Canonization, archivalization, and the ‘archival imaginary’ Paper presented at Archive Fervour/Archive Further: Literature, Archives, and

There has been a call to ‘open the archives ’ both from within and outside of the archival profession. Similarly, the ‘canon wars ’ in literary studies centered a comparable debate on the Western literary canon. Our analysis will be guided by John Guillory’s sociological analysis of canon formation.1 Central to this analysis is the understanding that the canonization of a work is an institutionally mediated, sociocultural process that defines its canonicity, an abstract set of properties that determines if work is canonical or noncanonical. In this paper, I argue that there are archival counterparts to these constructs. Using Eric Ketelaar’s concept of ‘archivalization, ’ which is the sociocultural process that determines whether something will be archived, I subsequently define the concept of ‘archivicity ’ as the abstract set of properties of a record that determines if a record is ‘archival ’ or ‘non-archival. ’ We will also investigate the institutional embodiment of a holistic ‘archival paradigm, ’ wherein archives and archivists recognize their role as preserving and potentially interpreting records as a form of cultural capital. However, as we will see, this paradigm also has a central role in the perpetuatio