Women's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women's archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae - missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication - that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
Show moreWomen's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women's archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae - missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication - that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
Show moreLinda Morra is a full professor at Bishop's University. She
was the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies (2016-2017) at
University College Dublin and a visiting scholar at Berkeley,
University of California (2016). Her book Unarrested Archives
(2014) was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Jessica Schagerl's research focuses on Canadian studies,
drawing heavily on archival material; she is also invested in
questions of professional concern, including mentoring and the
futures of arts and humanities. She is the alumni and development
officer for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of
Western Ontario.
`` Basements and Attics theorizes archives as non-neutral sites,
and articulates archival work as open to critical interpretations
and methodologies.... Each section explores alternative research by
highlighting the resourcefulness of publishers' archives, private
collections, or digital repositories. The contributions included in
"Reorientations" and "Responsibilities," for instance, constitute
excellent "how-to" guides for researchers interested not only in
how archives problematize (dis)location, representation, and
cultural translation, but also in ethical (re)readings of an
author's literary career.... Basements and Attics, Closets and
Cyberspace ...serves as an essential guide in defining what
constitutes an archive-as an ideologically and culturally
constructed site-and in addressing pertinent challenges encountered
both in the creation and study of Canadian women's archives, and
also those presented by the advent of new technologies.'' --
Cristina Ivanovici -- Canadian Literature, 219, Winter 2013
`` Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace is a fine example
of the systematic ways in which Canadian scholars (to a greater
degree, perhaps, than their Australian counterparts) have
successfully opened out and responded to some of the larger and
more compelling questions concerning what it means to work in, and
with, archived personal papers, whether as archivists or
researchers. As Morra and Schagerl observe, their collection
"addresses the real and sometimes peculiar challenges that affect
archival work today", and they freely admit that some of that work
now involves "deciding what constitutes and archive" (p. 1). The
subtitle, Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives , indicates
that the volume is especially directed towards those engaged in
ongoing debates concerning the archiving of material produced by
women, but those professing little or no knowledge of these debates
or Canadian literature more generally still have much to gain from
these detailed and sometimes provocative essays. If, as Catherine
Hobbs suggests in her contribution ... "archival theory has done a
terrible job of accommodating the particular needs of individual
peoples' archives" (p. 181), this volume arguably goes some way
towards addressing this lacuna. Comprising 20 essays, as well as a
lengthy introduction and afterword, it is a substantial work....
While the last section contains perhaps the most explicit
reflection on questions of ethics, contributors across the volume
consistently return to this aspect of archival work, thus making it
a valuable resource for anyone seeking to extend their
understanding of the many ethical dimensions invovled in managing
personal papers, whether in their acquisition, processing,
accessing or scholarly use.... [A] major contribution to ongoing
debates in the area of personal papers.... Basements and Attics,
Closets and Cyberspace is a valuable addition to current
scholarship and debate and, as such, deserves to be read and
appreciated well beyond the Canadian border.'' -- Maryanne Dever,
University of Newcastle -- Archives and Manuscripts, Vol. 41, No.
2
``Each of the volume's authors explores some of the unacknowledged,
yet crucial, ethical, material, and cultural boundaries that
pertain to the archiving of, and access to, the works of Canadian
women.... The book's contributors also address issues extending
beyond gender, such as the challenges of archiving digital works
and those of a more ephemeral nature, modes of resistant reading
and in every way challenge the static view of how we might come to
understand both archives and the process of archiving.'' -- Kane
Faucher -- Western News, October 31, 2013
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