Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives - Softcover

Gesa E Kirsch (editor); Romeo García (editor); Caitlin Burns Allen (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809338955 ISBN 13: 9780809338955

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2023

Synopsis

A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.

What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.

Unsettling Archival Researchis one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to counteract, resist, and explore alternatives to racist, colonial histories and which approaches best support such work. They also confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival theories and methodologies. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.

Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.

About this title

About the Author

Gesa E. Kirsch is professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Soka University of America. Her books include Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies; Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process; and Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research.

Romeo GarcÍa is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Utah and coeditor of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise.

Caitlin Burns Allen is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Louisville. Her work has appeared in Ethics and Representation in Feminist Rhetorical Inquiry and Peitho.

Walker P. Smith holds a PhD in rhetoric and composition from the University of Louisville.

Contributions byJennifer Almjeld, Sally F. Benson, Jean Bessette, MarÍa P. Carvajal Regidor, LynÉe Lewis Gaillet, Tarez Samra Graban, Wendy Hayden, Deborah Hollis, Jackie M. James, Amy J. Lueck, Kathryn Manis, Nadia Nasr, Kalyn Prince, Liz Rohan, Jessica A. Rose, Rebecca Schneider, Pamela Takayoshi, and Patty Wilde.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Archives are sites of history and memory. A central premise of Unsettling Archival Research is that any archive will merit and inevitably demand a careful reckoning with wound/ed/ing histories that continue to haunt our nation. Archives either refuse to conceptualize others’ communities as having memory and history or objectivize their memory and history as both something that belongs to the West and something to be studied under Western eyes. As a consequence, new archives and/or community archives are emerging so that local histories, memories, languages, and political legacies are not fully erased. Nonetheless, we contend that Archives need unsettling. Archives are never neutral instruments of storing information, but rather, always already involve knowledge production, and hence, power. Albeit we return to the archives for various reasons; a careful reckoning with them, particularly in the context of memory and history, demands an act of unsettling and amending. The unsettling of archival research has a broader meaning as well; it means one does not simply “return to the archives,” as scholars have made calls to in the past, only to extract, examine, or appropriate information found within them. Rather, it means taking seriously the rhetorical force of place(s) (e.g., material forms of public memory) and confronting the wound/ed/ing histories of our nation. 

Each writer, hence, complexly accounts for the materiality, symbolism, and functionality of archival research; the intermingling of archival materials with colonial history, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, ability, and/or religion; and the rhetoricity of their work in unsettling them. Such rhetoricity calls into question where the lessons of bearing witness and unsettling are learned and how they inform a current ethos and praxis of unsettling. Contributors also necessarily take up important new work emerging in the field of critical archival studies (Caswell; Caswell et al; Gilliland; Hughes-Watkins), a disciplinary gap that remains to be filled, especially as more writing studies scholars are beginning to forge valuable connections with archivists, data scientists, and librarians. Indeed, this collection recognizes and engages a concern expressed by Michelle Caswell in 2016—that the archival turn in the humanities has ignored archival studies as a “field of theory and praxis in its own right,” thereby disregarding the important contributions of critical archival scholars in many ways and reenacting symbolic colonial power structures.

Though unsettling is grounded in the historical arc of social injustices, systemic and epistemic racism, and systemic violence, it is a project of academics too who are interested in carefully reckoning with and unsettling that which is constituted as legible—the university, disciplines, archives. Building on the rich tradition of important archival scholarship such as Traces of a Stream (Royster), Liberating Language (Wilson Logan), Beyond the Archives (Kirsch & Rohan), and Working in the Archives (Ramsey, et. al.), Unsettling Archival Research seeks to unsettle our disciplinary knowledge of archival research by critically drawing on decolonial, anti-colonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, communal, and transnational perspectives and approaches. This book includes both critiques of archiving as a set of institutional practices, ideologies, and conventions, and new tactics of engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on how to expose, resist, and counteract racist, colonial histories; explore alternatives by highlighting how radical political approaches might support them; and illuminate the tactical archival practices that can decenter, reshape, and rewrite traditional archival methodologies and pedagogies.

One goal for this collection is to present a new vision of archival research—one that invites understanding of small-a archives beyond institutional Archives. What and how society chooses to remember history is significant. This is a crucial time in our history to ask what the future will look like, how we want to remember this period, and how we can unsettle history and memory. In taking steps towards such ends, unsettling material forms of public memory is required, and we seek to share emergent tactics and chart new directions for those undertaking such work. Many of these tensions are also present in archives. Unsettling Archival Research explicitly focuses on unsettling and confronting wound/ed/ing places and institutions and represents a range of voices and perspectives, including those of emerging and established scholars who are unsettling archival research now, while examining how and whether our discipline’s settled assumptions about the archives continue to serve (or fail to serve) us. In Unsettling Archival Research, authors address and work through these very tensions, often reflecting on how marginalized communities throughout the U.S. have long utilized archiving as a responsive political tool to mainstream public memory. The writers in this collection are connected by a common thread: exhibiting their epistemic right to confront, reveal, and amend the epistemic privileges of a proper Memory and History that remains responsible for the marginalization of other histories and memories. 

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Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809338955
• ISBN 13: 9780809338955
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320