In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.

Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of le mal d’archive, this study explores the interrelations between the experience of loss, melancholia, archives and their (self-)destructive tendencies, surfacing in different forms of spectrality, in selected poetry of British Romanticism. It argues that the British Romantics were highly influenced by the period’s archival fever – manifesting itself in various historical, material, technological and cultural aspects – and (implicitly) reflected and engaged with these discourses and materialities/medialities in their works. This is scrutinized by focusing on two basal, closely related facets: the subject’s feverish desire to archive and the archive’s (self-)destructive tendencies, which may also surface in an ambivalent, melancholic relishing in the archived object’s presence within its absence. Through this new theoretical perspective, details and coherence previously gone unnoticed shall be laid bare, ultimately contributing to a new and more profound understanding of British Romanticism(s). It will be shown that the various discursive and material manifestations of archives and archival practices not only echo the period’s technological-cultural and historical developments along with its incisive experiencing of loss, but also fundamentally determine Romantic subjectivity and aesthetics.

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.

"Contemporary art can seem chaotic: it may be made of toilet paper, or candies you can eat, or meat that is thrown out after each exhibition. Some works fill a room with obsessively fabricated objects, while others purport to include only concepts, thoughts or language. I argue, through many examples, that disparate developments in installation art, conceptual art, time-based media art, and participatory art can be understood in terms of custom rules. Many artists articulate custom rules governing artwork display, preservation of material elements, and interactivity or audience participation. Rules are established through the artist's sanction: the creative act of designating the material elements and rules that constitute the work's structure. Rules serve as medium: they are part of the work's structure and help to constitute its meanings. Rules are meaningful in themselves, and they help to activate the expressive potential of material objects. Museum practice should include providing information about the rules; otherwise, audiences can't fully appreciate the work. Contemporary art conservation involves preserving information: loss of information about the rules, like loss of a chunk of marble, can seriously damage the work. Rules are trickier to pin down than material objects and are subject to violation, so we'll examine the effects on the work's integrity and authenticity when things go wrong in various ways. Is the emergence of custom rules a positive development? Some artists have used rules to powerful effect. But rules aren't always used well: bad art can take any form"--

In this book, Ann Laura Stoler navigates the shadows and shatterzones of democratic policies, considering how imperial features are folded through (il)liberal orders, where racial inequities thicken in the borderlands of interior frontiers. Sometimes those frontiers, or the lines that define the contours of belonging and not belonging, are porous--often fixed and firm. For those on the wrong side of the fabulated division between inside and out, entry requirements can be opaque, neither verbal nor visible. Illegibilities are secured in code. The sites of inequity are disparate, the sensibilities that produce and sustain those inequities are as well. Borrowing Ralph Ellison's phrase, Stoler exposes unexpected sites and scenes that register the lower frequencies of denigration. Seemingly benign sites are laid bare as toxic, as in her essay eviscerating the warped criteria assigned to taste and who can have it, and in her study of the seared lives that longing, envy, and humiliation inscribe. In so doing, she hews close to the soft violences of sentiments that ascribe, distribute, and assess human kinds. But the project of these essays turns as much to those who reject those violences, who distil refusal in poetic rage--the phrase Stoler invokes to describe the anti-colonial avant-garde. Stoler casts this aesthetic of dissent through a surge of multi-media archiving ventures among Palestinians bent on creating and conjuring landscapes beyond Israeli violences-for the future and today. Stoler hugs close to the dark corridors where racial inequalities thrive. These inequities may be blatant but unnoticed, others are neither muted nor unseen. Each essay iterates a (sub)metric of inequality as a fictive measure of human worth. With an optic, ever bold and subtle, she turns the reader to the social ecologies and racial logics targeting the body and the senses. These are hazardous zones for the instruments and infrastructures in which (il)liberalisms invest. Increasingly unsettled and challenged by a more radically just demos, these sites of contest may be the emergent political scenes of racial sovereignty's unmaking and where the weapons of that unmaking are readied, and stored.

Collective Intelligence and Digital Archives DIGITAL TOOLS AND USES SET Coordinated by Imad Saleh This book presents the most up-to-date research from different areas of digital archives to show how and why collective intelligence is being developed to organize and better communicate new masses of information. Current archive digitization projects produce an enormous amount of digital data (Big Data). Thanks to the proactive approach of large public institutions, this data is increasingly accessible. Despite the recent stabilization of technical and legal frameworks, the use of data has yet to be enriched by processes such as collective intelligence. By exploring the field of digital humanities, audiovisual archives, preservation of cultural heritage, crowdsourcing and the recovery of scientific archives, this book presents and analyzes concrete examples of collective intelligence for use in digital archives.

The contents of this issue are: “Between Creation and Destruction,” by Finbarr Barry Flood and Zoë Sara Strother; “People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern Nigeria,” by Sarah Adams; “Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa,” by Kristina Van Dyke; “Censorship and Iconoclasm—Unsettling Monuments,” by John Peffer; “Recycling Icons and Bodies in Chinese Anti-Buddhist Persecutions,” by Eric Reinders; “Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture,” by Bryan R. Just; “Roman Oscilla: An Assessment,” by Rabun Taylor; “Turning Tale into Vision: Time and Image in the Divina Commedia,” by Gervase Rosser; “Building outside Time in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria,” by Marvin Trachtenberg; and “Restoration as Re-creation at the Sainte-Chapelle,” by Meredith Cohen; and the documents and discussions “The Constitution of Pleasure: François-Joseph Belanger and the Chateau de Bagatelle,” by Taha Al-Douri; “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” by Mauro Carbone; “Diskotel 1967: Israel and the Western Wall in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” by Daniel Bertrand Monk; “The ‘Kulturbolschewiken’ I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and ‘Pure Amusement,’” by Cuauhtémoc Medina; and “Aby Warburg in America Again: With an Edition of His Unpublished Correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927–1928),” by Davide Stimilli.