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Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada.

The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.

From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

1

Of Mini-Ships and Archives

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt’s essay, “Of Mini-Ships and Archives,” considers the ethical issues involved in archiving her own material when the privacy of others is also at stake.


2

Finding Indian Maidens on eBay: Tales of the Alternative Archive (and More Tales of White Commodity Culture)

Cecily Devereux

In “Finding Indian Maidens on eBay: Tales of the Alternative Archive (and More Tales of White Commodity Culture),” Cecily Devereux focuses on images of the Indian maiden in relation to questions of race, gender, and commodity culture. The source of such images is not the institution proper but, much more unconventionally, the web auction site eBay.
3

“Faster Than a Speeding Thought”: Lemon Hound’s Archive Unleashed

Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl

In “‘Faster Than a Speeding Thought’: Lemon Hound’s Archive Unleashed,” Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl consider the value of digital technologies for a revised understanding of the archive.


4

“I remember…I was wearing leather pants”: Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada

T.L. Cowan

T.L. Cowan’s “‘I remember . . . I was wearing leather pants’: Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada,” begins with a discussion of how best to document an event when one’s immediate archives are ephemeral and anecdotal. In so doing, she commits to writing a “rhizomatic historiography of the feminist cabaret specifically, but more generally, about feminist community-based, or grass-roots, performance.”


5

In the Hope of Making a Connection: Rereading Archival Bodies, Responses and Love in Marian Engel’s Bear and Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung”

Catherine Bates

Catherine Bates provides strategies of reading the archive that are evinced in the work of Marian Engel and Alice Munro. In her paper, “‘In the hope of making a connection’: Rereading Archival Bodies, Responses and Love in Marian Engel’s Bear and Alice Munro’s "Meneseteung," she suggests that these writers develop alternative, embodied strategies of reading within an archive.


6

An Archive of Complicity: Ethically (Re)Reading the Documentaries of Nelofer Pazira

Hannah McGregor

Hannah McGregor focuses on the discursive components of archives. In “An Archive of Complicity: Ethically (Re)Reading the Documentaries of Nelofer Pazira,” she specifically questions conflicting readings of Pazira’s work and emphasizes that Pazira’s artistic archive (films and memoir, chiefly) needs to be read against what she calls “the official Canadian archive of publicly-disseminated information about Afghanistan into which Pazira as a public figure has been absorbed.”  


7

Psyche and her Helpers, Under Cloud Cover

Penn Kemp

Penn Kemp’s autobiographical piece, “Psyche and her Helpers, Under Cloud Cover,” reflects upon the challenges of archiving sound, email, and digital files.


8

Archival Matters

Sally Clark

Sally Clark’s essay, “Archival Matters” tracks those “matters”—both the archival material proper and the concerns authors may have—which arise and which may impede the process of archiving one’s own papers, and sometimes those of others.


9

Keeping the Archive Door Open: Writing about Florence Carlyle

Susan Butlin

Susan Butlin reminds us in her essay, “Keeping the Archive Door Open: Writing about Florence Carlyle,” that exclusions from the archival record “result in a distorted view of women artists’ and writers’ professional careers and production.” For Carlyle, for instance, there exists a range of difficult-to-unearth resources that suggests an institutional lack of attention to popular commercial culture; these resources allow Butlin to question the traditional narrative surrounding the creative production and remunerative activity of female artists.


10

The Oral, the Archive, and Ethics: Canadian Women Writers Telling It

Andrea Beverley

In “The Oral, the Archive, and Ethics: Canadian Women Writers Telling It,” Andrea Beverley considers the limits to both what might be preserved in the archives and what a researcher may disclose after his or her discoveries therein.


11

Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars

Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir

As Ruth Panofsky discusses with Michael Moir in “Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars,” there are limits to completing research in archives; Moir explains the process by which archivists make decisions to preserve material and allow or prevent access.


12

Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers

Catherine Hobbs

In “Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers,” Catherine Hobbs elucidates what the responsibilities and ethical commitments of the archivist are when dealing with the papers of literary authors. In spite of such responsibilities and commitments, the archival institution is not consistently regarded as an ideal repository.


13

Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada’s Multicultural Mandate

Karina Vernon

Karina Vernon explores in “Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada’s ‘Multicultural Mandate’” how Black Prairie community members have avoided depositing their materials with Libraries and Archives Canada because they feel that their exclusions from the national imaginary would be restaged in the institution itself—even if LAC has been reoriented to reflect an institutionally-conceived “Multicultural Archives.”


14

“Rat in the Box”

Susan McMaster

In “Rat in the Box,” Susan McMaster reflects upon the deposition of her own papers, but also notes that these papers cannot be seen in isolation: the papers must be regarded as a part of the work of a larger cultural community. 


15

Letters to the Woman’s Page Editor: Francis Marion Beynon’s “The Country Homemakers”” and a Public Culture for Women

Katja Thieme

In “Letters to the Woman’s Page Editor: Francis Marion Beynon’s ‘The Country Homemakers’ and a Public Culture for Women,” Katja Thieme likewise suggests the need for turning to an under-used archives for investigation. She herself charts the rhetoric of Canadian suffrage debates through the archive of the “Grain Growers’ Guide” under the women’s page editorship of Francis Marion Beynon. Through the archival traces of her editorship, Thieme suggests how we might approach Beynon as significant to a larger and burgeoning feminist community in the pre-First World War period.


16

Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery; Or, “As Long as the Leaves Hold Together”

Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre

In “Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery; Or, ‘As Long as the Leaves Hold Together,’” Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre approach Montgomery archives from two different professional backgrounds in order to consider how their archival discoveries might be characterized and how such discoveries have an impact on currents in Montgomery scholarship
17

The Quality of the Carpet: A Consideration of Anecdotes in Researching Women’s Lives

Linda M. Morra

In “The Quality of the Carpet: A Consideration of the Value and Preservation of Anecdotes in Researching Women’s Lives,” Linda M. Morra traces the use of anecdotes in researching women’s lives and contemplates the ethical implications for their inclusion or exclusion from feminist research.


18

“I want my story told”: The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice

Paul Tiessen

Paul Tiessen considers the complicated and sometimes troubling means by which a researcher must approach his or her archival subject: as his title, “‘I want my story told’: The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice,” suggests, the researcher is implicated in the telling of the story and rendering of the subject’s voice. So it is that the researcher must also come to consider the responsibilities involved in “voyeuristically occupy[ing] a corner of a triangular position” when reading correspondence between two literary figures.


19

“You can do with all this rambling whatever you want”: Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer’s Archives

Kathleen Venema

Kathleen Venema’s moving essay, “‘You can do with all this rambling whatever you want’: Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer’s Archives” memories, theorizes the absences of and gaps in archives in resonant ways. So she notes that “Alzheimer’s disease means that my mother’s life and mine are defined these days by discontinuities, disconnections, and absences like the ones that the archive simultaneously performs and seeks to redress.” 


20

Locking Up Letters

Julia Creet

Julia Creet’s poignant rumination “Locking Up Letters” considers the ethical implications of depositing her mother’s Holocaust letters in the archives. The place to which these papers are consigned, she notes, is important in order to honour and respect her mother’s complicated national histories.


Afterword

Janice Fiamengo

Janice Fiamengo’s “Afterword” assesses at turns what archives are; where and how they may be located; how they may be approached, characterized, and interpreted; and what processes ought to be adopted for the material under scrutiny.


Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
  2. p. 1
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  1. Title Page, Copyright, Stuff
  2. pp. 2-7
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-x
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  1. Introduction: No Archive Is Neutral
  2. pp. 1-20
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  1. I. Reorientations
  1. Of Mini-Ships and Archives
  2. pp. 23-28
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  1. Finding Indian Maidens on eBay: Tales of the Alternative Archive (and More Tales of White Commodity Culture)
  2. pp. 29-46
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  1. “Faster Than a Speeding Thought”: Lemon Hound’s Archive Unleashed
  2. pp. 47-64
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  1. “I remember . . . I was wearing leather pants”: Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada
  2. pp. 65-86
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  1. “In the hope of making a connection”: Rereading Archival Bodies, Responses, and Love in Marian Engel’s Bear and Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung”
  2. pp. 87-106
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  1. An Archive of Complicity: Ethically (Re)Reading the Documentaries of Nelofer Pazira
  2. pp. 107-124
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  1. Psyche and Her Helpers, under Cloud Cover
  2. pp. 125-130
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  1. II. Restrictions
  1. Archival Matters
  2. pp. 133-140
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  1. Keeping the Archive Door Open: Writing about Florence Carlyle
  2. pp. 141-154
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  1. The Oral, the Archive, and Ethics: Canadian Women Writers Telling It
  2. pp. 155-168
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  1. Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars
  2. pp. 169-180
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  1. Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers
  2. pp. 181-192
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  1. Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada’s “Multicultural Mandate”
  2. pp. 193-204
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  1. III. Responsibilities
  1. Rat in the Box: Thoughts on Archiving My Stuff
  2. pp. 207-214
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  1. Letters to the Woman’s Page Editor: Reading Francis Marion Beynon’s “The Country Homemakers” and a Public Culture for Women
  2. pp. 215-232
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  1. Archival Adventures with L. M. Montgomery; or, “As Long as the Leaves Hold Together”
  2. pp. 233-248
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  1. The Quality of the Carpet: A Consideration of Anecdotes in Researching Women’s Lives
  2. pp. 249-262
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  1. “I want my story told”: The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice
  2. pp. 263-280
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  1. “You can do with all this rambling whatever you want”: Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer’s Archives
  2. pp. 281-302
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  1. Locking Up Letters
  2. pp. 303-318
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  1. Afterword
  2. pp. 319-324
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 325-330
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 331-335
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  1. Further Reading
  2. pp. 347-349
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