Moving Archives
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published:17th Mar '26
Should be back in stock very soon
The image of the dusty, undisturbed archive has been swept away in response to growing interest across disciplines in the materials they house and the desire to find and make meaning through an engagement with those materials. Archival studies scholars and archivists are developing related theoretical frameworks and practices that recognize that the archives are anything but static. Archival deposits are proliferating, and the architects, practitioners, and scholars engaged with them are scarcely able to keep abreast of them. Archives, archival theory, and archival practice are on the move.
But what of the archives that were once safely housed and have since been lost, or are under threat? What of the urgency that underscores the appeals made on behalf of these archives? As scholars in this volume argue, archives-their materialization, their preservation, and the research produced about them-are moving in a different way: they are involved in an emotionally engaged and charged process, one that acts equally upon archival subjects and those engaged with them. So too do archives at once represent members of various communities and the fields of study drawn to them.
Moving Archives grounds itself in the critical trajectory related to what Sara Ahmed calls “affective economies” to offer fresh insights about the process of archiving and approaching literary materials. These economies are not necessarily determined by ethical impulses, although many scholars have called out for such impulses to underwrite current archival practices; rather, they form the crucial affective contexts for the legitimization of archival caches in the present moment and for future use.
"Archives are not only physical repositories and electronic entities, they are affective commodities with the power to move researchers and archivists who work with them. This thoughtful collection of essays occasionally touches on the gathering and transfer of archival materials, but its emphasis is less on the physical and more on the emotional: archives as agents of transformative change. The essays Morra (Bishop's Univ., Canada) has brought together explore various situations, for example, the removal of documents and books from a dying writer’s home to a university archive; the implications of a sale of a literary archive from its linguistic home in Ireland to the special collections of an American university; the absence or manipulation of voice and experience of black slaves in the records of Canadian fur traders. The final essay is particularly apt: a personal account of how a scholar came to grips with her own sexuality through the process of creating an online archive of the writings of another. This is not a practical text for archivists but a collection for anyone who wishes to explore what is elicited through working with archives. -L. J. Sherlock, Victoria University
"Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals." - CHOICE
"In opening up a space to consider affect in the creation of archives, including what Jennifer Douglas calls the “aspirational” archive, Morra invites the possibility for archival scholars to reflect upon their own aspirations for the archives they participate in creating-and how those aspirations inevitably become encoded into the archives themselves. Thus does the field move, and as it moves it stirs, and the silt aroused by that movement stretches over the gaps and the abyss."-Gregory Betts, Canadian Literature
"Moving Archives is a celebration of ethical collection and community or, as Kean words it in chapter five, kinship. Morra and the other archival theorists have tentatively charted the shifted boundaries in the field and found wider space for new and established voices. … Moving Archives shows us that, if we understand archives as Jennifer Douglas does – as post-mortem social lives – how and where we support their existence says everything about us." -Jocelyn Williams,University of Toronto Quarterly
ISBN: 9781771127134
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
232 pages