Babel Unbound by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, History & Theory, Social Science
ISBN: 9781776145911
Publisher: Wits University Press
Published: 2020-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 9. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper, 1972), 79–134.

2Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

3‘Forensic’ is a word with roots (etymologically, ‘of or before the forum’) in the same classical frame as ‘democracy’, ‘public’ and ‘archive’. The Greeks organised contests for speakers that developed debating skills rooted in the use of evidence, which they believed central to democracy. In Roman times forensis was used to refer to the presentation of a case, often criminal, before a group of public individuals in the forum.

4Wikileaks positions itself as ‘an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking’. Stephen Moss, ‘Julian Assange: The Whistleblower’, The Guardian, 14 July 2010.

5See, for example, the National Security Archive in the United States, founded explicitly to check rising government secrecy, whose achievement includes the preservation of some 220 million electronic records, as a result of the archive’s White House email lawsuits in terms of the Freedom of Information Act, accessed 3 October 2019, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/the_archive.html. See also the work of the South African History Archive, accessed 3 October 2019, http://www.saha.org.za/about_saha/freedom_of_information_programme.

6In making these points I am mindful of Jacques Derrida’s foundational understanding that there is no political power without control of the archive: ‘Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: effective participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’ Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, fn 1.

7See Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19–26.

8Nelson Mandela Foundation, A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005), offers a full account of the history of the official record of Mandela’s incarceration, its formation, suppression and the struggle to open it up to public scrutiny.

9Another example is the sacking of the Nalanda University complex in India (the most renowned repository of Buddhist knowledge in the world at the time) by Turkic Muslim invaders in 1193.

10Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992).

11Irving Velody, ‘The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes towards a Theory of the Archive’, The History of the Human Sciences 11, 4 (1998): 1–16.

12Ivan Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory: In Sarajevo, Burned Books and Murdered Pictures (New York: New York Times, 1994), cited in Martin Hall, ‘Blackbirds and Black Butterflies’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 333.

13In the section that follows I draw closely on Prisoner in the Garden. I was a member of the writing team assembled by the Foundation to produce a draft text. Final manuscript production was undertaken by the Foundation.

14Accessed 3 October 2019, https://www.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.