Abstract
This chapter lays out the particular theories of archive and archival discourse that inform this book’s interrogative impulse and guide its analytical instincts. Starting with Jacques Derrida’s notions of “archive fever” and “archivization,” this chapter traces a contextualizing method among archival theorists that attunes the critical gaze toward the master archive’s indexes of subjectivities. This critical mode points to a shift in critical archival discourse such that it problematizes the way elite power instrumentalizes the archive in order to ensure its reproduction. In the end, this chapter creates a link between historicizing modes of archival theory and the original theory functioning in this book. This theoretical linkage not only points to the governing rationale for the book, but it also sets up this book’s primary focus—to historicize the British Museum in relation to the professionalization and credentialing of the biblical scholar in the nineteenth century.
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- 1.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 2.
- 2.
Ibid., 4.
- 3.
Ibid., 12.
- 4.
Ibid., 17.
- 5.
Ibid., 17.
- 6.
Ibid., 19, 59.
- 7.
Ibid., 19, 59.
- 8.
Ibid., 59.
- 9.
Thomas Osborne, “The Ordinariness of the Archives,” History of the Human Sciences 12, no. 2 (May 1999): 55.
- 10.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52; Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 26.
- 11.
Elisabeth Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,” American Archivist 63, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 126, 147.
- 12.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, eds. Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 102.
- 13.
In her introduction, Antoinette Burton attests to the potency of my latter pivot with these words: “Postcolonial studies and theory have provided another fillip to the notion that archives are not just sources or repositories as such, but constitute full-fledged historical actors as well,” Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7. In terms of this book’s specific focus of the British Museum, empire, and the study of archive, the most pertinent book is Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993).
- 14.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 129.
- 15.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 6.
- 16.
Ibid., 129.
- 17.
See, for example, Nicholas B. Dirks, Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); see also Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 19–26; Natalie Zemon Davis, foreword to The Allure of the Archive, by Arlette Farge, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
- 18.
Nicholas B. Dirks, “Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Future, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 48.
- 19.
Burton, Archive Stories, 7.
- 20.
Derrida, Archive Fever, 29.
- 21.
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting [1968],” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elser and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 8–16.
- 22.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 162.
- 23.
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 63.
- 24.
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10.
- 25.
Ibid., 11.
- 26.
Burton, Archive Stories, 5; Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 19.
Bibliography
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Cuéllar, G.L. (2019). Introduction: Historicizing the Master Archive. In: Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24028-8_1
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