Introduction: Pedagogies of the Archive

Abstract

To u.s. poet susan howe’s brief catalogue of potential archival investigators, we might add two more: a teacher, a student. These positions, of course, are not mutually exclusive from the others listed by Howe; nor, for that matter, are they exclusive from each other. It is revealing that Howe focuses on the archive as a scene of private, individual investigation, and in this she is not alone. For Carolyn Steedman, “the Historian goes to the Archive to be at home as well as to be alone” (72), while Antoinette Burton describes the aversion of some scholars to the “dreaded solitary existence” of archival work (8). In The Allure of the Archives, Arlette Farge’s persistent second-person address establishes the archive as a space of silent, solitary investigations, in which the sounding of an indecipherable word in the Introduction: Pedagogies of the Archive