On Gazing and Erasure ... and Our Preliminary Processing Plan

Dear Archiving Folks,

You may not be experiencing the positive affective rewards of all your work thus far, but I think you have done tremendously much and should take a moment to reflect on it all!

I've been paying special attention to three things in your work and in your interactions with one another: (1) the knowledge you make in your journals and reflections, whenever you develop a new lens for critique, or discover a new possibility for archival work; (2) the ethic and care with which you take stewardship of the materials you are examining; and (3) the theories you build when you let the collection speak back to what you read, and vice-versa. In all these things, I have only seen upward progress. Nicely done.

"Women in the Archives, Vandals in the Stacks"

Dear ENG 4938 Seminar,

A fuller post will appear here in advance of next class, recounting some highlights of our previous unit. For now, in the interest of two reminders:

1. Tuesday's readings by Ramsey and Yakel have been moved to Thursday 3/30. Although we will meet in Special Collections on that day, please plan to have finished your third Problem-Solving exercise and bring those readings to class so that we can discuss the implications of archival digitization on a collection like Nellie Godfrey King's.
2. As we convene in Special Collections on Tuesday 3/28, I have asked you to keep in mind some central questions from our discussions this week, most notably:

• How can/does "whiteness" become an archival imperative?
• How might we be sensitive to "whiteness" -- or avoid it from becoming -- an imperative in our processing of Nellie Godfrey King's papers? (A related question brought up by Mallorie right at the end of last class: "Why/Would we want to?")

On Planning ...

Taking "Social, Critical & Feminist Consciousness" to the Archives

Dear ENG 4938 Seminar,

In the interest of two reminders:

1. The Women Writers Project offers free access for the month of March, so I have invited you to use that as one of your repositories for Problem-Solving Exercise #3;
2. our next reading assignment (for Thursday 3/23) is Ramirez ("Being Assumed Not to Be") and Eubanks ("Mississippi on My Mind"). And yes, I'll ask you one more time to bring back Steedman chapter 6. Next time, I will open our discussion with some passages from her chapter to create a reflective backdrop for the other two essays.

Steedman, Davy, and Kirsch: Cultural Memory and the "Feminist" Archive

Dear Folks,

I promised I would bring two things back into our discussion:

• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's dohistory.org project
• Carolyn Steedman's "What a Rag Rug Means."

Promises kept.