Colonial girls' literature and the politics of archives in the digital age

In this paper we examine the politics of print and digital archives and their implications for research in the field of historical children's literature. We use the specific example of our comparative, collaborative project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Cultures, 1840-1940' to contrast the strengths and limitations of print and digital archives of young people's texts from these three nations. In particular, we consider how the failure of some print archives to collect ephemeral or non-canonical colonial texts may be reproduced in current digitising projects. Similarly, we examine how gaps in the newly forged digital "canon" are especially large for colonial children's texts because of the commercial imperatives of many large-scale digitisation projects. While we acknowledge the revolutionary applications of digital repositories for research on historical children's literature, we also argue that these projects may unintentionally marginalise or erase certain kinds of children's texts from scholarly view in the future.

Indigenous intermediaries : new perspectives on exploration archives

This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world.These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.

Exploration archives and indigenous histories: an introduction

Since the 1990s, a number of scholars have sought to uncover ‘hidden histories’ of exploration, as Felix Driver and Lowri Jones have referred to it.1 Working against a conventional emphasis on the exploits and achievements of the singular heroic explorer, imperial and colonial exploration is recast as a collective enterprise involving a diverse labour force and upon which expeditions were dependent for their progress and success.2 Various approaches are pursued for writing a more representative history of exploration, such as recuperatingfrom the archives the stories of little- or lesser-known participants; rewriting histories of particular expeditions through the lens of their encounters and interactions with indigenous people; or giving greater prominence to the work of intermediaries of many kinds, including interpreters, brokers, guides, porters and other labourers.3 The result is a more complex and multivocal account of the practices and politics of European exploration, the social and historical contexts in which it occurred, and the relationships, networks and institutions it createdand on which it depended.

Queering archives: intimate tracings

In the longer introduction of Radical History Review’s two thematic issues “Queering Archives,” we frame the archive as an evasive and dynamic space animated by the tensions of knowledge production, absence, and presence. As Jeffrey Weeks argued in RHR in 1979, “The evolution of sexual meanings and identities that we have traced over the past hundred years or so are by no means complete.”1 Fragments of information float unfixed — historically unraveled — and we form archives when we pull the fragments into the orbit of efforts to know. Yet the business of knowing is unsteady, as scholars of sexuality and gender have amply demonstrated. Between the fraught and necessary practices of historicization, anachronism, interpretation, bias, and partial readings that propel historical scholarship, archival fragments fall in and out of the frame of an easily perceptible knowledge. Queer historical knowledge thus is evasive — like a coin dropped in the ocean and for which one grasps, reaching it only for it to slip away again, rolling deeper into the beyond. To say that the knowledge work of animating queer historical fragments is marked by such slipperiness is to underline how the archive negotiates the decomposition and recomposition of knowledge’s materials. We pull and push at the fading paper, the fraying fabric, the photographs bleaching into their backgrounds, and manipulate technologies on their way to obsolescence, all as part of some suturing effort of one kind or another.

Editors’ introduction: archives and archivists

Today, questions about online access to media history, digital research infrastructure, and cultural and political pedagogy have come to the fore. A host of related questions has acquired a new urgency: What is lost and gained in the shift from physical to digital archiving? What and how do archives preserve, and how do they curate public access? How do we search for digital material? Which tools are used to modify and limit our search options, and what does this tell us about digital networks and our relationships to them?