Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
Some Background
The oft-cited 1999 College English (CE) issue devoted to archival work—which
includes articles by John Brereton, Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Steven Mailloux,
Thomas Miller and Melody Bowdon, and Vicki Tolar Burton—brought in-
vestigations of archival researchers’ work to a broad constituency of English
studies scholars. These researchers raised questions and issues that only now
are being addressed:
[W]e still aren’t sure what should be in our archive, or how access can be broad-
ened, or which tools we should bring to our task of exploring the past. In fact, we
aren’t sure exactly what we already have in our archive, or how in fact we even
define the term. . . . [W]e need to begin asking what is missing from the archive
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and how it can get there. And we can also ask some questions while there is still
time to act: Are there things we should be working to preserve right now? What
can we do now to make sure current practices and materials will be accessible in
the archives of the future? (Brereton 574)
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tell fuller, more inclusive and transparent stories of both the work we do and
our findings. This essay attempts to collate and address some of the recurring
issues associated with rhetoric and composition archival research.
Archives are now viewed as primary sources for creating knowledge rather
than mere storehouses for finding what is already known. History professor
James O’Toole explains, “Any archivist who has supervised a collection knows
that an ingenious researcher can find uses for records that no creator, collec-
tor, or curator ever imagined” (52). Rhetoric and composition scholars, who
often investigate materials not originally assembled with writing instruction
or instructors in mind, are familiar with creating new knowledge out of col-
lected materials. Consider Kelly Ritter’s gendered readings of the Yale, all male,
Awkward Squad (basic writing) archives. Her experiences working in archives
where her presence “was never intended nor particularly foreseen” left her
with a new set of methodological questions (192): 1) what does a homogenous
archive have to say to a deliberately excluded investigator who has a research
agenda very different from the original purposes of the collection; 2) how can
researchers answer “Brereton’s call to ‘begin asking what is missing from the
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archive and how it can get there’ (574)”; and 3) how can “restricted history . . .
open doors for us, as scholars, to reinterpret the histories of our field and ask,
‘What can we gain by confronting the discomfort we feel when these histori-
cal assumptions are overturned, if unexpectedly, by archival research?’” (193).
Interestingly, in Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, contribu-
tors Susan Miller and Susan Wells tout archival scholarship as proof that the
work compositionists do is rigorous and scholarly: “[I]f we claim expertise about
relations between specific writers, their processes and their texts, we easily
grow and successfully divert out-worn attempts to marginalize our teaching
and research” (52). Rhetoric and composition scholarship often and necessarily
works outside the box, using archival materials in ways that perhaps weren’t
intended by the collector and often producing what Linda Ferreira-Buckley
labels “a revolutionary shift in who counts” (578). Certainly historical literacy
studies in which scholars investigate figures and populations falling outside
the traditional rhetorical canon expand notions of who and what matters.
Wells shows how works by Cheryl Glenn, Jackie Jones Royster, Thomas Miller,
and Sharon Crowley expand what is known by recovering historical people,
places, and practices by reading “around a historical text, in contemporane-
ous history and analogous collections, often to discover positive value in what
is not evident. Writing studies leads archivists to look for evidence of writing
practices, of pedagogy, and of individual modes of composing, for the sake of
identifying the plausible cultural work a text may have accomplished” (45). This
redefinition of the role archives play in cultural scholarship is interdisciplinary.
Consider Beverly Moss’s A Community Text Arises, in which Moss adopts an
ethnographical methodology to study the literacy practices of three African
American churches. Using sermons as community textual evidence and ob-
servation as a primary research tool, Moss locates the church within the larger
African American community, analyzes literacy practices revealed in sermons,
and provides significant cultural, theological, and social commentary.
Judith M. Panitch, research and special projects librarian at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reminds us that “archives, as ‘sites of memory,’
are very much products of their time, invested with a meaning that may be
changed—as during the French Revolution—by changing beliefs and values”
(102). The work of Ann Laura Stoler, professor of anthropology and historical
studies at the New School for Social Research, exemplifies this claim. Stoler,
who investigates colonial cultures through archival productions, focuses on
“archiving as a process rather than archives as things,” explaining that “new
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approaches to colonial studies within the broader ‘historical turn’ of the last
two decades” look “towards a politics of knowledge that reckons with archival
genres, cultures of documentation, fictions of access, and archival conventions”
(267). Wells shows us how contemporary archival work demands rethinking
and explains how the archive “resists knowledge in a number of ways. It refuses
closure; often it simply refuses any answer at all. . . . It prompts us, as contending
scholars, to resist early resolution of questions that should not be too quickly
answered” (58). Comparing this “resistance” of archival methods to similar
resistance in ethnographic studies, Wells demonstrates how archives allow for
a “loosening of resentment,” combating feelings of being underappreciated or
undervalued that occur across disciplines. Recovery work in particular leads
to legitimacy, “speaks more loudly than the arrogance that neglects” people,
texts, practices, and places in the first place. Finally, Wells asserts that archival
research allows us to refigure the discipline of rhetoric and composition by
more broadly investigating what constitutes the field (59–60).
How does our “positionality” color the kinds of projects we take on?
In crossing cultural, racial, political, and gendered borders, in what
ways do we need to tread carefully in terms of representation?
Kirsch and Rohan’s collection of eighteen essays, Beyond the Archives, takes up
issues of “positionality,” or the researcher’s stance in regard to subject matter,
in nearly every chapter. In expanding the range of archival methodologies and
tools available to researchers and redefining what constitutes an archive, the
contributors foreground their individual relationships to research questions
and materials—relationships that often lead to expanding existing notions of
what counts as archives and adding voices and venues to scholarly conversa-
tions. Two talks at the 2010 meeting of the Coalition of Women Scholars in
the History of Rhetoric and Composition (and printed in Peitho) illustrate this
point. Michelle T. Johnson in “Beginning with the End in Mind: Why I Chose a
Career at an HBCU” and Rhea Estelle Lathan in “For Colored Girls who Con-
sidered the Academy when Suicide Wasn’t Enough: Unceasing Variations in an
Early Afrafeminist Academic Career” explain how their research choices are
“situated within the nexus” of identity (Lathan 6). By pointedly discussing the
reasons they select particular research projects, their personal relationships
to the materials at hand, and their prejudices and assumptions, archival re-
searchers write truer narratives—bringing a rich perspective to subjects under
investigation while in many cases discovering topics new to rhetorical studies,
unexamined collections, and novel venues for rhetorical agency.
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act of using one’s opponent’s words against him or her. Likewise, in the Smith
and Warnick collection, Gregory Clark’s “Rustic Experience and the Rhetori-
cal Work of National Park Architecture,” offers an interesting examination of
environmental rhetoric in which sermonic spaces are rhetorically manipu-
lated to invoke reverence among park visitors. Also examining liminal spaces
and public rhetorical artifacts, Brian McNely in “La Frontera y El Chamizal:
Liminality, Territoriality, and Visual Discourse” takes up issues of “rhetorical
stratigraphies” associated with the contested physical spaces represented by
the Chamizal National Memorial (near El Paso, Texas) and graffiti on physical
border markers between El Paso and Juárez. Not only do archival researchers
such as these now stipulatively define texts for their own research purposes
(regularly adding their own photos of artifacts and venues under investigation),
but they also expand traditional notions of rhetorical delivery by studying
alternate venues and liminal places for enacting rhetorical agency.
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Archival research is all about storytelling because through all the documents that
you study, you are figuring out the nature of a life, whether it be public or private,
for a summer or for fifty years. Documents must grow into storytelling or they
are not really worth writing about. But the path of document to story, of course,
is a treacherous one, with inferences made by the writer, often based on her own
prejudices, and thus her own story. (message to the author)
Researchers’ back stories about the processes of discovering materials, the ra-
tionale and reasons for their selected narrative structure, and tales of rigorous
research paired with the sometimes serendipitous nature of archival investiga-
tion are critical to producing ethical and transparent scholarship.
Thomas Miller claims that “as with archiving, storying is about fram-
ing—about contexting”; he explains that archivists and “ethnographers spend
time coming to know a people and their place in the world, weaving all the
texts they can find into a ‘thick description’ that they triangulate against the
teller and the told to garner a felt sense of how a people understands their col-
lective experience” (message to the author). Unified storytelling is critical to
interpreting and disseminating data. Suzanne Bordelon, author of A Feminist
Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck, warns that “[g]iven the
storytelling and argument-laden nature of historiography, we need to be careful
to balance an appealing style, a strong story with historical depth.” To success-
fully do this, she suggests that we may need to excerpt heavily from primary
sources “so that readers can examine the evidence themselves and arrive at
their own conclusions” (message to the author). To illustrate, Jane Donawerth
in Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900
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argues that before women began writing composition texts for mixed-gendered
audiences, they engaged in a rhetorical theory based on “conversation, letter
writing, testimony and preaching, elocution, and eventually public speaking”
(1). Donawerth includes excerpts from a wide range of “small a archives” and
cites the work of scores of women rhetors spanning three hundred years. Studies
like the 2012 Conversational Rhetoric emphasize a multilayered story replete
with examples of archival data that depends upon interpretation from both
researcher and reader.
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ing research questions—but one that proves useful as well; she describes her
method of physically arranging and labeling collected data in a wheel or rim in
order to determine order and patterns. Morris and Rose discuss ways to inven-
tory uncataloged materials, providing as illustration a most useful inventory of
James Berlin’s papers (71–78). Building archives of collected materials is impor-
tant work and represents one of the most-needed areas of scholarly attention
within discussions of archival method. Again, consulting professional archivists
and librarians is a logical place to start; journals
such as Archivaria and the American Archivists Building archives of collected materials is
regularly address issues of documentation and important work and represents one of the
storage—along with theoretical issues associ- most-needed areas of scholarly attention
ated with the role of the archivists. Randall C. within discussions of archival method.
Jimerson’s American Archival Studies: Readings
in Theory and Practice (2000), which includes twenty-eight essays written by
scholar-archivists from many disciplines on a wide range of archival issues,
and James M. O’ Toole and Richard J. Cox’s collection Understanding Archives
and Manuscripts (2006) offer divergent opinions and advice covering a myriad
of topics from documenting, storing, and preserving strategies to theories for
appraising archives to considerations of researchers’ needs.
Only rarely do archival researchers see themselves overtly as archivists
(and vice versa), when in fact professionals from both fields regularly engage in
dual acts. The emerging trend in archival scholarship to tell research stories and
share experiences about means for codifying, interpreting, and appropriating
materials under investigation becomes critical as emerging digital technologies
invite Web users to make meaning by adding information to existing archives
and providing easy access to do so.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have discussed issues that repeatedly surface in the scholarship
on archival research. Other troublesome concerns meriting further attention,
according to Brereton and Gannett, include “federal restrictions on the uses
of student texts” and “the current state of the archives in composition studies”
(678). Additionally, the messiness of many archives prohibits discovery and
access, while limited library funds allocated for organizing and maintaining
archival collections stand in the way of cataloging or preserving acquired ma-
terials in a timely manner. The training of archival researchers is an increasing
concern in recent scholarship as well; survey courses in composition and rheto-
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ric methodologies routinely gloss over archival research or align it only with
historical investigations. As Sharer explains, “Many of us . . . who are currently
doing archival research in composition and rhetoric have developed/learned
our research methods on our own—by reading about research methods in other
fields, by studying archiving practices, by
Ultimately, archives shape identity. Expand- stumbling around in a trial-and-error process,
ing definitions of archives, digital means etc.” (message to the author). Legal and ethical
for easily adding to existing archives, the issues, material conditions, and educational
increasing numbers of researchers who see concerns represent three areas ripe for future
themselves as archivist-researchers, and investigation in archival research.
codified information for working in the Ultimately, archives shape identity.
archives pave the way for composition and Expanding definitions of archives, digital
rhetoric scholars to make newknowledge means for easily adding to existing archives,
through archival research. the increasing numbers of researchers who
see themselves as archivist-researchers, and
codified information for working in the archives pave the way for composi-
tion and rhetoric scholars to make new knowledge through archival research.
By abandoning gatekeeping notions traditionally associated with archival
research, we can move toward Glenn and Enoch’s hope that “if we consciously
and carefully activate the materials in the archives, we might discover ways to
address the present scholarly moment meaningfully and announce the near
future insightfully” (337). Brereton tells us that “[o]ur term ‘archive’ is hardly
static”; the same can be said of archival methodologies. Researchers are now
dynamically redefining the role archival investigations play in the scholarship
of rhetoric and composition.
Acknowledgment
I wish to thank CCC reviewer Lucille Shultz for her wise advice and excellent revi-
sion suggestions.
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