A Book a Day: Potential History

[caitri]

 Getting back to my a-book-a-day project: This is a dense look at archives and museums as imperialist spaces. It's main weakness is that it's not written by someone who is an archivist, so there's a tendency here and there to treat archives in a theoretical way that I have a pet peeve about*. But this book combines polemic, case studies, and manifestos on imperialism, colonialism, and racism in archives, and it is some Good Shit. Especially for right now.

 

*This theoretical vein from non-archivists has a tendency to forget that archives are not neatly ordered in boxes upon arrival at an institution, and that there are people whose whole jobs are to go through boxes of stuff to try to assert information organization and control so that researchers can actually find what they're looking for. (If you've ever wondered why institutions have archival backlogs, also look at all the money that archives and archivists do NOT get.)