Refiguring the Archive
Published on 3. October 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
368 pages
978-94-010-3926-0 (ISBN)
Description
Refiguring the Archive
at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts. In his contribution, Jacques Derrida (an instantly recognisable name in intellectual discourse worldwide) shows how remembering can never be separated from forgetting, and argues that the archive is about the future rather than the past. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the degree to which thinking about archives is embracing new realities and new possibilities. The book expresses a confidence in claiming for archival discourse previously unentered terrains. It serves as an early manual for a time that has already begun.
More details
Edition
Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2002
Language
English
Place of publication
Dordrecht
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Research
Illustrations
368 p.
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
706 gr
ISBN-13
978-94-010-3926-0 (9789401039260)
DOI
10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Carolyn Hamilton | Verne Harris | Michèle Pickover
Refiguring the Archive
E-Book
12/2012
Springer
€309.23
Available for download
Carolyn Hamilton | Verne Harris | Michèle Pickover
Refiguring the Archive
Book
12/2002
Kluwer Academic Publishers
€353.09
Shipment within 15-20 days
Content
The Power of the Archive and its Limits.- The Archives and the Political Imaginary.- Archive Fever in South Africa.- Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida's Archive Fever.- A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive.- Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form.- 'Picturing the Past' in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies.- The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy.- The Archive, Public History and the Essential Truth: The TRC Reading the Past.- The Human Genome as Archive: Some Illustrations from the South.- 'The History of the Past is the Trust of the Present': Preservation and Excavation in the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa.- 'Living by Fluidity': Oral Histories, Material Custodies and the Politics of Archiving.- Orality and Literacy in an Electronic Era.- Holdings: Refiguring the Archive.- Literature and the Archive: The Biography of Texts.- Keeping the Self: The Novelist as (Self-)Archivist.- Electronic Record-keeping, Social Memory and Democracy.- Blackbirds and Black Butterflies.- Biographical Notes.- Acknowledgements.