An Invitation to the Archives

Abstract

One of the advantages of the decision in 2021 to publish the journal through an agreement with Cambridge University Press on behalf of theMLA is that the full run of PMLA since its founding in 1884 is now accessible to all MLA members through Cambridge Core. The dedicated website for PMLA (www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla) can serve not only as a passive repository of back issues but also as an interface that allows a renewed and revisionary engagement with the history of the journal, which of course is also in no small sense a record of the history of the Modern Language Association itself. To this end, moving forward the website will feature short posts highlighting elements from the journal’s past. The first few have been commissioned by the PMLA Editorial Board and will appear on the site this spring. I think of this modest new initiative as responding to and building on calls in the field of archival studies to “activate” records: to proliferate avenues of access, to invite participation and “recontextualization” (Ketelaar 137), to foster novel and even sometimes contrarian, irreverent, and transgressive uses. In 2001 the influential Canadian archivist Terry Cook argued that there had been a “paradigm shift” that had transformed the archival profession: “a shift away from viewing records as static physical objects, and towards understanding them as dynamic virtual concepts; a shift away from looking at records as the passive products of human or administrative activity and towards considering records as active agents themselves in the formation of human and organizational memory” (4). The same year, the Dutch archive theorist Eric Ketelaar argued in a similar vein that “every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of the record.” The archive is not a vault for a precious artifact with a fixed signification, he insisted, but instead the site of an “infinite activation of the record” (137). Over the subsequent two decades, there has been an ongoing conversation among processing archivists working with materials in fields as various as photography, film, and community activism about strategies to activate the archive, especially through digital curation and access.