The Matter of the Archive

INTRODUCTION

The essays in this volume investigate specific archives, particular collections of mnemonic objects, most of them created or sustained over the course of the Romantic century (ca. 1750–1850). Both the spaces that housed, and the protocols that shaped, archival enterprises changed during this century. The collection of natural history specimens assembled by Sir Hans Sloane through his dealings with curious travelers and during his own voyages to Jamaica occasions one familiar example of that dynamic: in 1753, with the establishment of the British Museum, that collection was reconstituted, transformed into the core of the holdings which the Museum would henceforth put on public display, “for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons,” as the language of the Act founding the institution declares.¹ The trajectory traced by Sloane’s collectibles exemplifies a wider trend from this period: cabinets of curiosities, formerly situated within private, aristocratic spaces and attesting to the virtu of an individual owner, come then to be relocated within centralized institutional settings, where they are in new ways made accountable to the imperatives of public culture or nationalist genealogy. During this same century, the disparate paper trails created by colonial ventures likewise begin finding their way into the document repositories that constituted modernity’s new spaces of memory. In 1776, the East India Company began appointing individuals to the post of “Keeper of Records” (later, the “Register of Indian Records”), making them responsible for maintaining the account books and correspondence that the Company saved in its London “book office” and which formed its inherited administrative memory. Some portion of the documentary holdings that these men oversaw became part of public culture, as happened, for instance, during Warren Hastings’s long trial on charges of imperial malfeasance, while others remained secret. (The bulk of those East India Company archives remained inaccessible until after India won its independence in 1947; similarly, for much of its long history the Hudson’s Bay Company both generated reams of manuscript records and protected its trading privileges in the north by ensuring that all those records were sequestered after their passage to the metropole.)² The Romantic period witnesses, as well, projects of centralization perhaps best described as the archiving of archives, with, for example, Napoleon ordering in 1810 the entire archive of the Inquisition in Rome to be transferred, wagon-load by wagon-load, to Paris. In a development that builds on that consolidation, the period also launches what the media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst describes as a new, “xerographical” idea of what it meant to speak about the past:³ a positivist historiography that was grounded in documents, and whose objectivity was ostensibly guaranteed by that grounding, by a modern exteriorization of collective memory in artifacts rather than inside human minds.

Twenty-first-century accounts of the cultural and epistemological transformations that we have just surveyed have often taken their cue from the scene of inception that Jacques Derrida staged to open his 1995 book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. For Derrida, law and history begin when, somewhere in ancient Greece, a certain set of documents is sent to the archon, the chief magistrate or ruler, in compliance with this lawmaker’s desire that these writings be placed in safe keeping and in compliance, more broadly, with his desire to consolidate the law’s power. This particular origin story has lent support to a strict definition of the archive as a carefully controlled set of documents, many of them in manuscript, that have been placed in a carefully safeguarded place where they are to remain once and for all. Archives, Derrida proposed, are storage facilities that retain their contents—carefully catalogued, readily searchable—under a kind of “house arrest” that “gathers together signs”:⁴ permanence and stability are the archive’s watchwords. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Gayatri Spivak writes about archives in similar terms; she plays up the intentionality of the colonial archive, which in her account includes only what it wants to include.

The essays collected here present materials, collections, and stories of exclusions and losses that challenge this...