Description
Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections.
Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences.
Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Michael Moss and David Thomas
1. Theorising the Silences
Michael Moss and David Thomas
2. What are silences: the Australian example
Michael Piggott
3. Silent contemporary records: access to the archives of Special Investigation Commission in Iceland, 2010-2019
Eiríkur G. Guðmundsson
4. Noises in the Archives: Acknowledging the Present Yet Silenced Presence in Caribbean Archival Memory
Stanley H. Griffin
5. Silenced and Unsilenced Memories: Archival Fonds of Brazil’s Political Police, 1964-1985
Renato Pinto Venancio and Adalson de Oliveira Nascimento
6. Uncovering Silences Through Photographs and Listening:
Envisioning Archives as a Democratic Space
Iyra S. Buenrostro
7. Silences in Malawi’s Archives
Paul Lihoma
8. Perceived Silence in the Turkish Archives: from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Republic
Lale Özdemir and Oğuz İcimsoy
9. Silenced Archives and Archived Voices: Archival Resources for a History of Post-Independence India
Swapan Chakravorty
10. The Voices of Children and Adolescents in the Archives
Mette Seidelin and Christian Larsen
11.Diaries and Silence
Polly North
12. Filling the Gaps
Michael Moss and David Thomas
Afterword: Tales from the Sometimes ‘Silent’ Archives
David D. Hebb
