Moving Archives

Linda M. Morra is a settler scholar and Full Professor at Bishop’s University, and a former Craig Dobbin Chair (2016–2017). Her book Unarrested Archives, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 2015. She prepared Jane Rule’s posthumously published memoir, Taking My Life, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2011.

• Introduction: Moving Archives: The Affective Economies and Potentialities of Literary Archival Materials — Linda M. Morra, Bishop’s University Chapter One: Archive Transfer — Archival Transformation: The Intervening Space Between — Patricia Godbout and Marc André Fortin, Université de Sherbrooke Chapter Two: Don’t you know that digitization is not enough? Digitization is not enough! Building Accountable Archives and the Digital Dilemma of the Cabaret Commons — T.L. Cowan, University of Toronto Chapter Three: Myles na gCopaleen’s 'An Scian': A Knife in the Back of Irish Archivists — Joseph LaBine, University of Ottawa Chapter Four: Inside the Cover, Outside the Archive: The Dispersal, Loss, and Value of Jane Rule’s Personal Library — Linda M. Morra, Bishop’s University Chapter Five: “The fearful state of things”: Technologies of Transparency in the Annual Report of the Canada Sunday School Union, 1836-1876 — Erin Kean, University of Ottawa Chapter Six: Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb — Katherine McLeod, Concordia University Chapter Seven: Fresh-Water Archives: Reading Water in Troy Burle Bailey’s The Pierre Bonga Loops — Karina Vernon, University of Toronto Chapter Eight: Letting Grief Move Me: Thinking Through the Affective Dimensions of Personal Recordkeeping — Jennifer Douglas, University of British Columbia Chapter Nine: Reading for Queer Openings: Moving. Archives of the Self. Fred Wah. — Susan Rudy, Queen Mary University of London

"Archives are not only physical repositories and electronic entities, they are affective commodities with the power to move researchers and archivists who work with them. This thoughtful collection of essays occasionally touches on the gathering and transfer of archival materials, but its emphasis is less on the physical and more on the emotional: archives as agents of transformative change. The essays Morra (Bishop's Univ., Canada) has brought together explore various situations, for example, the removal of documents and books from a dying writer’s home to a university archive; the implications of a sale of a literary archive from its linguistic home in Ireland to the special collections of an American university; the absence or manipulation of voice and experience of black slaves in the records of Canadian fur traders. The final essay is particularly apt: a personal account of how a scholar came to grips with her own sexuality through the process of creating an online archive of the writings of another. This is not a practical text for archivists but a collection for anyone who wishes to explore what is elicited through working with archives. -L. J. Sherlock, Victoria University"Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals." - CHOICE"In opening up a space to consider affect in the creation of archives, including what Jennifer Douglas calls the “aspirational” archive, Morra invites the possibility for archival scholars to reflect upon their own aspirations for the archives they participate in creating-and how those aspirations inevitably become encoded into the archives themselves. Thus does the field move, and as it moves it stirs, and the silt aroused by that movement stretches over the gaps and the abyss."-Gregory Betts, Canadian Literature"Moving Archives is a celebration of ethical collection and community or, as Kean words it in chapter five, kinship. Morra and the other archival theorists have tentatively charted the shifted boundaries in the field and found wider space for new and established voices. … Moving Archives shows us that, if we understand archives as Jennifer Douglas does – as post-mortem social lives – how and where we support their existence says everything about us." -Jocelyn Williams, University of Toronto Quarterly