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"Important and timely, this fascinating collection of tales from a multitude of repositories and record offices removes all sorts of archives from the historian's grasp (though there are many extraordinary and brave historians writing here) and restores their meaning to politics and society, to the telling of individual and collective pasts."--Carolyn Steedman, author of "Dust: The Archive and Cultural History"

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Archive Stories

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................................ixANTOINETTE BURTON Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories.................................................................................................1PART I Close Encounters: The Archive as Contact Zone...........................................................................................................25DURBA GHOSH National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India...........................................................................27JEFF SAHADEO "Without the Past There Is No Future": Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan.............................................................45CRAIG ROBERSTON Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport............................................................................68TONY BALLANTYNE Mr. Peal's Archive: Mobility and Exchange in Histories of Empire...............................................................................87HORACIO N. ROQUE RAMREZ A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories..............................111RENE M. SENTILLES Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace.......................................................................................................136PART II States of the Art: "Ocial" Archives and Counter-Histories..............................................................................................157JENNIFER S. MILLIGAN "What Is an Archive?" in the History of Modern France.....................................................................................159PETER FRITZSCHE The Archive and the Case of the German Nation..................................................................................................184JOHN RANDOLPH On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive...................................................................................................209LAURA MAYHALL Creating the "Suragette Spirit": British Feminism and the Historical Imagination.................................................................232KATHRYN J. OBERDECK Archives of the Unbuilt Environment: Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Twentieth-Century Kohler, Wisconsin.....................251MARILYN BOOTH Fiction's Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper's Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt...........................................274PART III Archive Matters: The Past in the Present..............................................................................................................297HELENA POHLANDT-MCCORMICK In Good Hands: Researching the 1976 Soweto Uprising in the State Archives of South Africa............................................299ADELE PERRY The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia............................................325ANN CURTHOYS The History of Killing and the Killing of History.................................................................................................351Select Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................375Contributors....................................................................................................................................................381Index...........................................................................................................................................................385

Chapter One

BRITAIN AND INDIA

HISTORIANS LONG TO TELL their archive stories, but unlike anthropologists, sociologists, and even political scientists, our narratives of fieldwork have little purchase within the professional standards of our discipline, which demand a certain level of professional distance that makes history "objective," rendering the archive as a finite site of knowledge about the past. And yet historians' archive stories often reflect the process by which historical knowledge is gathered, narrated, and represented. Archival research is an important credential in the career of a historian, often making or breaking our claims to "truth" and positivism. In processing the so-called primary sources of the archives into the secondary sources used by other scholars and students of history, it is a largely inadmissible secret that our work is often shaped by archival conditions beyond our control, conditions such as whether the archivist or librarian is sympathetic or drawn to the project, whether the proposed topic or research is congenial to particular types of national narratives, and whether the nation-state in which we do our research is invested in preserving and protecting the records we need.

My archive stories are drawn from the radically different responses in the two nations in which I did research, showing the ways in which what seemed like a great project in Britain was a terrible, even unspeakable one in India. If there is a lesson in these anecdotes, it is that national narratives and identities remain strong features in the production of histories, particularly in the ways that histories are fashioned from the spaces and conventions of national archives and libraries. In spite of recent efforts to downplay the importance of the nation and look at our historical projects transnationally, the ways in which archives are national institutions that regulate access by scholars, both formally and informally, often structure the information historians are able to retrieve. In presenting a personal "ethnography of the archive," this essay examines the stories and advice that were offered to me in encounters that I had with people who inhabit the archive-archivists, librarians, and other scholars-as a way of exploring the national and political investments that many archives and archive dwellers maintain in spite of a quickly globalizing and transnational world.

This essay seeks to expand our definitions of the kinds of knowledges that archives produce by destabilizing the notion that archives are only places of impersonal encounters with printed documents. As Nicholas Dirks and Ann Stoler have argued, a complete ethnography of the archive examines the logic of the archive, its forms of classification, ordering, and exclusions. As well, however, I would argue that an ethnography of the archive should include accounts of our exchanges with the people we meet and dialogue with in the process of our research. Doing research in archives in which we are "foreign" (in one way or another) is particularly fraught. As Jeff Sahadeo shows in his essay in this volume, the archive is an important "contact zone" that brings foreign scholars together with indigenous scholars and archivists, often producing a confrontation over what counts as history. When historians research colonial histories drawing largely from documents that are housed within the archives of colonizing and...