Introduction: Historicizing the Master Archive (original) (raw)
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The archive has been theorized as unstable and even fever-ridden, but what might it mean to deploy it in ways that counter its logic, or to activate it in ways that we might call queer? Using the example of Leah DeVun’s photographic exploration of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (the world’s largest LGBT research collection), this essay traces the manners in which an archive, as a repository of information, might always shore up certain histories while delimiting others. In contrast, the authors imagine using the archive badly – that is, not as a historian would, but through interpolation and anachronism, focusing on the archive’s feel and “mere” form. Rather than reconstructing the ways in which archival materials inhabit a discrete historical period, this essay explores what might it mean to focus our attention on the human agents that pull archival objects from circulation, as well as how such objects might circulate again. Ultimately, we consider an archive as an accretive space that continues to build up, and as a history in which we might live, rather than as a document of an already finished time.
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Public and private organizations depend, for their disciplinary and surveillance power, on the creation and maintenance of records. Entire societies may be emprisoned in Foucauldian panopticism, a system of surveillance and power-knowledge, based on and practised by registration, filing, and records. Archives resemble temples as institutions of surveillance and power architecturally, but they also function as such, because the panoptical archive disciplines and controls through knowledge-power. Inside the archives, the rituals, surveillance, and discipline serve to maintain the power of the archives and the archivist. But the archives' power is (or should be) the citizen's power too. The violation of human rights is documented in the archives and the citizen who defends himself appeals to the archives. People value “storage” as a means to keep account of the present for the future. In order to be useable as instruments of empowerment and liberation, archives have to be secured as storage memory serving society's future functional memories.
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Contents Igor Filippov Destruction of Archives and the Historical science 7 Flocel Sabaté Historical Archives: Function and Destruction 15 Françoise Hildesheimer La gestion archivistique de la Révolution française 27 Bruno Delmas Bouleversements administratifs et transmission des archives. Un aspect de la Révolution française 63 Pierre Santoni La Révolution française, les archives et la « théorie mimétique » 89 Serge Aberdam A propos des origines de la sous-série B II des Archives nationales (Votes populaires, Constitutions de 1793 et 1795) 111 Igor Filippov Through the Veil of Revolutionary Fires: What can we say about Medieval France despite the Mass Destruction of Archives during the Revolution of 1789 141 Stanley Fiorini The Survival of the Maltese Inquisition Archives during the French Occupation: 1798–1800 157 Christine Maria Grafinger Le transport des manuscrits vaticans et l’exportation des archives à Paris sous Napoléon 171 Flocel Sabaté Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia after the 19th Century Upheavals 185 Evgueni Vassilievitch Starostine Revolution and Archives: the experience of the French Revolution of the late 18th century and the Russian Revolution of 1917 255 Zinaida Ivanovna Peregudova Political investigation and the Romanov family archives during the revolutionary days 1917–1920 269 Iryna Matyash Archives during the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 277 Leonid Borodkin Economic Dimensions of GULAG: Evidence of the “Archival Revolution” 289 Jan Rychlik The Split of the State and Archives – the case of Czechoslovakia 307 William G. Rosenberg Revolutionary archives and the “archival turn” 313