On the Record

In April 2003, shortly after the destruction of priceless antiquities in the National Museum and shortly before the collections of the Koranic Library suffered a similar fate, the National Library and Archives in Baghdad were broken into and set alight by unknown rioters, as allied troops stood by. Writing in the Independent the following day, eyewitness journalist Robert Fisk noted with resignation the inevitability of this course of events: 'So yesterday was the burning of the books', he remarked, the occurrence of this powerful gesture of erasure engendering little more than world-weary acceptance of its predictability.¹ While iconoclastic attacks on national archives are indeed commonplace in periods of political violence, war and revolution, they draw attention to the vulnerability of the archival record even in more ostensibly peaceful environments. Further, such episodes, which the early twenty-first-century person inevitably views through a lens coloured by the wars and ideological struggles of the previous century, prompt us to consider the role of archives in shaping history and memory. The critical writings of Freud, Benjamin, Foucault and Derrida, among others, have blurred the boundaries between interpretation of the category 'archive' and the investigation of an archive. More recently the stakes have been raised by the assimilation of 'archive' into the vocabulary of paper culture appropriated by the digital – 'desktop', 'files', 'document' and so on – while traditional paper archives have been transformed by digital reproduction, which has in turn provided new methods of searching and consequently interpreting their contents.

Historians and archivists are interdependent, yet their relationship has seldom been analysed in any depth. This despite the fact that, as Penelope Papailias observes, 'The archive appears to have taken the place of historical narrative as a key locus for critical historical reflection'.² The collections of essays reviewed here are notable for their attempt to foster dialogue between the managers and users of archives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of access is a recurrent theme in both collections, an issue which sometimes has a political dimension. The restriction of access to an archive inevitably recalls the suppression of archives in mid twentieth-century Russia or Germany. Many of the essays explore this politicization and manipulation of archival sources, raising important questions about what Kathleen Marquis (in an essay which argues for collaboration between researchers and archivists) dryly terms the 'dragon at the gate' stereotype of archival practice, and historians' assumptions about their agency in the production of history.³

Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory is the more ambitious of the two publications. The result of a year-long Sawyer Seminar, held in 2000–2001 at the Advanced Studies Center of the International Institute of the University of Michigan, the forty-six papers brought together in this collection, by historians and archivists mainly, but also geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, and curators, approach the field from a diverse range of perspectives, and with a variety of theoretical and historical interests in mind. As the editors note in the first of their lucid introductions to the book's five sections, the main point of departure for the collection was an understanding of archives not as passive 'repositories' for historical knowledge, but as 'a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies'.⁴

The first essay in the collection, Carolyn Steedman's "'Something She Called a Fever": Michelet, Derrida, and Dust (Or, in the Archives with Michelet and Derrida)' is a fitting introduction, a sophisticated article which begins from a consideration of Derrida's 1995 Mal d'Archive, to consider the 'illness' of the archive as it affects the daily task of the historian, and then goes on to link the young Michelet...