Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors

• Published in: Theory & event 2008-10, Vol.11 (4), p.N_A
• Main Author: Ferguson, Kathy E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Goldman, Emma (1869-1940)
• ISSN: 2572-6633; 1092-311X

"Alternative visions require alternative archives," write Hamilton, Harris and Reid.43 The Goldman archive, along with the Labadie collection at the University of Michigan, the Kate Sharpley Library in London, the CIRA (Centre international des recherches sur l'anarchisme) in Laussane, Switzerland, the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, the American Radicalism Collection at Michigan State University, The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, and the Walter P. Reuther Library (containing the IWW archives) at Wayne State University are in some sense, and to some degree, counter-hegemonic; they position themselves more or less defiantly as archons of anarchist resistance. While the legitimation of oral traditions is essential for amplifying critical perspectives, the opposition of written/formal/conservative to oral/communal/transformative overlooks the possibilities of a specifically radical, written archive as well as the anti-hegemonic potentials in the most disciplined of state archives.47 Anarchists in general, and Goldman in particular, have been remarkably committed to the written word, generating a universe of books, articles, pamphlets, letters, journals, and circulars (as well as art, music, drama, and speeches) while also provoking the parallel written world of government surveillance and documentation. Because archives bring order to flows, there is always some kind of governing voice or central point of view in archives. [...]the accidental juxtaposition of Paul Avrich's book on anarchist education, The Modern School Movement, with Alan Antliff's Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde opened a whole new direction of thinking stimulated by Goldman's complex relation to modernism and anarchism's remarkable role in fostering radical change in the American art world in the early 20th century.76 In each of these felicitous moments, a small intellectual earthquake shook old and new pieces of my landscape into a new relationship, and fresh possibilities ensued. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, for example, devised principles of "radical archiving" to assure that all lesbian women have access to the archives; all lesbian lives are recorded; archives will be housed "within the community"; "the community" should share in the work of the archive; the archive "shall be involved in the political struggles of all lesbians;" archivists will teach archival skills to the next