Women's letters and memoirs were until recently considered to
have little historical significance. Many of these materials have
disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and
relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly,
cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection
showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about
women's archives in Canada.
The essays in "Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace"
consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges
that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are
some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival
research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials
available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable
forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not
only to research the lives of women but to create archival
deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process
might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and
critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to
challenges related to the interpretation of material, the
contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or
sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to
feminist commitments; how archival material is organized,
restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and
immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how
exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae--missing or
fragmented documents, or gaps in communication--that then require
imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
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