LITMIR.BIZ

      "For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."

(James Baldwin, "The White Man's Guilt"3)

      "Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow4)

      "We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year."

(Jean-Baptiste Michel et al.5)

Historians, legal researchers, and others dependent on archives for information and knowledge have increasingly recognized the important role of archivists.6 Over the last ten to fifteen years, an "archival turn" in history, literature, anthropology, and the humanities and social sciences in general has transformed archives from sites of research into objects of enquiry in their own right. Archives have come to be seen not as neutral repositories of sources but as historically constructed tools of power relations, deeply embedded in changing social and cultural contexts.7 Areas of study include investigations of memory practices; representation of cultural minorities in the historical record; the role of curatorial voice, including the evolving processes of selection, ordering, and usage; human rights and access to documentation.8 With the "archival turn" has come the recognition of the need for historians to engage "with the limits and possibilities of the archive as a site of knowledge production, an arbiter of truth, and a mechanism for shaping narratives of history."9 The same recognition is at work in other disciplines. In American literary history, for example, newly-unearthed documents have heralded "revisions in canons, new understandings of genres, and emerging, competing narratives."10

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