Of things said and unsaid: Power, archival silences, and power in silence

Archivaria

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 215-233

  Carter, Rodney G S ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 71149112865     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. Robert Smithson, "What is a Museum: A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson," in Jack Flan, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkley, 1996), p. 44.
2. Adrienne Rich, "The Cartographies of Silence," The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New York, 1978), p. 17.
3. Laura Millar, "Discharging our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada," Archivaria 46 (Fall 1998), p. 117;
4. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), p. 34.
5. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1974)
6. and Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996). Informed by the work of these two theorists, Derrida in particular, the concept of the Archive has been subject of examination by scholars in literary criticism and other fields. From the archival perspective, see the two thematic double issues of
7. Archival Science (vol. 2, nos. 1-2 and 3-4, [2002]) guest edited by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook on "Archives, Records and Power."
8. In this article I am examining silence using aspects of the European and North American philosophical tradition. Silence also plays an important role in other traditions, including Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
9. Michel Foucault, "The Confessions of the Flesh," in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York, 1980), p. 201.
10. Janice D. Yoder and Arnold S. Kahn, "Toward a Feminist Understanding of Women and Power," Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1992), pp. 382-83.
11. Miriam Meyerhoff, "Doing and Saying: Some Words on Women's Silence," in Mary Bucholtz, ed., Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries, revised and expanded ed. (Toronto, 2004), p. 209.
12. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1984), pp. 63-64.
13. Rae Langton, "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts," Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 22, no. 4 (August 1993), pp. 315-16;
14. Meyerhoff M, "Doing and Saying," pp. 211-12.
15. Verne Harris, "The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy," in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, and Jane Taylor, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, 2002), p. 150.
16. Verne Harris, "On (Archival) Odyssey(s)," Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001), p. 9.
17. Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington, 1980), pp. 4-5.
18. Derrida J, Archive Fever, p. 7.
19. Millar L, "Discharging our Debt," pp. 125-31.
20. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire," trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), p. 13.
21. M.T. Clanchy, "'Tenacious Letters': Archives and Memory in the Middle Ages," Archivaria 11 (Winter 1980-81), p. 116.
22. Barbara L. Craig, "Selected Themes in the Literature on Memory and Their Pertinence to Archives," American Archivist, vol. 65, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002), p. 282.
23. Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory," Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 1-2 (March 2002), p. 18.
24. Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 82.
25. Susan Gal, "Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender," in Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Cristanne Miller, eds., The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), p. 407.
26. Nora P, "Between Memory and History," p. 9.
27. For more on this see below; see also Verne Harris, "Seeing (in) Blindness: South Africa, Archives and Passion for Justice," Records and Information Management On-line Service (2001) available at (accessed on 10 October 2002).
28. Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), p. 97;
29. see also Harris V, "The Archival Sliver," pp. 135-36.
30. Carolyn Steedman, "The Space of Memory: in an Archive," History of the Human Sciences, vol. 11, no. 4 (November 1998), p. 67.
31. Schwartz J and Cook T, "Archives, Records, and Power," p. 2.
32. Clanchy MT, "'Tenacious Letters'," p. 115.
33. Kenneth E. Foote, "To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory and Culture," American Archivist, vol. 53, no. 3 (Summer 1990), p. 379.
34. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester, 1988), p. 13.
35. Sue McKemmish, "The Smoking Gun: Record-keeping and Accountability," Records Continuum Research Group Publications (1999); available at (accessed on 25 March 2003), p. 21.
36. Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (Albany, 2001), p. 5.
37. Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever in South Africa," p. 54.
38. See Harris V, "Seeing (in) Blindness," on the remembering/forgetting binary.
39. Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence," Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969), p. 11.
40. Foucault M, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 110.
41. Derrida J, Archive Fever, p. 64.
42. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Toronto, 1961), X (19), p. 226. A slightly different translation is quoted in
43. MacKendrick K, Immemorial Silence, p. 109.
44. See, for example, the essays in Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds., Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York, 1994).
45. Krista Ratcliffe, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich (Carbondale, IL, 1996), p. 120.
46. Schwartz JM and Cook T, "Archives, Records, and Power," p. 14.
47. Foucault M, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 169.
48. Terry Cook, "Mind over Matter: Towards a New Theory of Archival Appraisal," in Barbara L. Craig, ed., The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor (Ottawa, 1992), p. 50.
49. Lawrence Stone, The Past and Present Revisited (New York, 1987), p. 58.
50. Chris Hurley, "The Evolving Role of Government Archives in Democratic Societies," Association of Canadian Archivists Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 2 (November 2002), p. 6.
51. David Greetham, "'Who's In, Who's Out': The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion," Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring 1999), p. 19.
52. MacKendrick K, Immemorial Silence, p. 19.
53. Gudrun M. Grabher and Ulrike Jessner, "Introduction," in Gudrun M. Grabher and Ulrike Jessner, eds., Semantics of Silences in Linguistics and Literature (Heidelberg, 1996), posit that silence is felt to be unbearable as it "conjures up a premonition of the ultimate silence, which is death" (XI).
54. See Helen Willa Samuels, "Who Controls the Past?," American Archivist, vol. 49, no. 2 (Spring 1986), p. 122,
55. and "Improving Our Disposition: Documentation Strategy," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 136-37.
56. Luciana Duranti, "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory," American Archivist, vol. 57, no. 2 (Spring 1994), p. 341. Rather than ensuring the impartiality of the archive through the facilitation of public memory, I would argue that while this allows for more subjective viewpoints in the archive, it does not make it more objective. There is no such thing as an impartial archive.
57. Craig B, "Selected Themes in the Literature on Memory," p. 288.
58. Verne Harris, "Getting the outsiders in," The Witness (The Natal Witness Group), 4 November 2002, available at (accessed 15 November 2003), p. 5.
59. Harris V, "The Archival Sliver," p. 143.
60. Derrida J, Archive Fever, p. 18.
61. Nora P, "Between Memory and History," p. 15.
62. Greetham D, "'Who's In, Who's Out'," p. 18.
63. Harris V, "Seeing (in) Blindness," pp. 42-45.
64. Jacques Derrida, "On Cosmopolitanism," in Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York, 2001), p. 5.
65. Harris V, "Getting the outsiders in," p. 10.
66. Sonia Combe, as quoted in Derrida J, Archive Fever, p. 4. note 1. On the "logos-centric" archives, see
67. Joan M. Schwartz, "Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic 'Othering', and the Margins of Archivy," Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002), pp. 142-71, esp. pp. 167-68.
68. Patricia Lawrence, "Women's Silences as a Ritual of Truth: A Study of Literary Expressions in Austen, Brontë, and Woolf," in Hedges and Fishkin, eds., Listening to Silences, p. 156.
69. Yoder JD and Kahn AS, "Toward a Feminist Understanding of Women and Power," p. 384;
70. Maureen A. Mahoney, "The Problem of Silence in Feminist Psychology," in Sue J.M. Freeman, Susan C. Bourque, and Christine M. Shelton, eds., Women and Power: Leadership Redefined (Boston, 2001), pp. 68-69;
71. Robyn Fivush, "Voice and Silence: A Feminist Model of Autobiographical Memory," in Joan M. Lucariello, Judith A. Hudson, Robyn Fivush, and Patricia J. Bauer, eds., The Development of the Mediated Mind: Sociocultural Context and Cognitive Development (Mahwah, NJ, 2004), p. 83.
72. Davina Cooper, Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State (Buckingham, 1995), pp. 126-30;
73. Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany, 1998), pp. 147-52.
74. Cooper D, Power in Struggle, p. 127.
75. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Introduction," in Hedges and Fishkin, eds., Listening to Silences (New York, 1994), p. 3.
76. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1981), p. 15.
77. Verne Harris has repeatedly sent out an archival "call for justice." See Harris V, "Seeing (in) Blindness,"
78. Verne Harris, "The Archive is Politics," in Marion Beyea, Reuben Ware, and Cheryl Avery, eds., The Power and Passion of Archives: A Festschrift in Honour of Kent Haworth (Ottawa, 2005), esp. pp. 122-25.
79. Cristianne Miller, "M. Nourbese Philip and the Poetics/Politics of Silence," in Grabher and Jessner, eds., Semantics of Silences, p. 157.
80. Helga Ramsey-Kurz, "Telling Silences: Aspects of Female (In)Articulateness in Some Contemporary British Women's Novels," in Grabher and Jessner, eds., Semantics of Silences, p. 161.
81. Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondle, IL, 1997), p. 177;
82. see also Ratcliffe K, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions, p. 122.
83. Miller C, "M. Nourbese Philip and the Poetics/Politics of Silence," p. 151.
84. M. Nourbese Philip, "Dis Place The Space Between," in Lynn Keller and Chistanne Miller, eds., Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Ann Arbor, 1994), p. 307.
85. Miller C, "M. Nourbese Philip and the Poetics/Politics of Silence," p. 158.
86. Derrida J, "Archive Fever in South Africa," p. 42.
87. Harris V, "The Archive is Politics," pp. 122-23.
88. Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, "Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings," Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 3-4 (September 2002), pp. 279, 284-85.
89. Quoted in CWMA/ACMF Collective and WIC Board of Directors, "The Canadian Women's Movement Archives/Les Archives canadiennes du mouvement des femmes," in Margaret Fulford, ed., The Canadian Women's Movement, 1960-1990: A Guide to Archival Resources (Toronto, 1992), p. 21.
90. James A. Fraser and Harold A. Averill, Organizing an Archives: The Canadian Gay Archives Experience (Toronto, 1983), p. 60, Appendix A. See the CLGA Web site for the current mandate, last revised in 1998, CLGA, "Our Mandate," Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives - Keeping our stories and histories alive available at (accessed on 19 August 2005).
91. On the development of the Canadian Archival System, see Millar L, "Discharging our Debt," esp. pp. 122-25.
92. Greetham D, "'Who's In, Who's Out'," p. 14.
93. Harris V, "Claiming Less, Delivering More," p. 139.