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

Taken together, the essays in Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl’s book Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives set out to show “the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada.” In this regard, the emphasis on exploration in the collection’s subtitle is fitting. The essays are diverse in focus and consider the numerous problems and possibilities of archival work from a variety of angles. As a result, the process of reading through the collection both mimics the journey of archival work in its twists and turns, and also reflects the difficulty of pinning down what we mean by not just women’s archives but archives in general.

The essays themselves are scattered across the map of archival interests – the subjects range from Lucy Maud Montgomery to feminist cabaret. But the editors do suggest in their introduction a trajectory of reading the collection that lends it some coherence. They divide the essays into three broadly thematic categories: Reorientations, Restrictions, and Responsibilities. The final theme – Responsibilities – in fact runs throughout the book, as almost all of the contributors explicitly or implicitly engage with the ethics of archival work. Even the observations made by those authors whose work is being collected and archived contribute as much in this vein as the others. For example, Daphne Marlatt’s essay, “Of Mini-Ships and Archives,” is a wonderful complement to the contributions of traditional academics as she describes a “struggle with a sense of invaded privacy” around her own work.

By including essays from creative writers and academics, as well as archivists themselves, the collection is more able to respond to this central question about responsibility – or “ethically dealing” with archives, as the editors put it in the introduction. For example, the contribution made by Catherine Hobbs, English-language literary archivist at Library and Archives Canada, in her essay, “Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers,” rounds out the collection’s interest in all aspects of the archival process, particularly in her discussion of the extent to which traditional archival theory fails to accommodate literary archives and where and how the archivist herself must respond to the resultant gaps. Overall, there is a sense of voices coming together: creator, researcher, and archivist.

Importantly, the collection doesn’t shy away from asking difficult questions. Indeed, there is perhaps room for more of the kind of challenging questions Karina Vernon poses, for example, in her essay, “Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada’s ‘Multicultural Mandate.’” Her interrogation of the impulse to archive and the assumptions about archives that institutions such as Library and Archives Canada take for granted stands as an important reminder that the archive itself is ethically fraught, that some communities choose not to archive, or choose to archive outside of and away from the institution.

The concern with ethics is one of the opportunities the book opens up for further thinking and theorizing about archival research. Although the editors do quickly summarize relevant archival theory in their introduction, the essays gesture toward a fuller and more nuanced theoretical framework for approaching archival work in the twenty-first century that would also take into account newer forms of digital archives. For example, Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl’s discussion of Sina Queyras’s blog, Lemon Hound, explores the encounter between archive and digital media, and the implications of this encounter for reading, for publishing, and for literary culture in general. I get the sense, reading this and the other essays in the collection, that the adventures, trials, discoveries, and disappointments recorded and collected here are the raw materials out of which we might further shape an archival theory that fits the complexities of the work we’re doing and that explicitly addresses what’s at stake when we archive – or don’t. As...