"Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive." Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History --

Processing the Past explores the dramatic changes taking place in historical understanding and archival management, and hence the relations between historians and archivists. Written by an archivist and a historian, it shows how these changes have been brought on by new historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies. The book takes an "archival turn" by situating archives as subjects rather than places of study, and examining the increasingly problematic relationships between historical and archival work. By showing how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and archivists in Europe and North America came to occupy the same conceptual and methodological space, the book sets the background to these changes. In the past, authoritative history was based on authoritative archives and mutual understandings of scientific research. These connections changed as historians began to ask questions not easily answered by traditional documentation, and archivists began to confront an unmanageable increase in the amount of material they processed and the challenges of new electronic technologies. The authors contend that historians and archivists have divided into two entirely separate professions with distinct conceptual frameworks, training, and purposes, as well as different understandings of the authorities that govern their work. Processing the Past moves toward bridging this divide by speaking in one voice to these very different audiences. Blouin and Rosenberg conclude by raising the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if historical scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is archival and historical will ever again be joined.

This collection of essays interrogates library practices relating to archives and special collections.

Performing Archives/Archives of Performance contributes to the ongoing critical discussions of performance and its disappearance, of the ephemeral and its reproduction, of archives and mediatized recordings of liveness. The many contributions by excellent scholars and artists from a broad range of interdisciplinary fields as well as from various locations in research geographies demonstrate that despite the extensive discourse on the relationship between performance and the archive, inquiry into the productive tensions between ephemerality and permanence is by no means outdated or exhausted. New ways of understanding archives, history, and memory emerge and address theories of enactment and intervention, while concepts of performance constantly proliferate and enable a critical focus on archival residue. The contributions in Performing Archives/Archives of Performance cover philosophical inquiries as well as discussions of specific art works, performances, and archives.

Contributions by: Heike Roms, Amelia Jones, Julie Louise Bacon, Peter van der Meijden, Emma Willis, Rivka Syd Eisner, Rachel Fensham, Sarah Whatley, Tracy C. Davis, Barnaby King, Laura Luise Schultz, Malene Vest Hansen, Mette Sandbye, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Margeritha Sprio, Annelis Kuhlmann, Morten Søndergaard, Martha Wilson, Catherine Bagnall, Paul Clarke, Solveig Gade, Gunhild Borggreen, Rune Gade, Louise Wolthers, Mathias Danbolt, Marco Pustianaz.

Gunhild Borggreen is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Rune Gade is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. Electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of “archival” and “retrieval” practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing. Archives today are the center of much attention but few agendas. Can archives inform the redistribution of power and resources when the concept of the public library as an institution makes knowledge and culture accessible to all members of society regardless of social or economic status? This book sets out to show that archives need our active support and continuing engagement. This volume offers three distinct perspectives on the present status of archives that are at once in disagreement and solidarity with each other, from contributors whose backgrounds cut across the theory–practice divide. Is the increasing digital storage of knowledge pushing us toward a turning point in its democratization? Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Is there a downside to the present-day impulse toward total preservation?

Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities examines the data-driven labour that underpinned the Index Thomisticus–a preeminent project of the incunabular digital humanities–and advanced the data-foundations of computing in the Humanities. Through oral history and archival research, Nyhan reveals a hidden history of the entanglements of gender in the intellectual and technical work of the early digital humanities. Setting feminized keypunching in its historical contexts–from the history of concordance making, to the feminization of the office and humanities computing–this book delivers new insight into the categories of work deemed meritorious of acknowledgement and attribution and, thus, how knowledge and expertise was defined in and by this field. Focalizing the overlooked yet significant data-driven labour of lesser-known individuals, this book challenges exclusionary readings of the history of computing in the Humanities. Contributing to ongoing conversations about the need for alternative genealogies of computing, this book is also relevant to current debates about diversity and representation in the Academy and the wider computing sector. Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities will be of interest to researchers and students studying digital humanities, library and information science, the history of computing, oral history, the history of the humanities, and the sociology of knowledge and science.

The 'archive' is often viewed as a collection of historical documents that records and orders information about people, places and events. This view nevertheless obscures a crucial point: the archive, whilst subject to the vagaries of time and history, can also determine the future. This point has gained urgency in modern-day North Africa and the Middle East where the archive has come to the fore as a site of social, historical, theoretical, and political contestation. Dissonant Archives is the first book to consider the ways in which contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa - including Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Jananne Al Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mariam Ghani, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari - are utilizing and disrupting the function of the archive and, in so doing, highlighting a systemic, perhaps irrevocable, crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving across the region. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive; rather, they are unlocking its regenerative, radical potential.The result provides essential insights into the nexus between art and politics in the contemporary Middle East.

Across the British Empire and the world, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Girls and young women were at the heart of many of these shifts, which included the aftermath of the First World War, the enfranchisement of women, and the rise of the flapper or “Modern Girl.” Out of this milieu, the Girl Guide movement emerged as a response to popular concerns about age, gender, race, class, and social instability. The British-based Guide movement attracted more than a million members in over forty countries during the interwar years. Its success, however, was neither simple nor straightforward. Using an innovative multi-sited approach, Kristine Alexander digs deeper to analyze the ways in which Guiding sought to mold young people in England, Canada, and India. She weaves together a fascinating account that connects the histories of girlhood, internationalism, and empire, while asking how girls and young women understood and responded to Guiding’s attempts to lead them toward a service-oriented, “useful” feminine future.

In 1922-23, Chinese students in Victoria, British Columbia, went on strike to protest a school board’s attempt to impose segregation. Their resistance was unexpected at the time and runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded. Contesting White Supremacy offers an alternative reading of racism in British Columbia. Drawing on Chinese sources and perspectives and an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike, Timothy Stanley demonstrates that by the 1920s migrants from China and their BC-born children actively resisted policy makers’ efforts to organize white supremacy into the very texture of life. The education system served as an arena where white supremacy confronted Chinese nationalist schooling and where parents and students rejected the idea of being either Chinese or Canadian and instead invented a new category – Chinese Canadian – to define their identity.