Review: The Silence of the Archive (2017)
Nicholas Martin
Vice President, Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York &
Curator for the Arts & Humanities, NYU Fales Library & Special Collections
David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson. The Silence of the Archive. London: Facet Publishing, 2017. 187 pp. Paperback, £64.95
All archives tell a story. If we think of an archival source as one voice from the past, then for each document kept and preserved, we must also consider all of the voices from the past that remain unheard. The Silence of the Archive, foregrounded as “an attempt to peer into the silences” (xx), attempts to draw a roadmap for navigating the gaps between the pages. Presupposing a culture wherein archives are revered as uniquely authentic, comprehensive or truthful, the book seeks to identify and define the ever-present silences in archives, elucidating their various forms, root causes, implications, and uses. The three authors succeed in presenting a wide variety of often competing perspectives on all the things we don’t find in the archives. Given their distinct approaches to the subject matter, it is useful to consider each authors’ contributions individually: two of the authors invest heavily in describing and considering the types of archival silences, while one suggests actions to mitigate the problems they cause.
Simon Fowler’s contributions, comprising the first two chapters of the book, are explicatory in nature. The opening chapter provides an overview of how silences are enacted in the historical record, what types of silences exist, and how communities respond to those silences. An early section of the essay, entitled “The Power of the Written,” details the privileging of written traditions in the practice of history making: “The existence of written archives exercises a power over what is the subject of academic discourse and even what is known more generally” (3). Fowler reminds us that absences from these written archives are equally influential over what is remembered. These losses may be accidental or deliberate, of course. Fowler explores the ways in which state bureaucracies obfuscate, suppress, and destroy evidence of their governing bodies’ activities. British colonial administrative pipelines were practically designed to lose records of colonial operations; archives of the world wars were destroyed by bombs, and through scrapping and repurposing to counter supply shortages; even modern developments like freedom of information laws simply deter the powerful from recording their activities. As the Patriot Act introduces what Fowler terms a “born secret” (26) standard for government records, our approach to these archives, and our interpretation of what we find therein, must change.
In his second chapter, “Inappropriate Expectations,” Fowler addresses the flipside of the first: those absences which embody the archival record and its historical development. There are silences in archives of which we must be aware as we seek to identify and tell new stories; it is not sufficient to trust the comprehensiveness of the record. Fowler outlines “what records cannot tell us” (45) due to generations of skewing via the complementary practices, informed by biases, of preservation and destruction. Thus are we unlikely to find in the archives the voices of immigrants, women, and people of color or, indeed, “most people who lived before the 20th century” (46–47). These absences highlight the lie of authenticity in archives, and challenge the legitimacy of the historical record built from their contents. Every time we visit an archive, or quote from archival sources, we do so with the knowledge that, by design, they reflect the shortcomings of the past.
David Thomas’s chapters in the book are somewhat sprawling interrogations, the first on the archival shift from analog to digital. As archives are kept digitally, all but eliminating their traditional physical storage requirements, it may feel as though a golden age is on the horizon, where archives will approach the authority they’ve always claimed. But as collections grow exponentially, that information becomes increasingly difficult to describe, index, catalog, and publish. An aporia may ensue, where things get worse as they seem to get better.
Thomas warns, “In a world where the current discourse is increasingly concerned with a post-truth society, it is easy to imagine that archives are shining beacons of truth” (xxiv-xxv). Faith in the truth of the archive is a perilous path, though. Early in “Imagining Archives,” Thomas invites us to consider the ways one learns about the slave trade, given that the unmediated voices of enslaved people are effectively absent from the archival corpus. When presented with a ship’s log written to reflect kindly on the captain, a published slave narrative edited by a white abolitionist, and a contemporary novel fictionalizing the lives of slaves (whose author’s research perhaps drew strongly on the former two), which would we say is the most “authentic” (119–120) to the lived experience of an enslaved person? Thomas is attuned throughout his work in this book to the pitfalls of trusting the authenticity of a document, even one which presents as documentary or archival in nature. So-designated authentic documents such as ship’s logs are also agenda-driven, and teach us things other than the facts they claim to contain. Tellingly, though, Thomas is unable in this analogy to envision a future where authentic records of the enslaved are collected, preserved and made accessible.
Ownership of the archival record, which operates somewhat in tandem with the construct of authenticity, is a common concern in Thomas’s musings, and he voices legitimate concerns about what happens when for-profit corporations assume custody of archival records. Private stewardship of archives carries great potential for enforcing silences on the archival record. Thomas specifically highlights the work of Google and Ancestry, characterizing the privatization of history as “an existential threat to archives” (90) as these corporations make traditional archival repositories appear unnecessary while simultaneously delegitimizing their core values of long-term preservation and free access for all.
Where Fowler and Thomas spend their pages respectively mapping archival silences and examining their perpetrators and implications, Valerie Johnson strategizes around recognizing and addressing those silences. Hers are refreshing essays, in that they offer grounded suggestions for dealing with the concerns raised elsewhere in the book. Johnson’s most salient recommendations revolve around focusing our respective energies, as researchers and archival workers, on three crucial areas: appraisal, information literacy, and community empowerment.
Appraisal practices have the potential to be viewed as enforcing silences through privileging certain objects while ignoring the research potential of others. Thoughtful policies, though, can serve researchers by bringing to the fore new perspectives and, if they are transparent, better inform the researcher about what they can expect to find. Proactive appraisal can also change the way we think about silences and absences, underscoring the nature of loss as, in a way, constitutive of the archive. Johnson looks to a future “where loss is seen as good and as liberation from fixity, freedom from an overbearing respect of the past, where what has been valued continues to remain so without needing or even being allowed to be reappraised” (111). That “liberation from fixity” allows us to discover, pursue, and relate new histories.
There is a pronounced anxiety in parts of this book around the presumed abilities of present and future generations to seek out and identify archival sources. Thomas has an outsize sympathy for the “time-poor Google searcher seeking instant information” (73); he suggests that if archivists do not devise more efficient ways to get their materials in front of lazy researchers’ eyes, “archives will effectively impose silences on themselves” (73). The idea that archivists will actively make things worse by not foregrounding their collections for online discovery is as specious as the suggestion that historians of the future will look no further than what they find in a Google image search. As part of their practice, researchers gain an understanding of how archives work. In this way we come to grips with the scope of work required of good research, and eliminate some of the perceived, but ultimately chimeric silences. Johnson avers, “good archivists know that records are kept for a purpose, and predominately reflect that purpose” (109); we might extend that attribute to good researchers as well, and archival practitioners must do all we can to help our researchers understand the makeup of our collections, as well as the tools which enable their discovery.
The most insidious silence across the archival record is the privileging of predominately white, male, voices of power coupled with the exclusion of everyone else. Fowler’s outline of “Inappropriate Expectations” is also a call to action; it is, of course, insufficient simply to understand and orient our research strategy around the absences, driven by legacies of systemic white supremacy and misogyny, in the archives. Archival workers can combat these silences through examining and reorienting our appraisal and descriptive practices (see, for example, Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s Anti-Racist Description Resources). More importantly, though, Johnson drives us towards a community-driven model of collection development, description and access, whereby practitioners in the field of archives become collaborators with the creators of archival material, “establishing communities of records” (153). The move towards co-curation of archives encourages users of archives, as well as their subject communities, to join archival workers in expanding the breadth of the archival record.
The sheer scope of this book makes it an educational tool of some value, particularly as an introduction to the concept of silences in archives. I’ve barely addressed a fraction of its contents, although a key component that is missing from the book, ironically, is the voice of the marginalized in so many ruminations on silences and silencing. I can see these essays evoking productive arguments.
Nicholas Martin is the Curator for Arts and Humanities at NYU Special Collections, where his responsibilities include collection development, outreach, instruction, and exhibitions. He holds an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU’s John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masters’ Program, and an MSLIS from Pratt Institute. Prior to joining NYU in 2017, Nicholas was the Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at NYU Abu Dhabi. Nicholas is an active member both of the Society of American Archivists and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, where he currently serves on the security committee and is a co-chair of the task force to revise the section’s guidelines on exhibition and interlibrary loan of archives and special collections. His current research interests include quantifying the operational impacts of archival collection development, the implications of the use of archival materials in museum and gallery exhibitions, the intersections of the art market and the archives world, and the commoditization of archival materials as art objects and cultural artifacts.
