Migrant Archives: New Routes in and out of American Studies

1. In this article I discuss Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans, by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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2. For an overview of debates about the archive, see Marlene Manoff, "Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines," Portal: Libraries and the Academy 4 (2004), 9–25.

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3. Thomas Osborne has argued that the physical reality of an archive, in tension with the abstract conception of what it implies, grants credibility to certain archival configurations and even disciplines. See Osborne, "The Ordinariness of the Archive," History of the Human Sciences 12 (May 1999), 51–55. That physical credibility is one factor behind what some have called an archival turn in literary and cultural studies. While historicists’ methodologies and the de-centering of the literary text have also contributed to this archival turn, the lack of a consensus as to what constitutes literary studies has led to a privileging of the recovery of texts and contexts that have not been considered in the recent past. Jane Gallop has criticized this historical turn by establishing a dichotomy between close reading and "archival work." Actually, the best historical work would deploy close reading techniques on documents that might otherwise be taken as factual evidence for historical narratives. See Gallop, "The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading," Profession 2007 (New York: MLA, 2007), 181–186.

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4. The National Archives also has connections to regional archives and presidential libraries. The United States offers a curious case of archive construction. Unlike other nations, the United States did not establish the institution called the National Archives until more than a century after the country’s founding. Individual government agencies had been in charge of their own records before Congress created the National Archives and Records Administration in 1934 (http://www.archives.gov/about/history/). I would argue that the first U.S. "national archive" was the Library of Congress, founded in 1800 when the capital was transferred from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. Originally intended to house books for use by the government, the Library of Congress became a national library that was to provide information on all subjects, meaning all subjects that would be of interest to the nation. For an account of the founding of the Library of Congress, see John Y. Cole, Jefferson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1993).

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5. Thomas H. Kreneck, Preface to Crossing the Rio Grande: An Lmmigrant’s Life in the 1880s (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), ix–xii.

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6. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (New York: NYU Press, 2000).

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7. See also Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

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8. "By this term [archive]," Foucault writes, "I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation" (Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge [New York: Pantheon, 1972], 128–129). Instead, Foucault would focus on the historical discursive system (assumptions, connections, relationships) that permits a particular statement. Libraries and academic disciplines or fields are the product of the archive but are not the archive themselves. If a national archive implies continuity and tradition, Foucault’s "archive" functions in a particular context. Rather than focusing on the content of an archive or the person who inaugurates or promotes it, Foucault seeks to understand how the archive delimits what and how something can be said.

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9. For a discussion of "radical evil" in various strains of philosophy, see Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002). For a brief explanation of Kant’s concepts in relation to other uses of "evil," see Christoph Cox, "On Evil: An Interview of Alenka Zupančič," Cabinet 5 (Winter 2001–2002).

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10. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27.

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11. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7.

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12. Jacques Derrida, Mal dArchive: Une Impression Freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 15f.

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13. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Genaro M. Padilla, "Introduction", to Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 21.

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14. Walt Whitman, "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1146.

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15. A similar process is evident in the racial authorization of African American studies, although not without its own debates. As Xiomara Santamarina has noted, a methodological paradox emerges in that field when scholars develop an archive presumably about a racial group at the same time that certain practitioners deconstruct the racial particularity that propels such a search. "[T]he field encompasses reprinting and reinterpreting long out-of-print and forgotten texts, in combination with textual and contextual analyses that recover the instability and contingency of racial discourses across space and time." In response, Santamarina argues for the ongoing recuperation of archival materials that call attention to and speak to the need for specific analyses—in this case, historicizing practices that place discourses on race in the particular conditions faced by the writers. But one has to wonder whether in African American studies race remains as the category that sustains the archival process. By contrast, migrant archives move away from racial formations. See Santamarina, "Are We There Yet?: Archives, History, and Specificity in African-American Literary Studies," American Literary History 20 (Spring/Summer 2008): 304.

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