Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse

Description

Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined? This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies. Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences. Cover Contents List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Notes on contributors 1 Introduction: Encountering the intersectional archive Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams Part 1 Archival ownership 2 ‘Found in store’: Working with source communities and difficult objects at Durham University’s Oriental Museum Rachel Barclay, Lauren Barnes, Gillian Ramsay, Craig Barclay and Helen Armstrong 3 Transforming the archive of slavery at the Tropenmuseum Adiva Lawrence 4 Maqdala and the South Kensington Museum: 150 years later Alexandra Watson Jones Part 2 Colonial power 5 Encountering ‘colonial science’ in the visual archive: The natural history paintings of Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore (1777–1832) David Lowther 6 Enclosing archival sound: Colonial singing as discipline and resistance Erin Johnson-Williams 7 The infantilization of Indigeneity in colonial Australia Roisín Laing 8 ‘Some nameless, dreadful wrong’: Reading the silencing of police rape in the Indian colonial archive Deana Heath Part 3 Biographical silences 9 Completing the mosaic: Sara Baartman and the archive Tiziana Morosetti 10 Mercury, sulphur baths and fine art: Censorship and the sexual health of John and Joséphine Bowes, founders of The Bowes Museum Judith Phillips 11 Empowering the invisible: The archival legacy of Christian Cole Philip Burnett Part 4 Layered archives 12 The power of invisibility: Nursing nuns and archival gatekeeping Jemima Short 13 The instability and ideology of the archive: Archival evidence and nineteenth-century British theatre Jim Davis 14 ‘Our mind strives to restore the mutilated forms’: Nineteenth-century virtual museum tours in children’s periodicals Rachel Bryant Davies 15 Afterword: Intersectional Albertopolis Tim Barringer Index