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ABSTRACT
Only apparently a house, a domicile, an address, the Archive has never been a neutral place. As social theorists have argued at length, not only do archives dutifully collect and safeguard (certain fragments of) the past but they also produce what can be enunciated. They shape the historically thinkable and the politically utterable. But not all are welcome in such dwellings. In this article, I argue that Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive, functions as a microcosm of today’s Egypt and circumscribes the questions that historians as well as the public are allowed to ask. In ethnographic form, I explore the practices that regulate who is allowed into Dār al Wathā’iq, what can be accessed once the researcher sets foot past its door, and how such archival experience unfolds. I claim that the archive itself can morph into a locale of every-day surveillance and arbitrariness. Archival fieldwork is not an impartial practice. It should be acknowledged as such given the peculiar challenges and possibilities with which it confronts researchers as they stumble along in and out of the archives.
GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments
This article is dedicated to the memory of Giulio Regeni and to the countless others who encountered dead ends in their pursuit of knowledge and justice. I want to thank the friends and colleagues who supported me through fieldwork and who generously read previous drafts of this article: Emma Blake, Julia Clancy-Smith, Dick (Richard) Eaton, Natalie Eiselstein, Ryan A. Kashanipour, Teresa Pepe, Robert Schon, and Charles D. Smith. In particular, I thank my advisor Julia Clancy-Smith for discussing this work with me and with the students in her Capstone Honors course on “Life Stories and the Practices of Biography.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Dār can also be translated as ‘building, structure, edifice, habitation, dwelling, abode, residence, home, seat, side, locality, area, region, land.’ Hans Wehr, J. Milton Cowan, and Thomas Leiper Kane Collection (Library of Congress. Hebraic Section), A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Spoken Language Services, 1976), 299.
2. In a brilliantly written and utterly entertaining piece, the Iranian national, exile, and scholar Tavakoli-Targhi reports of similarly suspicion-tinged questions hovering over his research on Indo-Persian cultural formations in Lucknow, India. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Rediscovering Munshi Newal Kishore (1836–1895),’ South Asia Library Notes and Queries 29 (Citation1993): 20–21.
3. Charles. Royle, The Egyptian Campaigns, 1882 to 1885: and the Events Which Led to Them, vol. 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1886), 241. Archivio della Sacra Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli o de ‘Propaganda Fide,’ Rome, Italy (APF), Scritture riferite nei Congressi (Fondo S.C.), Egitto, Copti, Vol. 22, Alessandria, 17 June 1882, Anacleto Chicaro Vic. Apo. Co to Simeoni, F. 733.
4. APF, Fondo S. C., Egitto, Copti, Vol. 22, Cairo, 18 June 1882, M. Tullien to Père Général, F. 739.
5. ‘Ali Pasha Mubārak’s colossal work (translatable as ‘The New Topographical Encyclopedia of Egypt’) was originally published in 1888, Michael J. Reimer, ‘Egyptian Views of Ottoman Rule: Five Historians and Their Works, 1820–1920,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 1 (Citation2011): 150.
6. Archivio Storico Diplomatico Ministero Affari Esteri, Archivi Rappresentanze Diplomatiche e Consolari all’Estero, Rappresentanza Cairo, Busta 70, 1897–1902; The National Archives, Foreign Office 846–4, Port Said Consulate Court Records (Civil and Criminal), 1877–1881.
7. For the development of a professional ideology among Egypt’s academic historians in the 1920s, see Yoav Di-Capua, ‘The Professional Worldview of the Effendi Historian,’ History Compass 7, no. 1 (Citation2009b): 306–28.
8. Information on the ʻĀbdīn holdings can be found in Stanford J. Shaw, ‘Turkish Source-Materials for Egyptian History,’ in Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic, by P. M. Holt (London; New York: Oxford University Press, Citation1968), 28–48; Helen Anne B. Rivlin, The Dār Al-Wathāʼiq in ʻĀbdīn Palace at Cairo as a Source for the Study of the Modernization of Egypt in the Nineteenth Century (Brill Archive, Citation1970); Martin Kramer, ‘Egypt’s Royal Archives, 1922–1952,’ American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter, no. 113 (Winter Citation1980): 19–21.
9. David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975); Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Citation2001); Sam Mendes et al., Away We Go (Universal City, Calif.: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Citation2009); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Citation2013).
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Lucia Carminati
I am a PhD Candidate at the History department of the University of Arizona. My dissertation is titled ‘Būr Saʿīd/Port Said, 1859–1922: Migration, Urbanization, and Empire’ and traces the social and cultural history of the Egyptian and Mediterranean city of Port Said as the intersection of migratory routes, urban changes, and imperial interests. My work received support from the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Council for Library and Information Resources, the Zeit Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the University of Arizona. My research interests focus on the social history of the modern Middle East, with an emphasis on Egypt and North Africa, gender, mobilities, and micro-history.