The Archive as Master’s House: Appraising a “House of Difference”

Etymology for “archive”

From Greek archeion government house,
 archē rule, government

“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game,
but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[1]

Audre Lorde boldly declared these words in her influential essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Using the master’s house as a frame, how can we appraise a “house of difference”? This reflection explores “the master’s house” and “the mater’s tools” through archival studies and black studies. I discuss the underlying desires to appraise records in archives, noting such as the master’s archival tool that constructs the master’s archival house. This equation purports the archive as a captive space for bodies of knowledge that may have never desired to enter into its domain. Yet, when we relinquish the desire to hold captive, which arguably begins with appraisal, then what other bodies of knowledge surface outside the master’s archival house? In order to conceive of a “house of difference,” we need to reappraise our desires beyond the master’s archival tool.

In “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal” Michelle Caswell provides a feminist appraisal strategy that begins to dismantle the master’s archival house. She asserts that “Feminist standpoint appraisal inverts dominant appraisal hierarchies that value records created by those in power to justify and consolidate their power at the expense of records created by the oppressed to document and resist their oppression and imagine liberation.”[2] This mode of appraisal desires to counter the “view from nowhere” by positioning other bodies of knowledge from the margins of society. Caswell notes that “feminist standpoint appraisal explicitly and unapologetically gives epistemological weight (thereby assigning value to) records created and preserved by, and potentially activated in service to, those individuals and communities oppressed by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”[3] Through this perspective our appraisal vantage point is inverted from the hierarchal to the horizontal, yet still remains as one of the master’s archival tools that desires to hold captive bodies of knowledge in the master’s archival house.  

Simone Browne directs our attention to the horizonal view of bodies held captive in the archive of transatlantic slavery in Dark Matters. Tracing the historical formations of surveillance, she discusses the spatial arrangement of bodies aboard the Brooks slave ship, which “points to an alternative archive from which to understand the hold of both disciplinary and sovereign power on black life.”[4] Here Browne invites us to consider “How might the view from ‘under the hatches’ be another view from which to conceptualize the operation of power?”[5] This vantage point centers the bodies of black knowledge production, displacing the conquering  “view from nowhere” that pervades appraisal in the master’s archival house. The view from “under the hatches” challenges us to look beyond our appraisal desire to hold captive as to not replicate preexisting structural frameworks that are reproduced through the master’s archive tools. Instead we must conjure other archival imaginaries in order to reappraise a “house of difference.”  

In “Venus In Two Acts” Saidiya Hartman writes about the recorded accounts of enslaved bodies held captive in the master’s archival house. Central to her “recombinant narrative” is Venus—a symbolic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world. Rather than resorting to the archive, which has inflicted violence upon Venus for centuries, Hartman prefers to “write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised [her] strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements.”[6] Here she moves us away from historical recuperation, towards emancipation from the master’s archival house. To do so, Hartman employs “critical fabulation” as a method that combines fictional writing and critical theory to evoke other bodies of knowledge about Venus beyond the historical record. She goes against “the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacts the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.”[7] Hartman guides us towards a reappraisal strategy that is non-reliant on the master’s archival tool and master’s house by moving away from the desire to hold captive in the archive.

Throughout this reflection the authors provide us with other tools for appraising a “house of difference.” In shifting our appraisal desires, we need to move beyond the captive archive that privileges the holding of certain tangible bodies of knowledges, while excluding other ways of knowing, remembering, and preserving our pasts. Not all forms of knowledge depend on the structural framings of the archive for survival, but rather persist through other historical modes to be kept alive. Returning to Lorde, she reminds us that “we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”[8]

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[1] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Crossing Press, 2007): 12.

[2] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2020): 6.

[3] Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints,” 7.

[4] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Duke University Press, 2015): 38.

[5] Browne, Dark Matters, 32.

[6] Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 9.

[7] Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," 11.

[8] Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Crossing Press, 2007): 123.