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Hidden Archives: Revealing Untold Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2018

KATRINA M. POWELL
KATRINA M. POWELL*
Affiliation:
Center for Rhetoric in Society, Virginia Tech. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

Archives are power-laden spaces. For Foucault, the archive is “the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” In this way, the archive is not merely a neutral repository. It is a system governed by those who have the power to choose what gets archived and therefore produce meaning through that discursive formation.

Type
Forum: Interrogating Archives: Power and Politics in Visibilized and Invisibilized Narratives
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 26 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

1 Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 129Google Scholar.

2 I wish to thank undergraduate researcher Ashley Stant for her assistance with the digitizing work for this project.

3 Currell, Sue, “You Haven't Seen Their Faces: Eugenic National Housekeeping and Documentary Photography in 1930s America,” Journal of American Studies, 51, 2 (2017), 481–511 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

5 See works such as Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive,” Enculturation, 14 May 2012, at http://enculturation.net/queer-rhetoric-and-the-pleasures-of-the-archive; K. J. Rawson, “Rhetorical History 2.0: Toward a Digital Transgender Archive,” Enculturation, at http://enculturation.net/toward_digital_transgender_archive; Ramsey-Tobienne, Alexis, “Archives 2.0: Digital Archives and the Formation of New Research Methods,” Peitho Journal, 15, 1 (2016), 4–24 Google Scholar; Kirsch, Gesa and Rohan, Liz, eds., Beyond the Archives: Research as Lived Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Ramsey, Alexis, Sharer, Wendy B., L'Eplattenier, Barbara, and Mastrangelo, Lisa, Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Theimer, Kate, “What Is the Meaning of Archives 2.0?”, American Archivist, 74 (2011), 58–68 Google Scholar; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda, “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault,” College English, 61, 5 (1999), 577–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Rak's, Julie Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

7 See Fraser, Nancy, Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner for discussions about the public sphere and deliberation in democracy, including Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere on the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” Theory, Culture, and Power, 24, 4 (2007), 7–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, 25–26 (1990), 56–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 77.

9 Ibid., 71.

10 See Berlant's, Lauren The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), viiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 71.

12 See Schwartz, J. M. and Cook, T., “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science, 2, 1–2 (2002), 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1–2.

13 Carson, Anne, ed., If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2003)Google ScholarPubMed.

14 See Aitken, Will, “Interview with Anne Carson: The Art of Poetry No. 88,” Paris Review, 171 (2004)Google Scholar, at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson. Carson further says that the “texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life.”

15 See also Carson's nonfiction Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010)Google ScholarPubMed, a picture/image/text biography of her brother that highlights the ways that her brother's life, though not known fully to her, is available to some degree through the fragments of letters, newspaper clippings, and family memories.

16 Currell, “You Haven't Seen Their Faces,” 481.

17 Ibid, 484.

18 Schwartz and Cook, p. 12.

19 Rawson, K. J., “Archive This! Queer(ing) Archival Practices,” in Powell, Katrina M. and Takayoshi, Pamela, eds., Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflections on Ethically Responsible Research (New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2012), 237–50Google Scholar, 238.

20 As this list implies, there is a necessity to include interdisciplinary approaches to the same topic: history, archaeology, rhetoric, narrative, literature, film, conservation, photography, science/medicine, disability, displacement, migration/resettlement – all these disciplines come into play when understanding one event.

21 Powell, Katrina M., “Representing Human Rights Violations in Multimedia Contexts,” in Jensen, Meg and Jolly, Margaretta, eds., We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 196–213 Google Scholar, 204.

22 I discuss these convergences in “Converging Crises,” JAC: Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, 33, 3 (2013), 455–85Google Scholar. In addition, Richard and I worked closely with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Mary Bishop to interview several interviewees for the film.

23 Currell, Sue, “You Haven't See Their Faces: Eugenic National Housekeeping and Documentary Photography in 1930s America,” Journal of American Studies, 51, 2 (2017), 481–511, 484CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See www.exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu for information about the history of eugenics in Virginia.

25 Currell, 505.

26 See recent discussions about the FSA photographers and the implications of their work, including Finnegan, Cara, Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Finnegan, , Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

27 Currell, 486. Powell, Katrina M., Dick-Mosher, Jenny, Zvonkovic, Anisa, and Teaster, Pamela, “Displacing Marginalized Bodies: How Human Rights Discourses Function in the Law and in Communities,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 29, 1 (2015), 67–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Powell, Katrina M., “Converging Crises: Rhetorical Constructions of Eugenics and the Public Child,” JAC: Journal of Rhetoric, Culture & Politics, 33, 3 (2013), 455–85Google Scholar.

28 See Clare's, Eli “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness,” Public Culture, 13, 3 (2001), 359–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the intersections of disability and queer studies, where he challenges the ways that traditional narratives of ability and institutionalization impose narratives of exclusion on marginalized bodies.

29 See Bishop, Mary, “An Elite Said Their Kind Wasn’t Wanted: How Social Judgments of the Day Forced Sterilizations,” Roanoke Times, 26 June 1994 Google Scholar, E1, on Mary Frances and other residents of the Colony.

30 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 192Google Scholar.

31 Wernimont, Jacqueline, “Whence Feminisim? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives,” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7, 1 (2013)Google Scholar, at www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000156/000156.html.

32 Woodhouse, Edward and Sarewitz, Daniel, “Science Policies for Reducing Societal Inequities,” Science and Public Policy, 34, 2 (2007), 139–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Woodhouse, Edward, Hess, D., Breyman, S., and Martin, B., “Science Studies and Activism: Possibilities and Problems for Reconstructivist Agendas,” Social Studies of Science, 32 (2002), 297–319 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation,” the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1998, 1–67.

35 Michele Murphy, Gender Bodies and Technology Conference, Virginia Tech, 2016.

36 See www.feminist-archives.leeds.ac.uk.

37 Rawson, K. J., “Digital Transgender Archive,” English Department Faculty Scholarship, 1 (2016)Google Scholar at http://crossworks.holycross.edu/engl_fac_scholarship/1.

38 See McLean, Jessica, Maalsen, Sophia, and Grech, Alana, ‘Learning about Feminism in Digital Spaces: Online Methodologies and Participatory Mapping,’ Australian Geographer, 47, 2 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, online; England, David, Schiphorst, Thecia, and Bryan-Kinns, Nick, eds., Curating the Digital: Space for Art and Interaction (London: Springer, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haskins, Ekaterina, “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37, 4 (2007), 401–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Print.

39 Mbembe, Achille, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Hamilton, Carolyn, Harris, V., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R., and Taylor, J., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002), 19–27, 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.