Women and Archives

In her essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" (1983), the novelist Alice Walker pays tribute to the anonymous women and Black women in particular whose creativity has been either neglected or unaccounted for by dominant conceptions of what counts as art or literature. As Walker queries, "But when … did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high—and low."¹ Walker discovers that "our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read" (p. 1186). Indeed, while we conjure literary ghosts and excavate the lost and found of women's "creative spark," we must always remain mindful of the voices and innovations sewn into but, like invisible thread, unseen in the archives. Put another way, while archives offer scholars like us many affordances, they are also hindered by both epistemological and material limitations.

During 2020, we confronted new exigencies and constraints as we attempted to conduct research and produce scholarship during a global pandemic. For public health reasons, archives were made more inaccessible than ever. There were also fresh concerns regarding gender and labor, with scores of women (often the primary caregivers for children, the elderly, and sick friends and relatives in general) attempting to juggle new personal responsibilities alongside their active research agendas. Intersectional forms of oppression exacerbate these gender inequities. As we write, the yawning gender gaps that have always existed in the publication, recognition, documentation, curation, and scholarly analysis of women's literature—and have acutely impacted BIPOC and LGBTQ+ women's literature—are likely growing wider.

Even before COVID-19 altered the world as we know it, archives were generating a great deal of academic concern among and beyond archivists. Over the last several decades, many scholars have pivoted away from conceiving of archives as simply sites to conduct research and have instead highlighted the role that vaults and repositories of documents and artifacts play in curating and preserving particular forms of knowledge at the expense of others. Indeed, as theorists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historians Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, and Marisa J. Fuentes, and literary and culture studies critics Diana Taylor, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina Sharpe, and Sara Ahmed, among others, have made clear, archives are never neutral.² Ahmed points out that "the act of building such an archive is not exhausted or exhaustive; there are things forgotten, paths not followed."³ Archivists Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook similarly assert that "archives have the power to privilege and to marginalize. They can be a tool of hegemony; they can be a tool of resistance."⁴ This dual function of the archive as a vehicle for both reinforcing social inequities and engendering counternarratives frames our two special issues on "Women and Archives."⁵

In thinking through how to introduce these issues, we decided to record our conversation about the paradoxes that lie at the heart of archives. We especially consider how our scholarship in distinct fields—eighteenth-century British literature (Laura) and contemporary American and African American literature (Emily)—as well as our lived experiences inform our understanding of the intersection of archives and women's literature.

Emily:

I thought we might begin our conversation by attempting to define the archive.

Laura:

The archive can be both a tangible and an ephemeral thing. When we are talking about archives, we're usually talking about institutional spaces that save significant materials in one way or another. Often women's archival material was only preserved when they were connected to "men of importance." There are also more informal ways of thinking about archival collections in everything from libraries to people's own personal attics and closets. In other words, the archive can be both public and collective and a personal collection of things.

Moreover, the materials can be written and narrative, but they can...