Project MUSE®: Archivaria - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Archivaria.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 81 (Spring 2016) through current issueLatest Articles: ArchivariaTWOProject MUSE®Archivaria1923-64090318-6954Latest articles in Archivaria. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors' Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978330
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In recognition of the 50th anniversary of Archivaria and the 30th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, this special issue looks toward the legacy of critical theory in discussions on archives, particularly within the pages of Archivaria, and its impact on the far-ranging and interdisciplinary landscape of contemporary archival thought. Born of the union between archival practice and what was alternately called poststructuralism or postmodernism, early forays into the critical interrogation of archival praxis were rooted in the effort to reclaim the theorization of "the archive" from the proverbial clutches of philosophers, postmodernists, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallEditors' Introduction2025-12-24text/htmlen-USEditors' Introduction2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®93962026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Derrida, the Scene of Archiving, and the Unhappy Consciousness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978331
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This article follows Jacques Derrida's progress toward a direct critical encounter with the scene of archiving,1 centring on his much-commented 1995 work, Archive Fever. It will propose, however, that his many writings on the scene of writing implicate a scene of archiving. More specifically, what follows focuses on his critique of three aspects of the scene of archiving. Though discussed separately for analytical purposes, the three critiques actually converge.The first critique concerns archives as a shelter against record homelessness – against records becoming rootless texts ("texts," in a broad sense). Second, the article turns to Derrida's recurring discussion of metaphor as a kind of unsettling presence in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallDerrida, the Scene of Archiving, and the Unhappy Consciousness2025-12-24text/htmlen-USDerrida, the Scene of Archiving, and the Unhappy Consciousness2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1580262026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Michel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978332
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We begin where Foucault always began – in the "slightly dusty archives of pain."2It is the mid- to late 1950s. Paris. We are in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), rue de Richelieu. The library has just opened and, already, Foucault is at his poste de lecture #284, on the hémicycle, in the salle Labrouste, with its soaring ceiling of domes held up by impossibly thin columns. Foucault prefers the hémicycle; semi-secluded from the main room, there is less chance of being bothered.3 On this day, Foucault is continuing with the research for his dissertation on the history of madness. He wants to look at records related to the mad and many others confined to Paris's Hôpital général, and so he heads one floor up
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallMichel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives2025-12-24text/htmlen-USMichel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1579412026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Red Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Canadian Archival Theory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978333
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Thank you, friend, for coming to this dance.In a speech delivered to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) in 2022, Mazina Giizhik-iban (Hon. Murray Sinclair, CC, OM, MSC) recalled his legal studies at the University of Manitoba.3 He described meeting, as a young Indigenous law student interested in Indigenous laws and cultures, with a group of local Elders and Knowledge Keepers to discuss community laws and cultural practices. To attend the meeting, he was taken on a journey, in the back of a pickup truck, along winding dirt roads deep into the bush. When he asked why they were meeting so far in the backwoods, he was told it was because some of the traditional laws and cultural practices they
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallRed Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Canadian Archival Theory2025-12-24text/htmlen-USRed Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Canadian Archival Theory2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®2561062026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Fevered Inheritances: Ethics of Care and Donor Power in Starchives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978334
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In the three decades since its English publication, Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among theorists of the archive across disciplines, generating a remarkable variety of responses, applications, and critiques. This special issue itself suggests that Derrida is perceived as central to critical theories of the archive, as does Eric Ketelaar's emblematic claim that many cultural studies theorists and disciplines "'discovered' the archives-as-subject rather than archives-as-sources only at the behest of Derrida."1 Theorists frequently pair references to Derrida's work with that of Michel Foucault to limn the postmodern and poststructuralist interventions that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallFevered Inheritances: Ethics of Care and Donor Power in Starchives2025-12-24text/htmlen-USFevered Inheritances: Ethics of Care and Donor Power in Starchives2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1636512026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24"Should We Just Burn It All Down?": Slowness and Institutional Barriers to a Critical Future in Archives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978335
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Paulo Freire tells us that praxis is "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it."2 Praxis connotes a theoretically informed, socially engaged, rigorous approach that, in archives, is aligned with liberatory and critical work. This is echoed in Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand's call to activate a critical archival studies and a critical praxis to disrupt and unsettle archival traditions that have gone unchallenged for too long.3 But what does disruption look like? Can individual archivists challenge core disciplinary assumptions and the logics of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy that structure and haunt archivy, or can that happen only through collective action?
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmall"Should We Just Burn It All Down?": Slowness and Institutional Barriers to a Critical Future in Archives2025-12-24text/htmlen-US"Should We Just Burn It All Down?": Slowness and Institutional Barriers to a Critical Future in Archives2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1049622026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24The Archival Turn as Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978336
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The meanings of the archival turn are dependent on context. Within archival studies, the archival turn has come to mean the critique of the archives enabled by critical theory's questioning of how knowledge is constructed as well as by historical critiques of the role of archives in establishing nation and empire. If, like me, you are in fields outside archival studies, this critique has also taken the form of a turn to the archives by those who had not previously engaged with them. For those of us who work in cultural studies and queer studies, the preservation of underrepresented communities and their histories has necessitated people-centred forms of research, including oral history and ethnography, as well as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallThe Archival Turn as Practice2025-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Archival Turn as Practice2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®622422026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Love in the Archives: Towards a Theory and Praxis of Archival Care
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978337
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Even now, at the distance of calm reflection, I still think it was love. Not a simulation of love, but actual love as it is manifested in institutions.Tamarin Norwood is a writer, artist, scholar, and memoirist. In 2021, an article she wrote was awarded the Wakley Prize by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. In the essay, titled "Something Good Enough," Norwood reflects on the experience of the death of her second son in hospital, shortly after his birth. His death had been anticipated. Earlier in her pregnancy, she had received a diagnosis of anhydramnios: there was not enough amniotic fluid to develop the baby's lungs. Norwood's essay describes the care her family received in hospital, lingering on key
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallLove in the Archives: Towards a Theory and Praxis of Archival Care2025-12-24text/htmlen-USLove in the Archives: Towards a Theory and Praxis of Archival Care2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1884532026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Provenanced Aesthetics: The Beauty of Decay in Dawson City: Frozen Time
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978338
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If archives have long been the administrative tools of governments, states, and corporations – and later, the methodological terrain of historians and the commemorative practices of social movements – most recently, they have become the conceptual and analytical terrain of a range of disciplines across the humanities. Scholars invoke the archive to refer to places, institutions, collections, memory practices, psychic traces, methodologies, organizing principles, information networks, and theoretical frameworks. Some scholars have taken up the archive as a metaphorical apparatus to examine the transmission of knowledge through shared cultural forms. This archival turn in the humanities has produced a wealth of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallProvenanced Aesthetics: The Beauty of Decay in Dawson City: Frozen Time2025-12-24text/htmlen-USProvenanced Aesthetics: The Beauty of Decay in Dawson City: Frozen Time2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®824722026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24"A Self You Have Not Yet Learned How to Love": Building Asian/Queer//Queer/Asian Possibilities Through Archival Speculation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978339
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In her poem "Your Body Kept the Score," trans and non-binary Chinese-Canadian poet Kai Cheng Thom describes producing her identity at the impossible intersections of Asianness and queerness and what it meant to embody that self in the absence of visible models of such identities. Thom's poem is among the artistic endeavours exploring the theme of bodies as archives in a special blog issue titled "Bodies as Archives: QTBIPOC Art and Performance in Toronto."1 The theme presupposes an inherent relationship between embodiment and archival encounter, which requires one's historicization to stand in place of absent representation elsewhere. As both Asian and queer, Thom reveals in this and other poems the impossibilities
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmall"A Self You Have Not Yet Learned How to Love": Building Asian/Queer//Queer/Asian Possibilities Through Archival Speculation2025-12-24text/htmlen-US"A Self You Have Not Yet Learned How to Love": Building Asian/Queer//Queer/Asian Possibilities Through Archival Speculation2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®2023782026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives ed. by Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978340
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Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives, co-edited by Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, features the work of authors writing from a range of secondary institutions and community archives in the United States of America about projects that took place between 2016 and 2021. Much has happened between that period and the writing of this review in June 2025. With the rise of a fascist authoritarian government in the United States, with its long roots in colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, the lessons contained within this volume take on a sense of urgency and vitality. I full-heartedly encourage any archivists, educators, and workers in the fields of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallTransforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives ed. by Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes (review)2025-12-24text/htmlen-USTransforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives ed. by Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes (review)2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®180132026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978341
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In Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, Tanya Clement both argues for and illustrates how audio archives are of value in literary scholarship. Working with audio media digitized from reel-to-reel tapes, audiocassettes, and sound discs, Clement interestingly focuses on audio recordings that are perhaps not obviously literary, such as recordings of performances and readings, and considers how audio recordings can be both subject to literary analysis and intertwined with creative processes. These recordings include, for example, oral histories of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma; folklore recordings created, co-created, and participated in by Zora Neale Hurston; conference proceedings from a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallDissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)2025-12-24text/htmlen-USDissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives by Tanya E. Clement (review)2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®136512026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession ed. by Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978342
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Preserving Disability constitutes an unapologetic celebration of Disabled histories and their preservation. It interrogates the motivations and values that underlie preservation: Why do we choose to preserve the records we do, and how do those choices shape how we imagine disability? An edited volume of 22 chapters, Preserving Disability is a thorough examination of and meditation on what it means to be Disabled and to represent disability in archival spaces.The editors are both exceptionally well-positioned to work on a book on this topic. Dr. Gracen Brilmyer, an assistant professor at McGill University, is also the director of the Disability Archives Lab, and they have published extensively on erased and partial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallPreserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession ed. by Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang (review)2025-12-24text/htmlen-USPreserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession ed. by Gracen Brilmyer and Lydia Tang (review)2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®90562026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Joyce Wieland: À cœur battant; Joyce Wieland: Heart On (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978343
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Perhaps the most lasting image of Joyce Wieland: Heart On, the spring-summer exhibition co-curated and hosted by Montreal's Musée des beaux-arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), is that of four knit flags, entitled Flag Arrangement, from 1970–71. The exhibition – the largest ever devoted to the seemingly inexhaustible painter/filmmaker/sculptor/textile artist – collects a diverse body of work sourced from Canadian institutions. It also negotiates, at a time when such questions have gained new political urgency, the idea of Canadian patriotism. Wieland wanted to resist the dominance of American culture over Canadians, and yet her form of nationalism necessitated looking at, and never away from, the problems
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallJoyce Wieland: À cœur battant; Joyce Wieland: Heart On (review)2025-12-24text/htmlen-USJoyce Wieland: À cœur battant; Joyce Wieland: Heart On (review)2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®177272026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978344
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In 1964, Radio-Canada invited a young Alanis Obomsawin to appear in an interview with journalist Jean Ducharme on the television program Aujourd'hui to discuss Indigenous cultures and traditions and her experience growing up as an Indigenous woman. Over the course of the interview, Ducharme's line of questioning grew more and more contentious. He asked, for instance, whether Obomsawin agreed that living among white people was harmless for Indigenous culture.1 She responded,
You know, we didn't write many things down, the Indians, for our part. But there are things that we're taught as kids from mouth to mouth that exist to this day, like songs, legends, and stories. And we have a history of Canada too, one that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/729/image/coversmallAlanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story (review)2025-12-24text/htmlen-USAlanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story (review)2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®203862026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24