Mobile Archives: Virtual Workshop on November 10

The study of colonial America originated as a nationalistic, even patriotic enterprise. States, countries, municipalities, regions, and other groups (often geographically defined) established cultural genealogies, showing the “starting point” of an imagined political unit. With the rise of hemispheric, comparative, and transatlantic studies, however, these etiological narratives have come under scrutiny. Old continuities, once taken for granted, have been complicated, deepened, and enriched. The painful legacies of colonial violence--including enslavement, migration and removal--demand increased attention to how archival epistemologies carry colonial pasts into the present.

The attention to mobilities across time and space thus necessitates a critical look at one of the anchoring institutions in early American studies, the archive. Often established with a geographic basis, and usually bracketed by dates, the archival collection inevitably renders a given moment or object or angle of inquiry more relevant than others. Practicalities, of course, shape these decisions. Scholars travel to Pennsylvania to investigate Revolutionary Philadelphia, Massachusetts to understand Puritan New England, and so on. But how did archival materials themselves travel? Letters were sent, objects changed hands, spaces were imagined, entire collections would migrate over time. This mobility belies the instability of any claim to archival “rootedness.”

The time is ripe for reconsideration. Digitalization has challenged the locational grounding of early Americanist scholarship. Where scholars have always been encouraged to make physical contact with a given scholarly artifact, funding to the physical archive has diminished; at the same time, online scans are increasingly accessible. Travel restrictions due to a global pandemic, meanwhile, have pressed the issue of remote access into the realm of necessity.

How then should scholarship follow suit? Limited travel, and the possibilities opened by online access, necessitate a break in old practices. While archival research has long been regarded as the driver of innovation, access to collections has upheld institutional hierarchies. Gender, economic disparities, and geographic differences have played an overdetermined role in knowledge production. Increased attention to the living legacies of the colonial past, finally, demands greater attention to how our present-day past slips beyond set boundaries of space and time.

The inevitable restructuring of access and research challenges the role of the archive in a post-pandemic context. Will institutional access be restricted to digital environments only? What constitutes the allure of the archive, and how does it impact knowledge networks in historical and cultural studies? In what ways will material culture be accessible, and how will more unexpected connections unfold? Will future access remain bound to the monetization of digital resources and thus the purchasing power of research institutions? With renewed crossover between traditional and creative scholarship, how can silenced pasts be recovered alongside conventionally recorded and documented past?

Topics to be considered include, but are not limited to:

• Intersections of Nationalism and the Archive
• Hemispheric and transatlantic interventions on colonial archives
• Presentism and the colonial past
• Translation and circulation of scholarly traditions
• Digital v. on-site scholarship
• Archives and material culture
• Access and scholarly privilege
• Space and time in archival projects
• Futures of archival scholarship

Contact Email: mobilearchiveproject@gmail.com