Silences, Reconsidered
Speaking of silences at the end of history
Archives and Silence
What is the archive? It is difficult for archivists to give a sufficient answer to the question of what exactly an archive is. Partly, this is because “archive” and “the archive” are two different things in preservation: the former is a specific institution, the latter a general body of historic records. History comes from the archive.
I previously stated that the archive is the sum of all things from which we may draw a connection to the past. In that writing, I criticized the political economy that limited archives to specific buildings and places and the power of the political economy to destroy the identities of the oppressed without even appearing to target them.
What about the gaps? The holes in the archive? When I quoted Rodney Carter, I thought of silences as a gap in historical records. Yet what of the things that are said? What about the things of which we have records but that we cannot access? Of the things that are said but preserved in such a manner as to deny their historic significance to the oppressed?
Evaluating how silence is created evades the question of what exactly we mean by using the term silence.
