Charles Merewether (ed.): The Archive (2006)

“In the modern era, the archive—official or personal—has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive—no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.

This volume surveys the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive—as idea and as physical presence—from Freud’s “mystic writing pad” to Derrida’s “archive fever”; from Christian Boltanski’s first autobiographical explorations of archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in the present.”

Publisher Whitechapel, London, and MIT Press, 2006
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262633388, 9780262633383
207 pages

Reviews: Sas Mays (caa.reviews 2009), Barbara Beckers (Incirculation 2012).

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Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (eds.): The YouTube Reader (2009)

Over the last few years YouTube has become the very epitome of digital culture. With more than 70 million unique users each month and approximately 100 million videos online, this brand-name video
distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats and viral marketing – a clip culture seemingly outpacing both cinema and television. The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, an archive and a cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars in a discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of ‘broadcasting yourself’. The YouTube Reader confronts prevalent claims to newness, immediacy or popularity with systematic and theoretically informed arguments. It offers a closer look at both texts accessible via YouTube and policies and norms governing how they are accessed and used. Among the contributors are Thomas Elsaesser, Richard Grusin, Bernard Stiegler, Toby Miller, William Uricchio and Janet Wasko.

Published by the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, June 2009
Wallflower Press Series
National Library of Sweden Series
Volume 12 of Mediehistoriskt arkiv
ISBN: 978-9-188468-11-6
512 pages
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Ann Laura Stoler: Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2010)

“Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 0691146365, 9780691146362
314 pages

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