The journal Acervo, a scientific periodical of the Arquivo Nacional (Brazilian National Archives), published since 1986, opens the call for articles for the dossier on “The Archive as object: written culture, power, and memory”, edited by Claudia Beatriz Heynemann, PhD in Social History by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and researcher at the Arquivo Nacional and Nívia Pombo, PhD in Social History by the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), professor at the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas and at the Graduate Program on History at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Uerj) and researcher at the INCT Proprietas.
Archival holdings are traditionally understood as sources for academic research. By the other hand, studies on history of reading are dedicated to books, libraries and printed material that circulate among the public one way or another. The proposal of one dossier which has the archives themselves as object implies thinking about it by the follow angles: their formal aspects, in relation to writing production, paleography, diplomatics, the historicity of creating these artefacts and their preservation; archives seen from the point of view of their own organization, as a manifestation of a domination logic; archives analyzed from the point of view of their own discourses, practices and representations, that is as producers of knowledge, more than only source, also as agents of power, by the constitution and circulation of knowledges which are governments’ tools.
The creation of archives can be seen, thus, as a mirror of the so-called art of government from afar, a moment when quills, ink and paper became fundamental tools for the control and management of the territories scattered by “four parts of the world”, as referred by Serge Gruzinski. Witness of the tightening of the ties between disconnected spaces, the archives keep multiple clues of this first globalization experience, marked by the expansion in a vertiginous scale, of the written papers. This perspective allows the problematization of the archives as place of conflict and dispute for memory and truth, for identities, and as locus of resistance, in different regimes and situations of exceptionality throughout history. It covers also the colonial and postcolonial archives seen as agents, in themselves, of the colonizing powers imposition.
It is also possible to consider a dimension that few historians approach: the need to question what has been preserved in the archives. The intent to preserve some archival groups, the personal dimension and sensitivity present in the act of keeping a private correspondence, or even, the existence of copyists books, originals and spare copies, aspects that present clues of the meaning of records at a given time. As well as, when they are reorganized by the agents of a determined institution, and new meanings are created, inhibiting the possibility of understanding the meanings in the original order.
Repeatedly defined as “institutions of memory” or “places of memory”, mainly after some readings upon the oeuvre of Pierre Nora, archives are situated between the spheres of history and memory, in superpositions, equivalences or antagonisms, objects of historiographic critics and of other knowledge fields. The preservation of the “national” memory and history or of the State was, many times associated with the archives’ institutional mission, among other attributes. The archives’ trajectory itself in its intimate connection with history as a discipline sedimented a complex indistinction between the historical discourse and the manifestations of memory.
Dealing with this set of questions, the dossier will be composed of articles that discuss the role of archives in the exercise of various forms of power, in the historiographic tradition, in the valorization of written culture, in the formation of new sensibilities about the materiality of records and their supports, in the constitution or erasure identities and memories.
The article submitted must be sent till February 28th, 2023, by the website of the journal Acervo, to the sections Thematic Dossier and Review. The dossier will be in the format of continuous publication between September and December 2023. The contributions must agree with the journal’s focus and scope and follow its editorial rules.
Access: http://revista.arquivonacional.gov.br/index.php/revistaacervo/about/submissions
Doubts: revista.acervo@an.gov.br
v. 35, n. 3 (set./dez. 2022)
