'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.

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 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.' - from back cover.

Includes a select biography and an index.
Access level

Onsite

Location code
REF.BUA
Language

English

Keyword
Publication/Creation date

2005

No of pages

396

ISBN / ISSN

9780822336884

No of copies

1

Content type

anthology

Chapter headings

Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories - Antoinette BURTON

Part I Close Encounters: The Archive as Contact Zone

National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India - Durba GHOSH

'Without the Past There Is No Future': Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan - Jeff SAHADEO

Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport - Craig ROBERSTON

Mr. Peal's Archive: Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empire - Tony BALLANTYNE

A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories - Horacio N. ROQUE RAMIREZ

Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace - Renee M. SENTILLES

Part II States of the Art: 'Official' Archives and Counter-Histories

'What Is an Archive?' in the History of Modern France - Jennifer S. MILLIGAN

The Archive and the Case of the German Nation - Peter FRITZSCHE

On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive - John RANDOLPH

Creating the 'Suffragette Spirit': British Feminism and the Historical Imagination - Laura MAYHALL

Archives of the Unbuilt Environment: Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Twentieth-Century, Kohler, Wisconsin - Kathryn J. OBERDECK

Fiction's Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper's Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt - Marilyn BOOTH

Part III Archive Matters: The Past in the Present

In Good Hands: Researching the 1976 Soweto Uprising in the State Archives of South Africa - Helena POHLANDT-MCCORMICK

The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia - Adele PERRY

The History of Killing and the Killing of History - Ann CURTHOYS

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