The Archival is Political: Introduction
by
Alexandra Southgate
On the Feminist Archive
The specter of “the archive” has loomed large in the imagination of feminist and queer scholars following the publication of Derrida’s Archive Fever in 1995. Since then, scholars have declared numerous “archival turns” in both feminist and queer studies and there has been a proliferation of archival projects devoted to preserving feminist and queer histories (Eichhorn 2013; Marshall and Tortorici 2022). At the same time, feminist scholars including Sadiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes have called attention to archives as institutions with the power to silence marginalized voices and create the very conditions of their marginalization. According to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay “the archive is a synergetic machine of imperial violence through which this very violence is abstracted and then extracted from the passage of time” (2019, 60). The technology of the archive is not all encompassing, however, as Carolyn Steedman writes, “you find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities” (2004, 45). These “stories caught half way through” are also assemblages of “people, places, policies, attitudes, environments, and materials across time” (Brilmyer, 2018). The archive, therefore, has a contradictory logic. Its power and authority is alluring to activist archivists interested in preserving the rich histories of women, queer folks, people of color, and otherwise marginalized groups who have so often been excluded from the historical record. Yet the very creation of such an archive produces new historical subjectivities and is, in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility” (1995, 52). What does it mean for diverse histories to be made intelligible to the historical record? What is gained, and what might be lost, in the process? And, perhaps most importantly, what exactly is an archive?
As a historian I spend much of my time researching in or thinking about archives–either for my doctoral research or my work with Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive. If you visit the website for Rise Up you will first be greeted with an “About” section that describes it as “a digital archive of feminist activism in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s.” Since 2014, the Rise Up collective has been digitizing materials including posters, buttons, publications, and pamphlets, and making them available online. I recently joined the Rise Up team first as an archival assistant and later as a volunteer. Since beginning this work, I have processed documents related to the exciting history of Canadian feminist activism, a history that is too often overshadowed by the United States. I have also been confronted with some of the core challenges that face feminist history and archival practice, which include deciding what qualifies as feminist activism deserving of inclusion in the archive.
Although there is a political and emotional desire on the part of the collective to accept any and all materials for the archive, there are practical limitations related to time and resources. It simply isn’t possible to infinitely expand the archive and limits must be set. But how does one place limits on a movement as broad as feminism? How does one attend to diversity and inclusion in the archive when many BIPOC activists, for example, didn’t always consider themselves feminists? These issues have become salient through my work at Rise Up, but they are not unique to this particular archive nor to archival practice itself. Debates over definition and inclusion have plagued not only feminist archives but feminist theory; after all, the archives are an extension of feminist thought and politics.
My experience working for Rise Up has put me face to face with feminist praxis in a way that I did not anticipate. As Joan Scott writes in “Archive Angst,” her rumination on the process of preparing her own papers for Brown’s Feminist Theory Archive, “the copious writing about the archive rarely addresses the way it is actually constructed; if it does take up the issue of its construction, it is about the use to be made of the archive by practicing historians” (2021, 108). Working for an archive as a historian has provided me insights into archival practice that were previously out of reach. My observations from working with Rise Up, as well as connections between this work and feminist theory, served as the impetus for this collection. In a common formulation that is echoed elsewhere, Carolyn Steedman writes that “The Archive is a place in which people can be alone with the past” (2001, 72). This sense of solitude in the archive erases the labor of not only the archivists and technicians that processed the materials, but also the people who donated them or created them in the first place. Although archival practice is never as solitary as Steedman's formulation, Rise Up is an example of a grassroots organization led by a collective. Its purpose is not solitary research, but community-building through history. Instead of viewing archives as static tombs into which the historian breathes life, I take the life of the archive as a constant.
Because Rise Up is a digital archive it also offers the unique opportunity to reconsider standard archival practice. Documents are organized not by their benefactor but by issue and organization. The documents’ digital form allows them to exist in multiple places on the website. A document concerning immigrant women’s organizing for fair wages, for example, might be listed on the pages for “Women and the Revolutionary Left,” “Immigrant Women,” and “Women and Labour.” This flexibility allows the archive to push through paradigms requiring stratification and bifurcation and allow the full messiness of feminist political action to be highlighted. Ultimately, the digital archive becomes a cyborg archive. As Donna Haraway writes in her “Cyborg Manifesto”: “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (1991, 144). Importantly, the cyborg is born out of liberalism and settler-colonial capitalism, the very practices for which and through which archival violences are produced. As Haraway continues: “Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other” (1991, 164). We might understand history as myth, and archive as tool: as the two constitute each other they simultaneously reveal their mutual impurities. Cyborg archives might allow historians to face feminist tensions head on rather than shy away from the complexities of this theorization. Archives might ask us to define and redefine politics and identity and assemble the facts of feminist history, even as such facts result in complexity more often than clarity.
The Archival is Political
The contributions to this edition of Rejoinder take up these issues, and many more, in their considerations of the myths and meanings of archives for feminist and queer studies. Opening the collection we have a series of poems from Victoria Bailey in which she considers the academic and personal effects of the archive. We might be used to thinking of archives as purely academic spaces for research; Bailey’s poems show the personal stories hidden in the archived documents and the “mess” that they can make. The theme of the personal in the archive is further elucidated by Janée A. Moses in her account of collecting oral history interviews with Amina Baraka. Moses gives us a look into the moment of the creation of archival materials and the contradictions and complications that this entails. Cinnamon Williams takes the complications of oral history even further in her narration of the limits of oral history. If oral history traditions have the potential to disrupt Western archival practice and “redeem the violence of the archive” what do we make of the refusal to participate? Do people owe us their stories?
Kim Hoeckele mines the archives of art history to stage a conversation between representations of women’s bodies. In doing so she crafts new archival collages that reframe well-known artwork. Christina Maraboutaki and Christoffer Koch Andersen also address the crafting of archives. Maraboutaki examines the creation of a digital MeToo archive by the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The increased digitization of our world has reshaped how activists operate through the widespread use of hashtags and digital campaigns. This has made the already complex issues of feminist archiving all the more difficult as archivists are faced with the challenge of preserving huge amounts of data. Anderson takes us deeper into the process of creating a digital archive and the potential of archival projects for the advancement of queer liberation. In closely examining the “archivability of trans bodies” he reframes archival practice as one of community and connection.
The contributions from Christine Stoddard, Georgia-Taygeti Katakou, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, and Apala Kundu all consider existing archives and their utility for researchers. Stoddard works with photographs from the Library of Congress to highlight the inadequacy of the archive in documenting the lives of women. She reimagines the stark captions found attached to photographs of unnamed women in order to help them regain their humanity. This also serves to remind us of the numerous losses in the archive because we cannot know the true experiences of these women even as their photographs are carefully stored away. Katakou examines the Greek publication Skoupa (Broom) and showcases the importance of feminist archival collections in helping us understand the international lineages of feminist history. Meanwhile, Lampert-Weissig showcases the pedagogy of teaching archival practice through snapshots from a graduate seminar, “Encounters in the Archive.” She highlights the feminist and queer potential of medieval collections and the utility of teaching students archival practices in order to showcase the materiality of history. Also delving into the uses of the archive for literary scholars is Kundu in her consideration of queer archiving in the Iconothèque Historique de l’Océan Indien (Historical Icon Library of the Indian Ocean). Kundu articulates the difficulty in locating the experiences of colonized and subaltern women and comes face to face with their images in the digital archive.
While many of the works in this collection consider the limits of archives, others work to expand what we think of as an archive. Vero Carchedi looks at poetry and art in order to reflect on the body as an archive. Through this interrogation of the body-archive Carchedi disrupts the evidentiary paradigm facilitated by traditional archives in order to move us towards a transformed archival practice. Josh Adair similarly looks into the spectral embodiment of an archive found in his grandmother's house. For Adair, family photos, uneasy memories, and indeed the whole world offer archival resonances. Meanwhile, Farrah Cato asks us to consider the basket as an archive. Describing the process of making baskets by which you must “break the memory,” Cato reflects on the meaning of memory and basketry and further expands the definition of archive. Finally, Lisa Bond uses contemporary newspapers, the kind of source that will one day be found in archival collections, as the material for her artwork. She highlights some of the headline worthy news of the 2020s and weaves them into facemasks using a template for homemade masks from early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so she makes our current moment an object of historical investigation.
Taken together, the works in this collection speak to the many and varied ways that the idea of “the archive” has enriched feminist and queer studies. They highlight key tensions and pitfalls while gesturing to the liberatory potential of history. Thank you to all of the contributors, Sarah Tobias and the entire Rejoinder team for making this collection possible.
References
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso.
Brilmyer, Gracen. 2018. “Archival Assemblages: Applying Disability Studies’ Political/Relational Model to Archival Description.” Archival Science 18, no. 2: 95–118.
Eichhorn, Kate. 2013. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 no. 2: 1–14.
Marshall, Daniel, and Zeb Tortorici, eds. 2022. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Scott, Joan W. 2021. “Archive Angst,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 11, no. 1: 107–118.
Steedman, Carolyn. 2004. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
