Some Limitations to the Applicability of Queer Theory to LIS by Yassin Nacer

     In his work Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, the philosopher Bernard Williams remarks that much of modern thought is motivated by two impulses. The first is a guardedness against being fooled, a desire to "see through appearances." The second is a deep suspicion of "the Truth," truth claims, and claims that anything exists waiting to be uncovered behind those appearances. Emily Drabinski's paper "Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction" perfectly exemplifies these two impulses, the tensions between them, and the impasses they engender. 

    Drabinski attempts to use Queer Theory and its ever-renewing task of denaturalizing our concepts to critique classification and cataloging schemes and projects aimed at "correcting" the catalog. Queer Theorists have primarily used the tools provided by deconstruction and genealogy in this task of denaturalization (Fraser, 1995; Watson, 2005). In place of catalogers' attempts to arrive at a final, true catalog, Drabinski proposes that public services librarians help users engage with the catalog critically (p. 94). Libraries should focus on assisting users in recognizing catalogs' interminably contested nature and the questions of power hidden behind the seemingly innocuous task of cataloging. The two impulses outlined by Williams are exemplified in Drabinski's desire to have library users recognize the dissimulation produced by the power dynamics undergirding cataloging and classifications and the simultaneous belief that no true catalog is possible. Though she never directly acknowledges it, the contested notion of "inquiry" is central to understanding Drabinski's use of Queer Theory and the impasses that I it engenders.

Libraries and information services are intimately and inextricably bound up with the task of inquiry. At least this much is granted in Drabinski's belief in the pedagogical role of the librarian at the point of mediated exploration. Inquiry, however, may take on different forms; it may take the form of an accumulation of facts aimed to paint an accurate picture of how things are based on supposedly uncontested standards of rationality; it may take on the form of a subversive genealogical critique of a given domain which seeks to undermine and historicize the assumptions which underlie that domain; or it may take a deconstructive form, seeking to undermine the supposed stability of meaning as inhering in terms. Further, different information services are more or less helpful in these different modes of inquiry. In the first mode of inquiry, catalogers are seen as providing stable referents from which to launch an investigation. In the latter two, Drabinski's proposed pedagogical role for the public services librarian at the point of mediated inquiry functions to make visible the contingent and historically conditioned nature of all such catalogs and classificatory schemes and the fundamental instability of the terms which comprise them. From her deployment of Queer Theory and her proposed interventions, we may surmise that the kind of inquiry Drabinski has in mind is that of the latter two. In fact, she persuasively argues against the possibility of inquiry of the first kind (p. 96). Though Drabinski has provided good reason for seeing cataloging and classification schemes as “discursively produced, socially powerful, and always already undergoing revision” (p. 101) she neglects to acknowledge the ways in which the mode(s) of inquiry she endorses are themselves deeply contentious. The contentiousness of genealogical and deconstructive modes of inquiry is enough to show that using them to account for the contested nature of library cataloging and classification schemes is precarious at best, I believe that, beyond being contentious, these modes of inquiry are untenable.

No viable defense of these modes of enquiry seem possible because, in Drabinski's use of Queer Theory and its rejection of a stable self underlying the various discursively produced selves, the possible existence of the genealogists themselves has been foreclosed. In his work Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Geneology, and Tradition, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that, behind the more obvious objection that the genealogist who seeks to undermine all claims to objectivity and truth as being, in reality, the products of power is, in fact, a claim which pretends to be an objective wie es ist eigentlich, lies another more penetrating objection (D’Andrea, 2006, p. 347-348; MacIntyre, 1990, p. 36). MacIntyre objects that the genealogical project, which seeks to understand all identities as contingent and historical and subjects as discursively constituted, itself requires the existence of what Thomas D'Andrea calls an "Ur-self: a self behind and accompanying those transitory, un-masking selves which discard their identities and the standpoints from which they operate once the task of un-masking has been completed” (D’Andrea, 2006, p. 348; MacIntyre, 1990). We find this Ur-self poking through in Drabinski a number of times. We find references to fixed, stable, identities which catalogs succeed or fail to accurately refer to. For example, Drabinski refers to the reasonable expectations that library users be able to “locate themselves in the library” (p. 96). Later she claims that knowledge organization structures “do not smoothly represent reality, but discursively produce it, constituting the field of potential identities users can either claim as true and authentic representations of themselves or resist as not quite correct” (Drabinski, p. 102). This faith in the possibility of an authentic representation of oneself runs afoul of the belief in the subject as a “derivative product of certain contingent, historically specific set of linguistically infused social practices that inscribe power relations upon bodies” (Fraser, 1983, p. 56). Julia Walker has drawn attention to the presence of this kind of tension which she finds in the work of Judith Butler between a subject that is at once totally discursively constituted and yet autonomous and capable of voluntarily resisting the very discourse of which it is constituted (Walker, 2003). 

Concerning the uses of deconstruction in denaturalizing our categories of sexuality and gender, the same criticism applies insofar as it seeks to empty the subject of a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural existence. Concerning Drabinski's proposed interventions, insofar as the library user engages in the project of inquiry, the user, and the librarian assisting the user in engaging with the catalog critically, must presuppose that the one engaging in the inquiry has a "continuity of deliberate purpose and a commitment to that purpose which can only be ascribed to a self not to be dissolved into masks and moments" (MacIntyre, 1990, 54). 

Beyond these objections which focus on justification and consistency, it seems questionable whether such interventions built on Queer Theory in information services are desirable for those interested in a liberatory politics. It seems that, by doing away with the pre-cultural subject, by denying the possibility of a subject that is not entirely discursively constituted, we also deny the possibility of a subject capable of liberation. 

References

D’Andrea. (2006). Tradition, rationality, and virtue : the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre  / Thomas D. D’Andrea. Ashgate Pub. Ltd.

 Drabinski. (2013). Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction. The Library Quarterly (Chicago), 83(2), 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547

Fraser. (1983). Foucault’s Body Language. Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs), 61, 55–.

Fraser (1995). Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn. (1995). In, Feminist Contentions (pp. 163–178). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203825242-12

 Kirsch. (2000). Queer theory and social change  / Max H. Kirsch. Routledge.

MacIntyre. (1990a). First principles, final ends, and contemporary philosophical issues  / by Alasdair MacIntyre. Marquette University Press.

MacIntyre. (1990b). Three rival versions of moral enquiry : encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition : being Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988  / by Alasdair MacIntyre. University of Notre Dame Press.

Taylor. (1989). Sources of the self : the making of the modern identity  / Charles Taylor. Harvard University Press.

Walker. (2003). Why Performance? Why Now? Textuality and the Rearticulation of Human Presence. The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16(1), 149–175. https://doi.org/10.1353/ yale.2003.0011

 Watson. (2005). Queer Theory. Group Analysis, 38(1), 67–81. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0533316405049369

Williams. (2002). Truth & truthfulness : an essay in genealogy  / Bernard Williams. Princeton University Press.

Chasing Context: Cataloging, Classification, and Queer Theory by Nicolas Cabrera

 

In a Discord call with my friend about finding a personal doctor, I mentioned that the primary and only reason I had searched for one recently was so I could start taking estrogen. I had already come out to her, but she did not know I had begun hormone replacement therapy. In surprise to the offhand comment, she exclaimed, “Oh, you’re transitioning!” I was immediately irked, but was saved from further explanation by another person joining the group chat. The word “transition” felt wrong somehow. My whole life has been grappling with an intense sense of discomfort; I reject the notion of a process that had a fixed starting point.

Emily Drabinski, in “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” that a potential queer solution to the inherent biases of library classification and cataloging is by increasing points of reference. Through technological approaches, search interfaces can show related and broader terms, as well as allowing users to tag and map subject headings. Users can see themselves better in these systems while also being aware of the discursive nature of cataloging and classification.[1] In similar ways, documents and artifacts in colonial archives can be reclaimed by adding points of provenance, as seen in Jeannette Allis Bastian’s article “Whispers in the Archives: Finding the Voices of the Colonized in the Records of the Colonizer.” Conceptual provenance, as conceived by Terry Cook, shifts provenance away from the physical location of creation to the population the documents describe. [2] It is through the addition of contextual points that deeper understanding of materials, both its content and form, can be understood.

“It is not a problem of finally determining the correct word that will describe myself; any such decision simply inaugurates the play of resistance all over again,” writes Drabinski.[3] In the past year and a half, both in terms of my gender identity and my professional path, I have opted out of classifying myself to the best extent possible. The UCLA MLIS program specializations were too limiting, so I refused to stick to a pathway. I introduced myself to classes with they/them pronouns, but if anyone used something different, I would not correct them. Detachment gives perspective, but that is just a first step. Drabinski states that discursive interventions reveal the fantasies of objective structures and assumptions of exclusivity, after which you can then close off or open up possibilities.[4] Pretending something can be nothing is insufficient: books must be catalogued, documents must be appraised for provenance, I need to find a job and mark the appropriate boxes on job applications with my sexual identity.

Pretending something is one thing is also insufficient. Sites of reference and personal identity will inevitably be challenged. “Central to queer claims about structures of identity is this idea that such structures are always already in motion, contingent, and subject to change.”[5] Even in identifying what I am not, I remain uncertain of what I am. I am not a man; I have not taken any courses in the rare book’s pathway. I don’t know yet if I want to use she/her pronouns too, maybe one day I could work in special collections. There is also contestation beyond myself in time. Friends and siblings use the wrong pronouns sometimes, as does my passport and drivers license misgender me. And yet, while I hope these inconsistencies and violences are resolved, I don’t want to ignore or blot them out of history. “It is easier to imagine points of entry into critically teaching classification and controlled vocabularies if offensive subject divisions and subject language remain uncorrected.”[6] The Library of Congress once classified works on homosexuality under “sexual deviations.” That does not come as a surprise to me, a tranny and a faggot.

While imagining systems that allow for richer nuance in the addition of points of refence, a question needs to be answered. When do we stop? Documents and items can only be physically stored in one location. Adding too many tags to items will decrease search accuracy. In the end, materials will need to be more one thing than the other for it to be useful in a catalogue setting. The second solution proposed by Drabinski might counter this inevitability. Library professionals can be upfront about the biased nature of classification and cataloging with users, allowing for transparency and a site for dialogue.[7] If the nature of classification and cataloging is inherently mediated, then allowing for more people to understand that site is the next step in ensuring a more holistic approach to the materials in circulation.

---

[1]Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” Library Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 2. (2013): 106.

[2]Allis Jeanette Bastian, “Whispers in the Archives: Finding the Voices of the Colonized in the Records of the Colonizer,” in Political Pressure and the Archival Record, ed. Margaret Procter, Michael Cook, and Caroline Williams, (Society of Amer Archivists, 2005), 25-34.

[3] Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” 103

[4] Drabinski, 104

[5] Drabinski, 95

[6] Drabinski, 108

[7] Drabinski, 107 - 108

Queer Archive of Failure

Queer Archive of Failure

Do the archives know that im cute?

Do they know that I smell good

that im listening to charli xcx on repeat

Do they know that im queer too

Can they see me?

Katherine Watson asserts that in the most basic sense, queer theory is about using diverse methods to interrogate “desire and its relationship to identity.”[1] Although queer theory will necessarily evade attempts to summarize or generalize its intentions, the following uses desire as a point of departure to consider queerness and the archive. If the core of queerness is desire, then what is at the core of the desire to find queerness in the archives?[2]

While working on an archival research project in March 2022, I followed this desire and began searching UCLA Library Special Collections for traces of queerness.[3] Searching “trans” or “transgender” primarily conjured records of people described as “transexuals.” “Queer” yielded few search results, including one description of a painting of an oddly shaped piece of fruit.[4] Even amongst earnest attempts to engender hospitality for queer, community archival collections, the odd piece of fruit was a clear reminder of archives’ inability to make a home for queerness. Yet, the realizations, that result from archival injury, never extinguish the desire to return to the archives. In Turning Archival scholars come together to revisit what others deemed the “queer archival turn” in queer studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and history, by examining the “embodied work of turning” and theorize why exactly we cannot resist turning back to the archive.[5] They suggest that the entrance of queer of color, trans, and crip critiques resemble a distinct turning away, that still attends to archive by dismantling its power.[6] The anthology’s editors Zeb Tortorici and Daniel Marshall carefully consider library and information studies, where they see archival theory and praxis “most fully developed,” but without thorough critical engagement.

If I searched sometimes pink makes me sick

or when I hear she, my brain glitches

could I find a queer archive?

My own archival desires were fostered by scholars, at the queer archival turn, dedicated to carving out space for different contributions based on quantifying words like messy, urgent, silly, and unhappy. Reflecting on archival practice and labor now, these words resemble mere reform for me. Similarly, I find practioners concerned with what constitutes a “real archive” or a “real ____ archive” primarily reproducing what they claim to oppose. “Turning” the library catalog into something queer will be insufficient to avoid administrating life chances.[7]

As I keep turning back to archive, I also find myself returning to Jack Judith Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure, which “dismantles the logics” of success, failure, rigor, time, productivity, discipline, order, and positivity while identifying queerness as an inherent failure to perform accepted gender norms and embrace reproductive hetero-temporality.[8] Halberstam accomplishes this in part by deploying humor, low theory, SpongeBob in contrast to Foucault, and in daily life by using two first names. In turn, Halberstam allows us to understand the desire to find queerness in the archive as a pursuit that will necessarily fail and attempts to “queer the archive” as failures. I offer “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming,” unanswered questions, illegibility, and not knowing as essential in developing archival practice and queer, archival orientations away from administrative order or reform.[9] Instead of emphasizing an end product, such as an edited finding aid, the failures or performative attempts that occur along the way are the transformative and generative spaces of queerness. Further, if archivists unsettle the pursuit of futurity in greater alignment with queer theory and focus on what is at work in the present, we can “unleash new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies, than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.”[10]

Has anyone tried sitting on a file?

Laying all over it

or bringing it into bed

In the inevitable failures of the archives, the desire for queerness, to see and be seen, can be recognized as the desire for something not yet realized. For people that lead transgressive lives, archivists’ attempts, returns, and activations are a way to continue transforming in their afterlives.

[1] Watson, Katherine. 2005. “Queer Theory.” Group Analysis 38 (1). London: The Group-Analytic Society: 67–81. doi:10.1177/0533316405049369.

[2] As Watson does not include any discussion of the differences between queer theory and the experience of queerness, I use queerness and queer theory interchangeably.

[3] Radical attempts to queer the archive that refuse to use the language of archive at all exist in counter- public spaces and worlds not meant for study.

[4] As a part of an ongoing attempt to repair language, this description is no longer available.

[5]Marshall, Daniel, and Zeb Tortorici. 2022. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer. Edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, 1. Durham: Duke University Press.

[6]Marshall, Daniel, and Zeb Tortorici. 2022. Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer. Edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, 2. Durham: Duke University Press.

[7]Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham:Duke University Press.

[8] Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 9. Durham: Duke University Press.

[9]Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 7. Durham: Duke University Press.

[10]Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, 15. Durham: Duke University Press.

Intentional Silences as a tool of Ethical Archives: Why not everyone is entitled to each other’s full stories

by Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky 

Warning: this references violence against a woman, my aunt, in parallel with how Venus was murdered, as Hartman describes. This work grapples with violence and the intergenerational impacts that my Native aunt’s murder has had on my family, including me and my generation. The impact of these events has lasted decades in this part of my family, but I want to make clear two things: there is much joy and happiness in my family’s collective memories, and my positionality coming from both dispossessed Tonawanda Seneca people and white settlers who participated in dispossession. This is only a snapshot of our lives and those interactions. 

    I grew up learning how to weave together half-stories into a tapestry of my family’s history, adding bit by bit to my own memorized archive. I spent my time as a child peeling potatoes and carrots at family functions while eavesdropping on the memories they would reference offhand and observing body language in anticipation of more to learn. There was unspoken subtext in every conversation, argument, and joke, and as I grew up, I became skilled in extracting pieces of our family’s history. On behalf of my own curiosity and my younger cousin’s encouragement in hushed tones when we were sent to bed, a major priority was to find out everything I possibly could about our grandfather, Mishuan Goeman. In pursuit of this mysterious figure in our lives, who died just before I was born but left behind a long-lingering presence we children felt deeply, I started to file away the little details and hints to paint a picture of who my grandfather was and learned about other family members we never got to meet but who left impacts even us children, a decade later, could sense. Through this effort, I built up informal and ever-useful interviewing skills, learning to subtly ask questions that might elicit a real memory, something truer than those tinted with resentment or anger, or grief. Eventually, I became somewhat of a confidant, a vessel for the safekeeping of family history—an archivist of our family’s past. It's no wonder I became an archivist professionally as an adult, even if it was for a short while. Recently, I even took on the effort of trying to track down the missing family members… those who were taken as children, those who were “adopted” with no records kept, who appeared suddenly with no birth paperwork or trace to their own parents, those who were murdered or went missing. Those who may or may not exist.

 

    The silence I’ve been facing as I search for those missing family members and stories is resonant with Hartman’s version of archives as places full of silence (structured spaces which reduce enslaved women to their most painful moments, vanishing any trace of their personalities or variety of their daily realities). Her remedy of critical fabulation is a monumentally important tool for people who are either excluded from or misrepresented in most archives, especially those descendants of people whose true stories were disfigured and disregarded. Hartman describes ancestors of a different connection, a few generations back, who nonetheless represent a thread throughout the long history of violence Black women have faced in the so-called United States. That violence fueled more violence--massacres, boarding schools, land theft by force (and therefore cultural genocide). Black and Native women have been abused for hundreds of years by the same force in different ways: settler colonization. So while Hartman’s critical fabulation was created to address Black women’s stories, it is a tool that is useful and relevant to Native stories as well. We don’t share the same stories, silences, suffering, or identities—but they leave us, the descendants, with a similar longing for more. 

 

    I started lamenting the obfuscating work of formal archives when I stumbled upon an FBI database of declassified surveillance records from the American Indian Movement (AIM) era. I was in class, ignoring a very patient librarian who was showing us how to navigate the UCLA library webpage, when I saw the FBI AIM files available to UCLA students. It is a searchable digital archive, and I thought back to my grandmother’s half-told stories about going along with my grandfather and his siblings to join up with AIM. I wondered if their names would show up and if this might be another way to gather clues about who my grandfather was as a person. So I typed “Goeman” into the database.

    What I found was, in part, hilarious but mostly infuriatingly unhelpful.

 

    My Uncle’s name came up many times, but only in heavily redacted reports about one instance my Uncle didn’t even deem remarkable enough to mention when he did talk about AIM. I know for a fact there are more dramatic and “interesting” stories about my family’s time fighting for AIM, but all I can find is yet another partial story about something my own family found so routine that they can’t remember the redacted details? What else is the U.S. government withholding?

 

    It's exhausting and potentially unethical work to extract stories about my family from those who are still around. As a child I felt entitled to know, and I wanted my family to feel like I should know—but I’ve grown to learn that some silences exist for a reason. I have been taught that my family has to protect themselves, and me, from certain memories that they deem too harmful to recall or preserve.

 

    My grandfather is certainly not a Venus. But my Aunt Daynonah, my mother’s favorite Aunt who kept baby foxes and hitchhiked with my mother to take a dead rabbit to the Vet? When my mother and I visited my Uncle and asked about Daynonah, innocently and sweetly, he told the truth to my mom for the first time that day because I probed; my mother cried in a way I’ll never forget. Sweet stories about baby animals and kind gestures, big laughs, and bold outfits, now tinged with particular grief and anger for how she was taken from our family, violently murdered, and body left alone on a road. I’m left to grapple with whether I’m better or worse for knowing some of the things I’ve tucked away into our family archive but will never be able to find tangible records about--my Aunt Daynonah never had an obituary, no investigation was conducted, no records are available online beyond her birth and death dates, and the only real information I know about her is through my mother and Uncle.

 

    Hartman concludes Venus in Two Acts with “we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.” But I can’t help to feel that some stories do not, could not, and perhaps should not live in an archive to be stewarded by people that would never digitize their materials or appreciate the importance of what they have. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) efforts following recognition of a genocide always seek to build an archive of what happened, documenting the violence one population committed against the other but only examining the impact on the victims, never the oppressors and any guilt, malice, and evil they might have dealt with while carrying out heinous acts. These commissions operate under the assumption that everyone must know how people suffered so that it will not be replicated. But here, the archive becomes the endpoint--as if creating a TRC and collecting these stories releases the country and not-so-former oppressors from their actions. It places genocide in the past when it’s an ongoing project--missing and murdered Native women and their relatives across Turtle Island would like a word, starting with just those abducted and found today. 

    Why does the FBI or the Smithsonian, branches of the same entity that started the chains of events that led to me missing family members, deserve unlimited access and control over my ancestors or family’s pictures and stories, but not me? Why does my family owe everyone in the United States the details about the people they stole from us, when we can barely keep that alive between ourselves? These days, I’d rather have my half-stories passed down in an oral tradition, replete with its gaps, and fill in the blanks myself, because I don’t believe many other people deserve to know the truth (not that it could be contained in an archive, anyways). I wonder if Hartman wants everyone to know Venus, or if she really wants for people who can understand Venus to have access to her history. Who has no choice but to read between the files of an archive? When is silence protection against those who wouldn’t understand or could not relate, those who would only harm further by misinterpreting our joys and sorrows?

 

    An elder I interviewed about repatriation work explained that as someone who holds their community’s history, who knows what hasn’t necessarily been written down about what happened to California Native people at the missions, expressed his concern for people who learn about all the awful things that have happened to their ancestors but have no support. “It’s like, if they know, what’s that going to do to them—to their health?”

 

    The first few months of my job as an archaeology assistant at a museum, I felt ill and uneasy all the time. I didn’t sleep well for months—dreams too vivid and sharp. The first time I set foot in the ancestor’s room  to assist with a repatriation case, I found a box that explained why: a box labeled Canandaigua. Two of my ancestors’ bodies, unknown people who may or may not be directly related to me, but who at the very least lived with my family, shared meals and jokes and experiences. Taken from their graves, disturbed in pursuit of some colonizer’s petty dissertation research. They’d been there the whole time, and I wasn’t given the opportunity to treat them with the specific respect and reverence they deserved--I didn’t automatically have access to the room or archive, even as an employee, and those who did have that power did not think to share it with me. 

 

    While I believe in record keeping, history, archives (both collections of records and bodily remembrances), I’ve come to appreciate what I can’t know. There are things out there that I’m meant to know, that I will be asked to understand by someone in my community. Stories that I’ll be prepared to handle. But I will no longer turn to FBI or Smithsonian databases for any kind of “truth.” As Harris outlines, the oppressor’s silence and audacity balances but yields too much and too little of the stories I want to know. I know too much about the length and physiology of my Native ancestors’ leg bones desecrated by white archaeologists, too much about my white ancestor’s silly experience being brought to court for wearing silk in 1657, too much about how my aunt and uncles died by racist and gendered attacks… and too little of that which I think might make me feel whole—too little about the personalities and lives of my missing family members who should have been here to talk to me themselves, too little about what they might have cooked at family gatherings or contributed to family stories while I helped prepare vegetables. And perhaps I’m selfish not to feel bad that a stranger will be just as in the dark about that as I am—but I am somewhat at peace with the half-stories I’ve worked hard to stitch together to form an idea of what those relatives were like. While they’re instructive and valuable stories, they are now my responsibility to keep and hold dear. Do I want to share them with just anybody? Am I obligated to make an example of my family’s history to benefit people who can’t understand it viscerally, emotionally, or intensely? No, my family didn’t, doesn’t exist to be an example that instigates settler guilt-based learning. So I’ll keep my own archive, prying settler eyes be damned. 

Tracing Shadows: A Case for Describing Missing Records Through Artist Collaboration

 

Tracing Shadows: A Case for Describing Missing Records Through Artist Collaboration 

By Alanna Quan

Traditionally, objects in most western museums were displayed with a label that contained information of place and culture compiled by an ethnographer (usually a white male). Andrews does not do this. Instead, he attaches an enlarged wooden megaphone through a round hole that is cut into the glass of the museum cabinet. The skeleton is posed as if it is speaking into it.. It invites that which is objectified, unnamed, and silenced to have a voice. Yet, the subjects of the display do not speak, there is no sound… Andrew’s own postcard collection, which contains images of unnamed Indigenous/First Nations people globally… stare back at the viewer.

Aliza Levi, “The Colony Under Gaze”

The work of Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew titled 52 Portraits & Vox: Beyond Tasmania, is a stunning example of how art can restore power to a colonized community without claiming to speak for that community.[1] I discovered this installation as it was described by Aliza Levi in her Master’s of Fine Arts thesis at Monash University.[2] It is not, as far as I can tell, the result of a collaboration with an archives, but it draws on archival material and makes a statement about that material, its context, and the viewer’s relationship to both the materials and their creators, as well as to the subjects of that material.

I find myself drawn to artist collaborations. Art has the ability to call upon aspects of the human psyche that are inaccessible through many forms of objective inquiry. An artist, by the very nature of their work, can access the subjective. They can convey affect and meaning without claiming authority over truth. They can force positionality. We understand, and expect, that an artist is interpreting or filtering reality and producing work that is intended to elicit a sub-textual response. An archivist, by contrast, especially one working from within an institutional or academic archives, must know that their work, by its very nature, will do the opposite. Even as the archival profession evolves to embrace the subjectivity of the archivist and acknowledge the inherent bias in individuals and institutions, resulting collections, as they are or may be accessed in perpetuity, carry the weight of historicity.

The archival record, then, is imbued with power. In an effort to harness that power- in this case, the power to collect and describe one’s own experience- and transfer it back to historically marginalized subjects or creator communities, archivists who endeavor to describe reparative collections often turn to partners who have the authority to represent that community. This collaboration decentralizes the archivist’s voice and situates the power and knowledge conveyed through the archives within the subject community. 

However, it may not always be possible for oppressed or marginalized communities to represent themselves in an institutional context. There may be political conditions or practical concerns which make timely community input impossible. It may also be the case that material collections are no longer extant or should not be collected by the institution due to the community’s wishes. Any attempt to describe or collect records in these situations would undermine the important work of relocating the power to describe records within historically silenced communities. My concern is that in some of these situations, failure to acknowledge the absence of such records risks perpetuating the disempowerment of historically marginalized communities, and, in circumstances where records were intentionally omitted, allows institutions to obfuscate their responsibility in that erasure.

So what then? By recognizing the relationality of records and aiming to describe them by their context, there are circumstances where an institution can aim to build reparative collections that address intentional erasures or ignored records. Archivists can name and witness missing collections, without relocating power away from the subjects or creators of the records, by describing the gaps formed by their absence. Considering the relationality and context of archival gaps and applying an ethics of care to missing records holds space for indescribable material in archives and can serve to activate the immaterial affect in archival collections.

One framework for conceptualizing this process is that of a feminist ethics of care, described by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor as a “shift [in] our thinking about archival ethics from an individual, rights-based model to a relational feminist ethics of care.”[3] By employing a relational model for understanding archival work, especially as it applies to the records of the oppressed, we recognize that all archives are socially located and culturally situated.[4] When we recognize archives as such, we also recognize that they are inherently relational within the institutional archives and open up the possibility of naming and describing collections according to their context. With regard to appraisal, a feminist standpoint, “explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created, preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.” [5] As archivists, we can utilize this same epistemology to bear witness to oppression in situations where material archives are not possible. By recognizing the gaps, or shadows, left by such records as also being socially located, culturally situated, and reflective of the ideology and intentions of those who ensured their erasure, we can trace these shadows in order to avoid assuming the authority and power inherent in describing. 

To further access and activate the relationality and affect in missing records, archives can consider engaging with artist-collaborators whose work would serve the purpose of naming, describing, and holding space for unrepresented collections without relocating the power to represent within the archival institution. By collecting and describing such work as auxiliary collections, which can serve to contextualize absent materials, the artist can help users witness archival shadows and access the affective aspects of these records. 

Brook Andrew’s work serves as a model for how such collaborations might achieve this goal by defining the relationships between material collections and the colonial archive, the creators and subjects of those records, and by situating the viewer as witness to those people and materials. The work, “invites that which is objectified, unnamed, and silenced to have a voice,” yet it acknowledges that they cannot speak, and, “restores dignity and power” to the subjects of the archive by making the viewer the subject of their gaze.[6] If the archives in this example were such that reparative practices could not sufficiently collect or describe materials without further disempowering oppressed communities, the soliciting, collecting, and describing of work like Brook Andrews’ could serve to name and hold space for missing or indescribable records.

When we witness immaterial archives, we are treating them with radical empathy. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez defines radical empathy in the archives as a state in which, “we place less focus on the records themselves and centralize our relationships with the records’ creators, subjects, users, and communities, and each other as archivists.” [7] We can center the creators and subjects of immaterial records by refusing to describe them. By doing so explicitly, we situate the power of representation with the creators and the subjects and situate ourselves as witnesses. We can name the archival shadow by describing its context and invoking its affect and reduce the risk of continued erasure. In situations where it is deemed appropriate, archives can let the work of artist-collaborators name and define archival shadows by activating the silence of the oppressed. 

 

[1] Andrew, Brook, 52 Portraits & Vox: Beyond Tasmania, July 2013, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

At the time of this publication, images from this installation can be seen on Andrew’s website http://www.brookandrew.com/vox-beyond-tasmania

[2] Aliza Levi, “The Artist as Witness: A Colony under Gaze” (thesis, Monash University, 2021), https://doi.org/10.26180/14044841.v1.

[3] Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “Revisiting a Feminist Ethics of Care in Archives: An Introductory Note,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.162.

[4] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.113.

[5] Caswell “Dusting for Fingerprints.”

[6] Levi, “The Colony Under Gaze.”

[7] Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, “Radical Empathy in the Context of Suspended Grief: An Affective Web of Mutual Loss,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i2.134.