Moving Archives

Moving Archives

Moving Archives

Linda M. Morra, editor

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Moving archives / Linda M. Morra, editor.

Names: Morra, Linda M., editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190141476 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190141506 | ISBN 9781771124027 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781771124041 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771124034 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Archives—Processing. | LCSH: Archives. | LCSH: Archival materials. | LCSH: Archival materials—Conservation and restoration. | LCSH: Libraries—Special collections.

Classification: LCC CD971 .M68 2020 | DDC 025—dc23

Cover design by Lime Design Inc.

Interior design by Janette Thompson (Jansom).

© 2020 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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In memory of my parents, Anthony and Jessie Morra, and Ben and Leo—

for their vital framework of love

The circulation of objects

allows us to think about the

sociality of emotion.

– Sara Ahmed

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Moving Archives: The Affective Economies and Potentialities of Literary Archival Materials

Linda M. Morra

CHAPTER ONE

Archive Transfer / Archival Transformation: The Intervening Space Between

Patricia Godbout and Marc André Fortin

CHAPTER TWO

Don’t you know that digitization is not enough? Digitization is not enough! Building Accountable Archives and the Digital Dilemma of the Cabaret Commons

T.L. Cowan

CHAPTER THREE

Myles na gCopaleen’s An Scian: A Knife in the Back of Irish Archivists

Joseph LaBine

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside the Cover, Outside the Archive: The Dispersal, Loss, and Value of Jane Rule’s Personal Library

Linda M. Morra

CHAPTER FIVE

The fearful state of things: Technologies of Transparency in the Annual Report of the Canada Sunday School Union, 1843–1876

Erin Kean

CHAPTER SIX

Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb

Katherine McLeod

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fresh-water Archives: Reading Water in Troy Burle Bailey’s The Pierre Bonga Loops

Karina Vernon

CHAPTER EIGHT

Letting Grief Move Me: Thinking Through the Affective Dimensions of Personal Record-keeping

Jennifer Douglas

CHAPTER NINE

Reading for Queer Openings: Moving. Archives of the Self. Fred Wah.

Susan Rudy

Works Cited

About the Contributors

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1.1  Douglas Gordon Jones’s cabin in North Hatley, QC

FIGURE 1.2  Patricia Godbout collecting Jones’s papers

FIGURE 1.3  A part of D.G. Jones’ personal collection of Canadian poetry

FIGURE 1.4  An old manuscript of a poem found in Jones’s wastebasket

FIGURE 1.5  Jones’s Yellow Chair, now at the Université de Sherbrooke

FIGURE 1.6  North Hatley, 16 April 2014

FIGURE 1.7  The D.G. Jones Canadian Poetry Collection during the 2014 inauguration

FIGURE 2.1  Cabaret Commons early-stage database grid view

FIGURE 2.2  Untitled, Not Pictured, Meow Mix performance, 2003

FIGURE 4.1  Title page of Lucien V. Rule’s The House of Love

FIGURE 4.2  Inscription to Jane Rule by Lucien Rule

FIGURE 4.3  Postcard from Phyllis Webb to Jane Rule and Helen Sonthoff

FIGURE 9.1  Loose Change broadsheet

FIGURE 9.2  Home Page, the Fred Wah Digital Archive, 2010

FIGURE 9.3  Banner, the Fred Wah Digital Archive, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In experiencing significant loss over the past three years, I understand, intellectually and emotionally, how archival documents might provide solace (however limited), solidify identity, and create a sense of context and connection. That experience undergirds the process of producing this book, which at times evoked deep grief as I worked through ideas related to affect and archives, even as it also provided intellectual stimulation. I am profoundly appreciative of those who facilitated the latter, including the two anonymous reviewers at Wilfrid Laurier University Press; I am deeply thankful for their considerate and gracious assessment of the manuscript. I also gratefully acknowledge the Senior Editor of the press, Siobhan McMenemy, whose guidance and editorial finesse were, as always, essential to seeing this book to production; Lisa Quinn, the Director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press and a goddess of academic publishing; and the entire team at WLUP, especially Rob Kohlmeier and Clare Hitchens.

Doing archival research is extremely costly. I therefore deeply appreciate the Awards to Scholarly Publishing Program (administered by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences), and the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council for awarding me a SSHRC Insight Grant, which supported the completion of a chapter in this book. I am also thankful to Bishop’s University—specifically, the Publications Subcommittee of the Senate Research Committee—for its support, as I worked through the manuscript from beginning to end.

I was surrounded by a group of very dear and loyal friends and colleagues who were unflagging in their support, including Deanna Reder, Elise Moser, Anna Sedo, John Potvin, Dirk Gindt, Sharon Davidson, Jennifer Andrews, Tina Trigg, Connie Guzzo-McParland, Chantel Lavoie, Kate Ready, Erin Wunker, Lynn Charpentier, Carolyn Van Der Meer, Adam Kelly, Lori Schubert, Jacqui McCloskey, Sarah Henzi, Deanna Radford, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Tina Wayland, Teresa Petruzzo, Colleen Franklin, Marco Timpano, Liliana Pitelli, Marc Fortin, and the entire McCloskey family. I extend my deepest thanks to my aunt, Gabriella Altobelli McCloskey, and my uncle, Giuseppe Morra: you know the kind of support you have given and how grateful I am to you. And to L.-G. Harvey—whose ready encouragement, caring, and intelligence are a mainstay in my life—there is not an adequate vocabulary to thank you.

My dear, lovely, and loving parents: I will never forget you or how much you have done for me. I could only wish for other children to be as fortunate as I have been.

INTRODUCTION

Moving Archives: The Affective Economies and Potentialities of Literary Archival Materials

Linda M. Morra

Archives move.

I was reminded of this fact yet again—that archives are far from being static repositories¹—when I read several listserv exchanges by members of the Society of the History of Authors, Readers, and Publishers (SHARP). The messages characterized archives and libraries as having fallen victim to a decrease in university or public funds; the emails were largely appeals for assistance in relocating and preserving books and historical materials that are perceived as valuable to other institutions, or proposals for larger efforts that might be made to forestall their imminent destruction.² The field of archives, its theoretical frameworks and its practices, is transforming; archival materials and deposits are proliferating—when they are not altogether disappearing—with such rapidity that its architects, practitioners, and theorists are scarcely able to keep abreast of the changes and grapple with slippages in form, content, and meaning. Archives, archival theory, and archival practices are indeed on the move.

But what of the laments and entreaties made in response to those archives that are lost or in peril, the sense of urgency and anxiety that underwrites these appeals? As many scholars within and beyond this volume demonstrate, archives—their materialization, their preservation, and their conceptualizations—are also moving in a completely different sense: they are involved in emotionally engaged, emotionally charged processes, which act upon their subjects and enact specific fields of knowledge and varieties of community. Leading this school of thought related to theories of affect and its application to archives is, of course, Ann Cvetkovich, who developed and applied the idea of an archive of feelings to characterize queer archives and the trauma surrounding the community in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture. Therein, she asserts that trauma can be a foundation for creating a way of transforming loss into collective memory (7–8).³ Affect, she observes, is a crucial means of approaching queer histories that may not be located within more formal repositories, because they leave ephemeral and unusual traces whose registers are apprehended only against the grain of mainstream archives (8). Queer history thus demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive (241). Texts, in this view, are repositories of feelings and emotions that may be approached to discover renewed critical approaches (Biber and Luker 12). Kate Eichhorn takes up a similar theoretical challenge in her examination of archival activism—that is, she envisions how some archives might inspire the political mobilizations of feminist activists, and how women’s literary archives may offer innovative sites for storytelling and political engagement. In yet another example, Arlette Farge speaks in more general terms about how research in archives is a charged experience that may sweep scholars into unexpected directions, taking [them] to a place poised somewhere between the familiar and the exotic (17).⁴

This book grounds itself within this critical trajectory to invite a reconsideration of what Sara Ahmed calls affective economies, produced as effects of circulation (2004, 8), to offer fresh insights into the process of archiving and approaching literary materials; these economies undergird every stage in the process of the archiving of literary materials—from selection, acquisition, arrangement, description, and preservation—and well beyond it, including the reception, conceptualization, and recalibration of such materials, by which individuals and communities are confronted, moved, engaged, catalyzed (8). Affective economies are also shaped by the effects of encounters, in whatever way these may be characterized, and by reorientation(s) between subject and object. They both engender and are engendered by the creators, practitioners, and users of archives, at all phases of the production of literary archival materials, from their initial staging in institutions to the kinds of access granted to them, and to the interactions permitted and expressed between the materials and researchers, on-site and thereafter. These economies register and secure (however temporarily) the identities of subjects and objects.

Each interaction is crucial to forms of self-identification assumed by persons, communities, institutions, nations, and global interests, which in turn determine what is collected—the gravitational pull toward, for example, the papers of particular literary figures regarded as iconic in one culture or one community, from one context to another. At times, these attachments involve the fetishization of a writer, a desire for materials or objects that are a stand-in for that iconic figure; at other times, they are about the cultural capital and social prestige accrued by an institution in the process of securing these papers or objects. Calls for the preservation of historical and literary heritage as priorities suggest how archives are seen to carry affective value that then informs a national ethos, even as the latter may be undermined by global capital.⁵ In this sense, archives are created as an expression of longing, what Derrida referred to as a desire for origins, but one that is paradoxically projected into the future. That desire may generate coherence around distinct narratives about particular groups—communal, national, and transnational—even as it involves ignoring disjunctive elements of or occasioning displacements from those narratives. One question that thus arises in determining which materials to acquire is, as Cheryl Avery and Mona Holmlund observe, What value do these records have for us? (xi). I would add at least two other, equally important, questions, "What role will these archives perform for us?, and Who is this ‘us’? or For whom do these archives speak?"

How archival materials circulate and what role they perform in relation to shifting affective economies is pivotal to the understanding and constitution of social categories and to the identities of persons, institutions, communities, and nations. The us in Avery and Holmlund’s formulation suggests how archives are conceived around and by particular groups—not with the detachment or neutrality that is often attributed to archivists, scholars, and historians working in the field.⁶ Indeed, as Lisa Darms observes, state repositories have typically ostracized radical or minority communities—which, as a result, have been self-documenting for decades, creating their own archives, libraries, and oral histories.⁷ The us that is positioned in relation to an archive is as revealing about the persons and communities involved in the preservation of materials as it is about the materials themselves.

The latter observation suggests that institutional investment extends beyond financial considerations, that such investment is related to control over the making of meaning, including self-meaning, and to securing a place in a larger cultural context. The competition for literary papers between countries, for example, showcases what papers do and what they symbolize—significantly more than, for example, an author’s life—and how they may even suggest the dissolution of national boundaries. As Antoinette Burton explains, an examination of the backstage of archives—that is, how archives are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated—suggests who are stakeholders and by what means they are positioned in relation to those archives (7).⁸ Calling upon Ann Laura Stoler, Marika Cifor notes that affect is central to this process, since it is key to the ways in which power is constituted, circulated, and mobilized (10).⁹

As several critics argue, these considerations have of late involved an increasing emphasis on accountability felt by government and public institutions (Avery and Holmlund xii). Such accountability generates a pressure under which, as Ian Wilson argues, archivists recognize themselves as active participants in the creation of memory (qtd. in Avery and Holmlund, xv). Acquiring records is therefore not necessarily about preserving a past as much as it is about using those records to offer redress, or, as Julia Creet observes, about reorienting affective relationships in a present moment in relation to shifting patterns of migration or federal policies. Doug Surtees argues that ethical approaches to the management of information are often anchored exclusively in the present (qtd. in Avery and Holmlund xiv).

Rosanne Kennedy has done considerable critical work to explore how archives carry reconciliatory properties, not simply because they may offer truths, but also because they may alleviate the ongoing suffering and grief of communities by offering a space for resolution and justice (2011, 2014). Calling upon what she calls compassionate politics, compassionate counterpublics, and the counter-public archives of memory as developed by feminist and queer scholars, she examines their applicability to Indigenous suffering, and the government’s refusal to respond adequately (2011, 258). A counter-public archives can be developed or read as a means of eliciting compassion, offering a counterbalance to past injustices, trauma, and violence, and providing reconciliatory avenues. Invoking Dominick LaCapra’s warning about the need to exercise empathy without appropriating the other’s pain as one’s own, Kennedy adds that emotions have catalytic potential, even if that potential can be double-edged: we must be careful to take our own difference into account (273). The position of the archivist and researcher here becomes paramount in terms of identifying with or responding to the archive and the affects that are perceived, generated, or contained therein. As Katherine Biber and Trish Luker observe, the archive—especially a criminal one—transforms people into witnesses (10).

Still, affective economies are not necessarily determined by ethical impulses or by the pursuit of justice; rather, they are mutually constitutive. Such economies form the crucial contexts for the legitimization and justification of creating archival caches in the present moment and for future use. Many academics have recently and more insistently called for ethical drives to inform archival practices and research pursuits; contemporary scholarly approaches that call upon affect theory in relation to archives assert the importance of the application of justice, directly or implicitly, in the preservation and use of archival materials—from championing female subjects (Eichhorn) and the queer community (Cvetkovich) to invoking the legal system (Biber and Luker), and to considering directly questions of ethics and social justice (Cifor, Affecting Relations; Garay and Verduyn, Note from the Guest Editors).¹⁰ These critics, in addition to those in the present volume, demonstrate how affect informs the decisions we make—to pursue, to forgo, to concentrate on particular archival materials, and to establish particular archives. If affective investments have consistently driven archival pursuits, the material difference is that, historically, one did not draw attention to these investments; it did not mean, however, that those investments never existed. The chapters in the present volume are thus meant to operate more broadly to draw attention to and to explore the peculiar nature of our engagement with archives; they do so in terms of the marriage of archive theory with critical studies of affect, and in their apparent application to the phases in the development of archival literary materials.

At times, the contingences of affect have implications for the literal movement of archives, for their placements and displacements. The result is a challenge to the perception that archives are static in various ways: in terms of substance (digital), content, and context (their relocation and dispersal). In this sense, this volume is the continuation of a direct challenge, offered in Unarrested Archives (Morra) and elsewhere, to Jacques Derrida’s notion that archives are under house arrest, or "in domiciliation" (10). Originally formulated in May 2014, the call for papers for this volume was transformed into a panel, titled Moving Papers, for the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Congress held in Ottawa in June 2015.¹¹ The CFP asked potential contributors, first, to consider how and why literary archives move—to track the migratory trajectories of archival materials geographically and temporally (Where and how do they move?) or from one medium to another, and, second, to assess the affective investments and relationships produced and reproduced in so doing (Why and how do archives move us?). Determining the emotional valences of an archival document thus involves questioning how it comes to be, what ends it serves, to what uses it was put—and what might have disappeared in the process.¹² Affective economies generate archival materials, which alter for each generation and for those communities that inherit them; conversely, political struggles and social change produce and reproduce archival materials. Shifting contexts (geographical, temporal, and otherwise) also change the emotional valences of archives. Even when a context does not change, the embeddedness—what Brian Massumi refers to as a heightened sense of being connected, with other people and to other places—of archival caches determines their value (16).

More specifically, contributors were invited to evaluate the implications for such moving, both in terms of the forms these materials adopt and in terms of the posture of the researcher, archivist, scholar, and private individuals. Some archival caches travel from one location to another, occasionally from institutions in which they had been thought to be permanently housed, across national and other boundaries, in response to narratives that conceptualize or assign affective value to those caches in sometimes remarkably different ways. One may apply here Derrida’s formulation about anxiety around loss and about our quest for origins as the process preserving archives unfurls—both macroscopically, on an international stage, and microscopically, as individuals increasingly resort to digital forms to protect what they perceive to be of value. Although the contest for ownership of archival caches can be played out on an international stage, transformations in the cultural field of archives have increasingly borne witness to the wresting of control over archives by individuals.¹³

Affective economies undergird every stage of archive production, as the order of the chapters in the volume demonstrates: from the act of acquiring and preserving archival materials (as Patricia Godbout and Marc Fortin, and T.L. Cowan establish in their contributions to this volume), to their placement and displacement (as LaBine and Morra show in theirs), and to the interpretation and reinterpretation of moving archival materials—or of archival absences (as Erin Kean, Karina Vernon, Katherine McLeod, Jennifer Douglas, and Susan Rudy delineate in their chapters). Jennifer Douglas and Susan Rudy note in their pieces that archival materials not only mean something to researchers but also perform on or act upon researchers; they heighten the subject–object dynamic that Sara Ahmed elsewhere identifies as integral to the sociality of emotion.¹⁴ The emotional valences and potentialities of archives are thus dynamic, complicated, and enriched by shifts in context and access, in the theoretical apparatus used, and in the very theoretical postures researchers adopt.

Svetlana Boym’s exploration of diasporic intimacy is useful here as a means of identifying how archival materials may come to find value outside of and to transcend their original contexts; such intimacy, she argues, is born of collective frameworks of memory that structure and govern their formation. Such intimacy would elucidate why certain archival deposits carry greater resonance for some groups and, ultimately, explain how these deposits might bind strangers to each other (228; see Luca 77). By contrast, some archival materials are seemingly immovable—that is, they are restricted from or limited in terms of public access. As such, they represent smaller collectives or disenfranchised individuals with a unique set of claims, sometimes related to suffering or grief. In these instances, any consideration of who is granted access and why is of pivotal importance.

Even in understanding how affect is important to the study of archives, to privilege the affective dimension in isolation from archival materials is to misapprehend fundamentally the logic of the resurgence of archival research in the late twentieth century, which was a backlash against postmodernism, even as archives were also seen as active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed (Schwartz and Cook 1). Postmodernism was an academic discourse that denied objectivity was possible, and, in making that claim, postmodernism overwrote ethical claims based in historical fact. Archival research was thus not necessarily about reasserting adherence to objective research, but rather about counterbalancing (while grounded in historical fact) lines of inquiry that were forgoing responsibility and lacking in ethical care. In this sense, conducting archival research has become seen in the contemporary moment as inseparable from an act of ethical care: ethics and archives have in this manner become vitally interdependent. The espousal of emotional fervor, however, without proper grounding in historical and factual research would read as propaganda, of which the Sokal hoax of 1996 and fake news are clear reminders.¹⁵ Claims to affect that are not properly historicized or yoked with factual/archival materially based scholarship or that privilege individual emotional responses above and beyond proper archival or historical research are simply forms of propaganda.

A researcher’s critical positioning in relation to archival materials and understanding the implications, ethical and otherwise, of the affective dynamic that is deployed for this purpose have become paramount, especially when investigating the material and conceptual traces of law. Biber and Luker demonstrate that working with archives turns on matters of access, use and interpretation, and they consider the ethical limits related to archival sources and what kind of ethical precepts or responsibilities are engaged by archival access (3). Intersections of affect, ethics, and the archive were crucially developed at the symposium Affect and the Archive in November 2014, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, which subsequently produced a special issue, Affect and the Archive, Archive and their Affects, in Archival Science in 2016. Edited by Marika Cifor and Anne J. Gilliland, the essays therein contribute to an understanding of how affect is central to archives and the archival endeavor (4). Even as both the conference and the special issue identified some of the key issues and cultivated a rubrics by which scholars could navigate the field, the editors acknowledged that future scholars would still find many gaps and silences in their foundational work, including issues related to the digital. Moving Archives is meant to draw upon this groundwork, address some of these gaps, and fruitfully extend the theoretical formulations, discussions, and issues that were broached by these researchers and scholars.

The contributors to this volume establish that, even if those affective impulses play a significant role in the preservation of archives, the investments of various stakeholders in the materialization and use of archives have been historically wide-ranging—deeply personal at times, and at other times representative of a collective (national) identity (rather than, for example, a cause). Indeed, historically marginalized figures were often under-represented or unrepresented in archives; contemporary researchers must therefore reorient themselves and their affective investments, as Karina Vernon reveals in this volume, in relation to what remains in order to produce their scholarship—which may be radically different from, or even a contradiction of, the logic that gave rise to the archives under scrutiny. As Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook observe in Archives, Records, and Power, archives, rather than passive resources to be exploited or neutral repositories of fact, are active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed (1).

The socio-political, affective complexities involved in shifting contexts in relation to the study of literary (and other kinds of) materials are manifold, and these complexities are heightened by digital remediation or digital-born materials, which seem to promise more expansive or inclusive audiences—and, in turn, sometimes promulgate