Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Exploration in Canadian Women’s Archives ed. by Linda M. Morra, Jessica Schagerl (review)

In Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives questions about the ethics of doing research in women’s archives are explored from numerous different perspectives. As they question what it means to conduct ethical research, contributors also consider how archives form and re-form over time: essays address questions about what makes up an archive, what it means to do archival research and what it means to archive and to be archived.

In their introduction, Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl explain the book’s separation into three sections: reorientations, restrictions and responsibilities. In the first section, “Reorientations,” questions about what constitutes an archive are considered in essays that expand traditional definitions of “archive.” Cecily Devereux argues convincingly for the ability of eBay to act as an archive of cultural history in her essay on the presentation and consumption of “Indian maidens” on the online shopping web-site. Devereux suggests that the “records” on eBay help fill gaps in the institutional record; other essays in this section likewise call attention to such gaps. Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl present the blog of poet Sina Queyras as a “shifting and unpredictable” (60) archive, but one which provides researchers with unique opportunities to investigate the tensions between print and digital culture that currently affect writers’ lives and works. T.L. Cowan’s contribution to this section is particularly provocative in its challenge to the traditional archive; writing about how to “preserve” feminist cabaret, Cowan speculates about the archival nature of the anecdote as the primary source in what she calls “repertoire knowledges.” (71) As archive, the anecdote emphasizes how we remember rather than what we remember. Other essays in this section consider how archives are made and/or found in fiction and film, foregrounding the need to read “against the grain,” to develop alternative strategies of reading women’s archives.

In the second section, “Restrictions,” writers focus on the limits and exclusions of archives. Susan Butlin discusses how national archival institutions have failed to recognize the significance of popular commercial artwork in the archives of artist Florence Carlyle; focusing on “high art,” these institutions have formed collections that are not representative of Carlyle’s life or artistic output, and Butlin describes her search through more local, “small and obscure archival deposits” (144), where less culturally constrictive acquisition practices have led to the formation of often overlooked but very useful collections. Butlin also discusses her own resistance to accepting Carlyle’s commercial work as a central aspect of her archive and her life, explaining that as she worked through the “unexpected” (148) in Carlyle’s archives, she was confronted by her subjectivity as researcher and by the realization that she had to let go of expectations and let the material lead her. Essays by Andrea Beverley and by Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir address issues of privacy in archives. Panofsky and Moir discuss restrictions placed on the Adele Wiseman fonds at York University from the perspectives of the researcher and the archivist, while Beverley considers the archival subject’s desire for privacy and the researcher’s responsibility in the face of that desire. Catherine Hobbs’ article in this section is the only contribution in the book by a professional archivist and offers a nuanced analysis of the ethical responsibilities of archivists who work with personal collections. Hobbs asks, “W hat does it mean to ‘do right’ by someone’s archives?” (181) This is a deceptively simple question; her essay introduces new ideas about how the everyday work of appraisal, arrangement and description has ethical implications and should be required reading in archival studies courses. In the final essay in this section, Karina Vernon explains how the absence of archives of racial minorities in national institutions is often portrayed as a sign of exclusion or “disenfranchisement” but argues that in some cases these exclusions are...