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

409 Pages·2005·1.92 MB·English

by  Antoinette Burton (ed.)

Archive Stories

Edited by Antoinette Burton
s
Archive Stories
facts, fictions, and the writing of history
Duke University Press Durham & London
2005
∫ 2005 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Dante by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on
the last printed page of this book.
for d. h. b.
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dedicated historian
fabulous storyteller
beloved father

Contents
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Acknowledgments ix
antoinette burton Introduction: Archive Fever,
Archive Stories 1
part i
Close Encounters:
The Archive as Contact Zone 25
durba ghosh National Narratives and the Politics of
Miscegenation: Britain and India 27
jeff sahadeo ‘‘Without the Past There Is No Future’’:
Archives, History, and Authority in Uzbekistan 45
craig roberston Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing
the Archive and the Passport 68
tony ballantyne Mr. Peal’s Archive: Mobility and
Exchange in Histories of Empire 87
horacio n. roque ramírez A Living Archive of Desire:
Teresita la Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino
Community Histories 111
renée m. sentilles Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace 136
part ii
States of the Art:
‘‘O≈cial’’ Archives and Counter-Histories 157
jennifer s. milligan ‘‘What Is an Archive?’’ in the
History of Modern France 159
peter fritzsche The Archive and the Case of the
German Nation 184
john randolph On the Biography of the Bakunin
Family Archive 209
viii Contents
laura mayhall Creating the ‘‘Su√ragette Spirit’’: British
Feminism and the Historical Imagination 232
kathryn j. oberdeck Archives of the Unbuilt Environment:
Documents and Discourses of Imagined Space in Twentieth-Century
Kohler, Wisconsin 251
marilyn booth Fiction’s Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper’s
Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt 274
part iii
Archive Matters: The Past in the Present 297
helena pohlandt-mccormick In Good Hands: Researching the 1976
Soweto Uprising in the State Archives of South Africa 299
adele perry The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession,
and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia 325
ann curthoys The History of Killing and the Killing of History 351
Select Bibliography 375
Contributors 381
Index 385
Acknowledgments
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this book is the result of many people’s willingness—their eager-
ness, even—to tell me their archive stories. I wish to thank not only all
the contributors, but also everyone who shared their accounts of what it
is like to encounter an archive, struggle in and with and against it, and
even abandon it altogether. Several colleagues have been especially pa-
tient with the particular strain of ‘‘archive fever’’ that has beset me while
working on this project: Jean Allman, Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth,
Clare Crowston, Ania Loomba, Kathy Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Srirupa
Prasad, Dana Rabin, and all those who took Gender and Colonialism at
the University of Illinois in the spring of 2003—especially Lauren Heckler,
Danielle Kinsey, Karen Rodriguez’G, Rachel Schulman, Jamie Warren, and
Karen Yuen. My thanks to them, and especially to Tony Ballantyne, whose
enthusiasm for the ideas I have tried to develop here has been boundless.
As did Tony, Anjali Arondekar, Ann Curthoys, Ian Fletcher, Durba Ghosh,
Laura Mayhall, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, John Randolph, Anu Rao, and
Renée Sentilles all o√ered insightful and eminently useful feedback to me
on the Introduction to the book. I appreciate their critical engagement,
which is born at least in part out of their own struggles with and against
archives of all kinds. Parts of my introductory essay have been given as
talks at the Canadian Historical Association and the University of Otago,
where audiences helped me to refine my arguments, for which I am very
grateful. The two readers for Duke University Press also deserve special
thanks for their comments and suggestions, which have made the collec-
tion more tightly woven than it was. Miriam Angress is, as ever, the perfect
editor. Without her guidance and enthusiasm and wisdom—on matters
large and small—this book would not be what it is. Without the love,
support—and of course, the technical and pop culture assistance—of Paul
Arroyo, none of this would have been possible. I remain as amazed by as I
am indebted to him for his generosity and his belief in me. Nick and Olivia
did what they could to cure my archive fever, and but for them I would
have succumbed long ago. Thanks to them for helping me daily to appreci-
ate which are the most important stories to tell.