Archive

This entry examines the elasticity of the term “archive” and the tensions that surround its ever-expanding usage as a keyword across disciplines. As a term that connotes a place, a practice, a profession, and, with the archival turn, a metaphor, archive/s offers an opportunity to think across the institutional contexts that define the work of scholars, record keepers, creators, and curators. Its continued salience as a keyword, however, depends on attending to the specificities of archives in their plural forms and to the archival labor that is often elided in theories of “the archive” as a singular logic. Whether singular or plural, then, the keyword archive/s should act as an explicit point of intersection between metaphor and materiality: the protocols of the archivist; the allure of archival imaginaries; and the many sites—both physical and ephemeral—that encode memory