Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (review)

The essays in Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan’s edited collection, Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, are written by scholars in diverse fields, with rhetoric, writing, literacy, and women’s studies especially well represented. These essays, Lucy Schultz remarks in the foreword, “instantiate the archival turn” popular today (vii), a point that serves as a keynote to the volume: “When an event has taken place, what we know of it comes from various accounts constructed as rhetorical acts in a theoretical space by writers who, while engaged in historical research, assume the subject positions of rhetorician” (vii).

In “The Role of Serendipity, Family Connections, and Cultural Memory in Historical Research,” editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan introduce their goals for the collection, which include “expanding a narrow conception of archives” and exposing “facets of the research process that might be easily marginalized” (4). They celebrate “place”—that is, “geographical location”—as archive, one with the power to reveal much to those open to its stories. Kirsch and Rohan conclude with the wish that the collection will cultivate “the openness of heart and mind required for the very best scholarly work” (9). The integral role they (and many of their contributors) attribute to affect is likely to rankle more traditional researchers, whose characterization of historical records and procedures this book wishes to challenge.

Seventeen essays follow. All are first-person narratives that recount parts of an author’s archival research, from exploring a subject to honing focus, and from recalling early insecurity about one’s training or even one’s abilities to gaining confidence about method and object, often the result of casting off objectivist standards of truth in favor of modes of interpretation that embrace a range of aptitudes. Indeed, the authors generally celebrate the insights made possible by emotion and intuition, which is not to say that evidentiary standards are not in place. In short, the narratives bring to life what Schultz describes as work “as a lived process” (ix).

The volume divides into four sections, the subtitles of which convey the texture of the whole. Four essays make up the first section, “When Serendipity, Creativity, and Place Come into Play.” In these the role of place is especially important to “the imaginative thinking” and “the thinking imagination.” David Gold—the “Accidental Archivist” of his title—recounts in specific terms the difficulty of finding the materials necessary for writing micro-histories of nontraditional colleges, but comes to embrace “Chance and Confusion in Historical Scholarship” (13). Four essays also make up the second section, “When Personal Experience, Family History, and Research Subjects Intersect.” Ronald R. Stockton’s “The Biography of a Graveyard” tells the story of how this political scientist came to be the historian of a local Illinois resting place.

Five essays make up the third section, “When Personal, Cultural, and Historical Memory Shape the Politics of the Archives.” Essays by established scholars of color like Malea Powell, Victor Villaneuva, and Gail Y. Okawa talk back to archives whose shapes and absences have misled and continue to mislead researchers who compose the histories that often stand as truth. The often painful acts of defiance described here are to be celebrated. In the next essay, Anca Vlasopolos discloses how she came to write her historical novel, New Bedford Samurai, revealing how the stories of an old friend and the generous help of new ones afforded her rare opportunities to follow albatrosses and others in Japan.

Four essays make up the final section, “When the Lives of Our Research Subjects Parallel Our Own.” Elizabeth Birmingham’s “‘I See Dead People’: Archive, Crypt, and an Argument for the Researcher’s Sixth Sense” follows the author’s study of female architect Marion Mahoney Griffin, whose accomplishments had been alternately dismissed or attributed to her husband. Assuming that faculty valuations were beyond question, Birmingham acquiesced to making Walter...