Burton

This week’s reading, Archive Stories by Antoinette Burton was an interesting collection of essays about historian’s experiences with archives. When I began reading this book, during the Introduction, I began to think of the African Nationalism class I took, where my first exposure to the fact that records are in fact destroyed when a government wants to control what is remembered. This information also lead to the fact that like the Aboriginal History Wars, archives that did contain documents were located in European institutions, controlled by the nations that dispossessed the Indigenous populations. Like the Tasmanian case, the historical texts I read for that class, relied heavily on oral histories to attempt to collect the memories from the bottom up instead of the top down. And like other academics mentioned, the students in our class questioned the validity of these archival resources. Although I do not think it is always the case, on the one hand, the government is accused of skewing history in its favor, on the other, public memory could be recorded to create their own history. This tension of power between a colonial state and the dispossessed people is what I believe lies at the heart of Burton’s argument. She illustrates the fact that historians interpret historical facts, but also that the facts can be skewed through the absence or withholding of information, painting archivists in some cases as gatekeepers. In Durba Ghosh’s essay we also see how these power plays are at work where judgment about a researcher’s topic attempts to sway her away from exposing a presumed scandal that some individuals do not think be included in a national narrative. The resolution I believe Burton gets at is that the responsibility lies with the researcher, the individual who ultimately makes history available to the public through their publications.