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Editors’ Introduction

Mario H. Ramirez and Rebecka Taves Sheffield

Derrida, the Scene of Archiving, and the Unhappy Consciousness

Brien Brothman
What does the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) have to do with the archival community’s recent turn to critical theory? This article proposes that Derrida’s philosophy worked at critical theory’s edges. His much-commented Archive Fever exemplifies Derrida’s longstanding personal and political (post-colonial) critique of the concepts of shelter, home, and belonging and with the presumptions of social, linguistic, and territorial sovereignty. These preoccupations underlie Derrida’s diagnosis of a fever – of an unhappiness or malaise – at the scene of writing/archiving.

Michel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives

Steven Maynard
In this article, we follow Foucault into the archives. Foucault spent much of his working life reading and researching in libraries and archives, and yet he most often figures in the archival literature as the creator of the rarified concept of “the archive.” As a counterpoint, this article explores Foucault’s work in archives, his use of archives in his work, and the significance he attached to archival research. Ultimately, I contend that it is impossible to understand the abstract archive as concept without first grounding it in the experiential, epistemological, methodological, and political dimensions of finding Foucault in the archives.

Red Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Canadian Archival Theory

Raymond O. Frogner
This article considers an Indigenous imaginative thread in the dominant European intellectual history of colonization in Canada. Until recently, historiography of the colonial encounter commonly assumed the dominance of imperial imagination was an unchallenged cognitive event. European intellectual histories have proven reluctant to recognize the sustained independence and holistic self-reliance of Indigenous knowledge models or the Indigenous influences on European thought. However, European juridical knowledge paradigms have never eliminated those collective cognitive social principles that supported Indigenous societies for generations before first contact. This Indigenous epistemological influence can be found in our institutions of governance; in our mechanisms of social representation; and in our public spaces of culture, heritage, and social memory.This article first considers how Indigenous spiritual epistemologies, social protocols, and knowledge methods were delegitimized and marginalized by Enlightenment thinkers. Next, it looks at the Kwakwaka’wakw encounter, when George Hunt and Franz Boas recorded resistant and independent Indigenous cosmologies in late-19th-century West Coast Indigenous communities. Through ceremony, Indigenous authorities demonstrated core values of Indigenous cosmologies: the potential of diversity over the threat of difference; the dynamism of culture; and the holistic vision of totemic, collective relationships between humanity and nature. From here, the article examines how mid- century critical theory carved out a theoretical space for these Indigenous values for humanity. Finally, it looks at how Indigenous cosmologies have begun to break through constraining modernist traditions of archival remembrance. The article closes with the notion of the decolonizing of archives and the digital potential for new, post-colonial archival paradigms that recognize revitalized Indigenous epistemologies.

Fevered Inheritances: Ethics of Care and Donor Power in Starchives

Anastasia Armendariz and Kate Orazem
In the three decades since its English publication, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among theorists of the archive across disciplines, generating a remarkable variety of responses, applications, and critiques. However, as the records of critical theorists enter our archives, this discourse has paid scant attention to the legal conflict following the acquisition of Derrida’s papers as the flagship collection of the Critical Theory Archive at the University of California, Irvine (“the UCI affair”). This article seeks to explore and amend the meaning of that gap as itself an archival silencing.Analyzing the UCI affair as an element of the provenance of the Derrida Papers, we position that collection, and the conflicts surrounding it, as a valuable case study regarding the translation into praxis of feminist archival theories positing a radical ethics of care as a key professional commitment. Applying these theories to this case, we examine the increasingly uneasy relationships between the university, its donors, its archival agents, and the state, and the circuits of capital that constitute and animate those entanglements. We argue that this clarifies how archival collections, as contractually mediated by universities, can preserve creators’ perspectives and their social, professional, and discursive power over time. We examine the implications of this function through the lens of feminist and queer theories of the archive and engage with theorizations of the neoliberal public university in the United States to analyze the intersecting axes of power at play in the UCI affair and among various archival stakeholders. Considering Derrida’s limited-access papers as a paradigm of the flagship collection or starchive opens up broader questions about the competing priorities of donors, institutional administrators, researchers, and archival practitioners. Finally, returning to feminist theories of affect in the archives, we consider how frameworks like radical empathy and restorative justice ask us to ground both theoretical work and archival practice in an ethics of care that embraces the inevitability of harm and the paradoxical necessity and impossibility of repair, leading us to a critical stance of radical humility in service of material solidarity with all archival labourers.

“Should We Just Burn It All Down?”: Slowness and Institutional Barriers to a Critical Future in Archives

Josh Wilson
Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with five archivists, this article explores the barriers to implementing critical practices in archives. It examines if and how archivists use critical practices and approaches to change archival institutions, highlights the barriers they encounter when trying to transform these institutions, and expands archival scholarship on slowness and neoliberalism. Due to archives’ neoliberal entanglements and their slow pace of change, this research data underscores the powerlessness some archivists feel regarding their ability to change the workings of archival institutions. This article shows that creativity, outlined as experimentation and imagination, can provide a bridge between ideas of critical archival studies and particular contexts of practice and conveys some archivists’ view that transforming practice is unfortunately and necessarily slow. Slowness structures the types of responses and critical practices in archival institutions, setting the parameters for what transformations are available. Slowness provides an opportunity for archivists to reflect on the best way to implement practices but also limits the formation of liberatory praxis in institutional archives.

The Archival Turn as Practice

Ann Cvetkovich
This article reflects on the significance of the affective turn for work in cultural studies and queer studies, paying particular attention to the distinction between archival theory and archival practice. It focuses on queer archives and especially the creative methods of artists in the archives. It closes with a brief return to Derrida’s Archive Fever by way of acknowledging its influence.

Love in the Archives: Towards a Theory and Praxis of Archival Care

Jennifer Douglas
The word love is not used very often in archival scholarship or in archival practice. Love is also easy to dismiss as a subject of serious inquiry. This article takes seriously the role of love in archives, engaging with ideas from critical and feminist love studies, where love is understood as a creative and productive force that can be used to bring about transformative change. Drawing on research about grieving and recordkeeping, with both bereaved records creators and practising archivists, and grounded in the expanding critical literature on trauma-informed archival praxis and affect and emotions in archival work, this article considers how the discourse of love is taking shape in archival studies and why any discussion about love in archives has to be grounded in a politics of structural care. Thinking with Tamarin Norwood’s notion of institutional love, the article argues for a kind of love that is research- and experience-led and embedded in institutions, policies, procedures, and training.

Provenanced Aesthetics: The Beauty of Decay in Dawson City: Frozen Time

Patrick Keilty
Cinema is critical to our understanding of modern archives. Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, cinema emerged at the turn of the 20th century as an unprecedented form of archival knowledge, even as it represented a form of ephemerality in the face of modernity’s increasing rationalization and standardization within archives. So, why are archival studies and cinema studies not in greater conversation with each other? This article allows for a cross-pollination of rigorous methodological and theoretical approaches from cinema studies to add new dimensions to archival theory. Through a close reading of sound, material decay, and film editing, this article argues that Dawson City: Frozen Time reflects the historical symmetry between cinematic and archival impulses to capture the ephemeral while grappling with the material limits of preservation. Dawson City: Frozen Time turns decay into an archival aesthetic not only to convey the way archival records gain meaning when viewed in relation to their unstable custodial histories but also to demonstrate the finitude and distortion of memory and history. Indeed, Dawson City: Frozen Time reframes archives as sites of creative irruption and, specifically, of decay and provenance as aesthetic contrivances that remind us of history’s instability.

“A Self You Have Not Yet Learned How to Love”: Building Asian/Queer//Queer/Asian Possibilities Through Archival Speculation

Yingying Han and Travis L. Wagner
Archives often preserve materials that reinforce privileged identities and marginalize LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disabled communities. Furthermore, there is only limited theoretical work addressing how to ethically document intersectional identities, especially the dual embodiments of Asianness and queerness. Inspired by K.J. Rawson’s theorizing of accessing transgender//desiring queer archival logics, we employ critical case studies to analyze how Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities are represented in archival collections. Our study finds that Asian/queer//queer/Asian theory offers a new lens and new tools to combat archival erasure and misrepresentation resulting from heteronormativity, white supremacy, and cisgender misogyny. This article develops three critical case studies focusing on the white queer gaze toward Asian queer bodies in archives, the disidentification of Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities within archival records, and the use of archival speculation to explore Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities. This work makes both practical and theoretical contributions. Practically, we advocate for proactive archival practices that better represent such identities, avoiding essentialist representations. We also highlight the importance of embodied knowledge and the positionality of scholars and practitioners whose lived experiences centre Asian queer identities along with approaches like revisiting collections, creating reparative descriptions, and reading against the archival grain. Theoretically, we argue for archival speculation as a legitimate mode of inquiry and a process of knowledge production, positioning archives as sites that encourage disidentification.

Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives. Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, eds. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: Lever Press, 2023. vi, 349 pp. 9781643150512

Claire Malek

Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives. Tanya E. Clement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024. 240 pp. 9780262379229, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14976.001.0001

Heather Dean

Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession. Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang, eds. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2024. xix, 706 pp. 978-1-63400-149-6

Elizabeth A. Pineo

Joyce Wieland: À coeur battant; Joyce Wieland: Heart On. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Art Gallery of Ontario. February 8 – May 4, 2025; June 21, 2025 – January 4, 2026. Curated by Anne Grace (Montreal Museum of Fine Art) and Georgiana Uhlyarik (Art Gallery of Ontario)

Dylan Adamson

Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec. September 26, 2024 – January 26, 2025. Organized by Richard Hill (Vancouver Art Gallery) and Hila Peleg (Haus der Kulturen der Welt). Curated by Lesley Johnstone and Marjolaine Labelle for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Kate Nugent