Dear All,
A former mentor and dear friend forwarded the link to Correal's recovery story last week (appearing in Friday's edition of The New York Times) just as I was preparing notes for today's discussion of Finnegan's piece. It stuck with me.
Perhaps it came as a light-hearted balm at a difficult time. Perhaps it came as an opportune case study for self-reflection or critique. For whatever reason, Correal's essay made me look again at Finnegan's shack/sharecropper problem (Finnegan 120) as a problem of institutional value. In what ways are we institutionalized to the point where we unqestioningly carry the value of our institutions into how we encounter the archive? Institutional belonging is powerful and intricate -- we belong to a discipline, a school, a department, a way of thinking/being/writing/reading, and that is just within FSU, not even considering those other social, moral, political, or religious institutions that form our identities.
So, this is why I had to reread Finnegan. I'm not sure I would be as generous as she was in interpreting the FSA's classification of the photograph as "privileg[ing] the land and living conditions over individual lives and experiences" (Finnegan 120). I still wish they would have tagged it "sharecropper," because to me, that already implies a progressive view toward history-writing. The very term implies several archival agents: the sharecropper depicted in the photo; the phenomenon of sharecropping as southern commodity and prosperity plan; and the archivist who selects "sharecropping" as a tag over something else like "laborer" or "farmer" or "poverty."
I have no problem understanding the FSA's necessity to tag the photo as "shack" because their archive needs to reflect certain institutional values. But Correal's essay reminded me that this same dilemma of tagging can occur even when we're dealing with deeply personal materials, or materials that seem more mundane or unattached to greater causes.
In other words, if we're not all having those moments of asking "What is this a [fill-in-the-genre] of?", then we might be missing an opportunity for critique. You know what this means, of course. (Yes, I have made this into a journal prompt.)
-Dr. Graban
