Archives as Spaces of Radical Hospitality

ABSTRACT

Deploying feminist notions of embodied, relational archival practices, this article critically defines and creatively unites both ‘radical’ and ‘hospitality’ as a tool for enacting generosity in archives. Drawing on the complexities of Derrida’s Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present) alongside feminist scholarship and, what Cherríe Moraga calls ‘theories of the flesh’, it elucidates the urgent work of imagining archives as spaces of radical hospitality. The article uses embodied knowledges and storytelling as an archival methodology to propose a set of elements of radical hospitality and what it means and does in and for the community archives. It attends to the creative possibilities that acknowledging the relational complexities of the archives, its collections, and its records as integral to establishing socially just and generative spaces for its records creators and its visitors. Radical hospitality becomes not only a possibility but also the lively, animated, and joyous archival body and all of its parts.

KEYWORDS:

• Community archives
• radical hospitality
• queer archives
• storytelling
• embodiment
• feminist theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more on the use of ‘archives’ versus ‘archive’ along with the politics of naming in these ways, see Caswell (2016).

2 See www.arizonaqueerarchives.com for more about the Arizona Queer Archives.

3 A serif is a decorative line or taper added to the beginning and/or end of a letter’s stem, which creates small horizontal and vertical planes within a word. Serif fonts have those decorative lines or tapers that are commonly referred to as ‘tails’ or ‘feet.’ Serif fonts are commonly used for printing in books and signify a sense of being trustworthy, established, and reliable.

4 For these discussions within Library and Information Science and Archival Studies, please see: Cooke, (2019), Cooke, et al. (2020) and Caswell, and Cifor, (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jamie A. Lee

Jamie A. Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona, U.S.A., where their research and teaching attend to critical archival theory and methodologies, multimodal media-making contexts, storytelling, and bodies. Lee’s book, Producing the Archival Body, (Routledge, 2021) interrogates how power circulates and is deployed in archival contexts in order to build critical understandings of how deeply archives influence and shape the production of knowledges and human subjectivities. Lee has published in Archivaria, Archival Science, the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies. They have also published book chapters related to archival studies, media studies, art & culture, and the history of American sexuality. For more on their research: www.thestorytellinglab.io