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CAROLYN HAMILTON, VERNE HARRIS, JANE TAYLOR, MICHELE PICKOVER, GRAEME REID and RAZIA SALEH (eds), Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip (hard covers R 240, ISBN O 86486 507 4); Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (hard covers euro106.00, US$117.00, £73.00, ISBN 1 4020 0743 4). 2002, 368 pp.
This impressive collection of articles is the result of a project hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand together with a number of South African archival institutions. This project was an attempt to address the concerns of historical researchers and archival practitioners. At the same time though, scholars also tried to grapple with the idea that archives are more than just physical records. This means that the eighteen chapters of this book contain straightforward articles, dealing with concrete archival material, as well as philosophical papers addressing concepts like social memory, the production of knowledge, or public history. The overall idea is to try to understand how material-or knowledge-is preserved, why certain material is included or excluded, what kind of power relations are involved, and how all this develops over time.
After the introduction, Achille Mbembe starts off in the first chapter by talking about the power of the archive and about some of its religious and political significations. Bhekizizwe Peterson then continues by expressing his concerns regarding the composition and accessibility of South Africa's archives. According to him, archiving has to be a creative and dynamic...