Description
Book SynopsisWomen's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women's archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae - missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication - that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
Table of Contents
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Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Women's Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl
- Introduction: No Archive is Neutral Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl
- I. Reorientations
- Of Mini-Ships and Archives Daphne Marlatt
- Finding Indian Maidens on eBay: Tales of the Alternative Archive (and More Tales of White Commodity Culture) Cecily Devereux
- ""Faster Than a Speeding Thought"": Lemon Hound's Archive Unleashed Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl
- ""I remember""I was wearing leather pants"": Archiving the Repertoire of Feminist Cabaret in Canada T.L. Cowan
- ""In the hope of making a connection"": (Re)Reading Archival Bodies, Responses, and Love in Marian Engel's Bear and Alice Munro's ""Meneseteung"" Catherine Bates
- An Archive of Complicity: Ethically (Re)Reading the Documentaries of Nelofer Pazira Hannah McGregor
- Psyche and Her Helpers, under Cloud Cover Penn Kemp
- II. Restrictions
- Archival Matters Sally Clark
- Keeping the Archive Door Open: Writing about Florence Carlyle Susan Butlin
- The Oral, the Archive, and Ethics: Canadian Women Writers Telling It Andrea Beverley
- Halted by the Archive: The Impact of Excessive Archival Restrictions on Scholars Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir
- Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers Catherine Hobbs
- Invisibility Exhibit: The Limits of Library and Archives Canada's ""Multicultural Mandate"" Karina Vernon
- III. Responsibilities
- Rat in the Box: Thoughts on Archiving My Stuff Susan McMaster
- Letters to the Woman's Page Editor: Francis Marion Beynon's ""The Country Homemakers"" and a Public Culture for Women Katja Thieme
- Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery; or, ""As Long as the Leaves Hold Together"" Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre
- The Quality of the Carpet: A Consideration of Anecdotes in Researching Women's Lives Linda M. Morra
- ""I want my story told"": The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice Paul Tiessen
- ""You can do with all this rambling whatever you want"": Scrutinizing Ethics in the Alzheimer's Archives Kathleen Venema
- Locking Up Letters Julia Creet
- Afterword Janice Fiamengo
- Contributors
- Index
