I have hesitated to write this piece because, as I told the person who commissioned it, everything about the archive(s), archivists, and their tepid relationship with historians and humanities folk has already been said in academic articles, books, conferences, and in less diplomatic ways on social media. Perhaps the most succinct and well-presented perspective of archivy’s relationship with other academics is Caswell’s (2016) article, “ ’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” I would not be offended if you stopped reading this right here and just clicked on the link to that article now.
Caswell (2016) acknowledges in her article previous work on the topic by Lingel (2013), “This is not an archive” , who spoke about the limits of the archives as a metaphor especially when the theories are constructed “in ignorance of archival work.” Recently, Gibbons (2020) has written “Derrida in the Archival Multiverse” which begins with the important point all of our voices have grown hoarse repeating, “Archival theory did not start (nor end) with Derrida.” As Eastwood (2017) explained, archivists themselves “have long engaged in characterizing the nature of archives.”
Continue reading “Archivy (n. ~ The discipline of archives) *: everything that’s already been said”