters: The Archive as Contact Zone 36 Durba Ghosh - National Narratives and the Politics ofMiscegenation: Britain and India 38 Jeff Sahadeo - ‘‘Without the Past There Is No Future’’: Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan 56 Craig Roberston - Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport 79 Tony Ballantyne - Mr. Peal’s Archive: Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empire 98 Horacio N. Roque Ramírez - A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories 122 Renée M. Sentilles - Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace 147 Part II - States of the Art: ‘‘Official’’ Archives and Counter-Histories 168 Jennifer S. Milligan - ‘‘What Is an Archive?’’ in the History of Modern France 170 Peter Fritzsche - The Archive and the Case of the German Nation 195 John Randolph - On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive 220 Laura Mayhall - Creating the ‘‘Suffragette Spirit’’: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination 243 Kathryn J. Oberdeck - Archives of the Unbuilt Environment: Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Twentieth-Century Kohler, Wisconsin 262 Marilyn Booth - Fiction’s Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper’s Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt 285 Part III - Archive Matters: The Past in the Present 308 Helena Pohlandt-Mccormick - In Good Hands: Researching the 1976 Soweto Uprising in the State Archives of South Africa 310 Adele Perry - The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia 336 Ann Curthoys : The History of Killing and the Killing of History 362 Select Bibliography 386 Contributors 392 Index 396 Despite the importance of archives to the subject of history, there has been very little written about actual encounters with them. This anthology compares scholarly findings from around the world to comment on the creation, definition, and use of archival evidence in the writing of history Edited By Antoinette Burton. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [375]-379) And Index.