Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions
Résumé
The Arab uprising and revolutions have revealed the strength of protest, but also the political apparatus of police, the military and the deep state networks that support them. For archivists and archival activists, the uprisings have also shown the difficulty of anchoring national memory of post-colonial states. Memory and the archives are crucial components of modern democratic states. The question is what states do with memories of failed and defeated revolutions. Today, the proliferation of "places of memory" for the revolutions on the Internet, in Art and even in public space creates a sanctification of traces of the struggle, but also of its erasure. All this affects the revolutions themselves and plays a part in the history to come and the very possibility of new struggles. Some archives are produced by private persons, de-materialized and shown on the web, while others exist at the mercy of foreign funding. Even so, this chapter argues, archives produce institution. By disentangling the notions of state that underwrite archival ventures, this chapter aims to capture the tension that lies in the gap between state institutions for conservations and the civil society's production of memories. It describes a position for historians and historical narratives that take seriously the access and accessibility of the documentation as well as their very own production and creation as archives of today.
Domaines
HistoireOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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