Archives, Emotion, and Radicalism: A Review and Critique of Caswell's Urgent Archives

Caswell's formulation of humanity has a very prescribed and limiting sense of things like intention, agency, motivation, and cause/effect, writes guest contributor Bradley J. Wiles.

Photo by C M on Unsplash

Bradley J. Wiles, guest contributor.

Positionality and Posturing

It is increasingly clear that performative white guilt has gained unquestioned currency in the academy-dominated archival discourse, especially in the impressive way that associated narratives frequently celebrate the fatalistic embrace of “resistance,” “disruption,” and “liberation” through strategies that effectively amount to little more than trolling one’s real and perceived enemies based on essentialized identity interests. At least that seems to be a major takeaway from Michelle Caswell’s 2021 book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work and other recent writing. With a hardback listing price of $160.00 as part of the Studies In Archives series by Routledge, Urgent Archives does a lot to illuminate the peculiar nature of “radical” exhortations broadcast from elite positions within the archives discipline. Of course, I realize that my own positionality may to some deem me morally and ontologically unqualified to comment on such matters; after all, I generally fit into several not-at-all-reductive and meticulously labeled (yet somehow “unnamed”?) WEBCCCHAM vectors of identity, and probably do not appear sufficiently contrite about it.¹

But at the risk of being criticized by those who do not know me as partially or wholly white supremacist, fragile, privileged, aggrieved, or whatever other manifestation the original sins of whiteness and heteropatriarchy confers, I think it is worth offering some pointed criticism in a professional forum that is still, ostensibly, open to differing perspectives. Actually, my overall outlook probably is not that much different from Caswell’s and others who have written about community archives, activism, social justice, and so forth in recent years, but I think there are several points in Caswell’s book and other recent writings worth considering that go beyond critiques of style or messaging. I’m mostly interested in the radical posturing constantly on display, which exemplifies what seems to be a more general trend in archival literature that, when scrutinized more closely, ends up very empty—a fork and knife but no steak.

Conflict For Its Own Sake

To wit: in a 2020 Archivaria article, Caswell expresses the need to “rethink and redo the work of archives” in ways that acknowledge emotion and feelings as epistemologically valuable on par with reason, particularly in analyzing, understanding, and reconfiguring the dynamics of power, domination, and oppression.² Caswell begins the discussion of emotion with a brief anecdote describing a recent editorial piece in Archives & Manuscripts that allegedly accuses her “spirited defence of the past decade of critical archival theory as being too emotional.”³ Caswell then quotes this editorial, further framing it as a direct attack on her work and uses it as an example to critique the “false binaries” that result from “the division of the world into knowledge - based on reason - and emotional outburst - based on feeling,” and that are deeply rooted in “dominant Western masculinist divisions of the world.”⁴ Aside from the false binary that this claim unironically implies, it also misrepresents what was written in the editorial. Here’s the full paragraph with the section quoted by Caswell in bold:

In the wake of the controversy about the publication of Frank Boles’ article in The American Archivist, it is important to affirm that academic and professional journals are the place to present new ideas that are based on solid reasoned argumentation, rather than on emotion and preferences. Archives and Manuscripts will welcome contributions that present new ideas and demonstrate that the archival field is flourishing with new ideas. As General Editor of Archives and Manuscripts, I would be pleased to publish papers that present new ideas, - whether I agree with them or not, - as long as they are based on rigorous scholarship and respect for others and they make research in the archival field progress.⁵

Nowhere in there is specific mention of Caswell, much less a direct attack on her work, nor any kind of an implicit or explicit defense of anything other than open discussion, which, I suppose, becomes more indefensible the further it deviates from the profession’s accepted progressive-collectivist orthodoxy. At best, Caswell’s claim of an attack is some kind of meta-comment on a string of scholarly discussions over archives and social justice in recent years that involved Caswell and others; at worst, it represents the defensive arguments from authority frequently uttered by notable figures from prestigious institutions who seem to rely on conflict to legitimate their views. At the very least, this deployment of a strawman is consistent with Caswell’s derision of archivists’ supposed ongoing fealty to dominant Enlightened reasoning, but it does little to otherwise validate in any significant way the strategy of using feelings and emotion in archives “to end white supremacy and patriarchy and to initiate material redistribution.”⁶

In this article–the main points of which are mostly replicated in Urgent Archives–Caswell plainly states that the more immediate goal of American archival efforts should be advancing sovereignty and land reclamation for Indigenous people and slavery reparations for Black people—worthy end goals in and of themselves. But what an ambitious proposition and a tall order for archives! Indeed, these goals might even seem unrealistically ambitious if not outright impossible to achieve solely through archival means, given the limited scope of most archives and their categorical and irredeemable status as tools of pernicious WEBCCCHAM structures. One might even surmise that the very purpose of nurturing such elusive goals is largely the point, that the resistance journey—the fight, as Caswell writes—is its own reward.⁷ After all, nothing less than the liberation of white souls is at stake here and falling short dooms those not on board with this liberatory program to “live the sad, unfulfilled lives of oppressors.”⁸ Sounds horrible.

And what does this fight involve? Well, beyond all those initiatives and activities central to archival work that actually afford archivists the opportunity for wider influence and impact (which, presumably, some archivists would consider ineffectual and/or insufficiently radical), apparently it mostly involves publicity stunts. Caswell mentions the Guerrilla Girls’ adventures in the art world and her own uproarious experience handing out a poster at a SAA annual meeting, but not much about how such lofty goals as material redistribution and social re-ordering might be pursued in more quotidian and practical terms. That’s the beauty of theory: the theorist says, “this is how I think the world should be, now the rest of you figure out how to make it happen.” There is no obligation on the theorist’s part to connect point A to point B (a notion that Caswell clearly embraces on p. 116 and elsewhere in Urgent Archives), but you can be sure that doing so will include slogging through rote assumptions about victimhood and victimization toward some nebulous moral opprobrium where “we” are all to blame but no one is actually responsible. Or maybe no one is to blame, but “we” are all responsible?

An Unworkable and Nonsensical Model for Archives

In any case, the scope of responsibility rises to histrionic levels in Urgent Archives, where at one point Caswell insists that archival institutions and archivists who “inhabit dominant identities” that fail to counter symbolic annihilation and promote representational belonging (both concepts she helped formulate in previous writings), are potentially complicit in genocide and/or mass murder carried out at the behest of white supremacist power structures (pp. 83-84). Such are the stakes of representation and liberation in contemporary archival work, which Urgent Archives also claims can no longer be undertaken faithfully in mainstream academic, government, and community-based institutions that do not fall into a radical variant of community archives formed expressly around minoritized, marginalized, and oppressed identity groups. In this conceptual framework, entities like traditional historical societies or university archives are merely stooges for the hetero-patriarchal, white supremacist, neoliberal status quo, and any questioning of such generalizations identifying oppression as the defining characteristic of archival institutions (if not all of existence, past and present) is simply an extension of that oppression.

If one is at all skeptical of the assumptions and notional leaps that provide the foundation for Urgent Archives’ vision, one likely will have a difficult time recognizing how it corresponds with their experience or applies in real-world contexts familiar to most archivists. That’s not to say that the vision presented is not bolstered by philosophical grounding, empirical investigation, and a command of the archival body of knowledge. Caswell’s development of a liberatory program pulls together an impressive array of theoretical strands from Critical Race, Social Justice, Feminist, Queer, Afro-Futurist, Indigenous, and Post-Colonial (among others) intellectual approaches aimed at transformative outcomes for oppressed communities. The archives-specific framework and terminology Caswell develops around representation, temporality, and restitution also incorporates many years of activity at the UCLA Community Archives Lab and the Southeast Asian American Digital Archives, both of which Caswell helped create. It also considers recent research on community archives, critical archives praxis, and other disciplinary preoccupations with the post-modern archive, all of which serve as both complement and foil to Caswell’s theoretical modeling.

Throughout, Urgent Archives insists that a constant analysis of power is a requirement to rethink and reconfigure archives toward liberatory ends, but the articulation of power in the archives context and how it relates to social or political power is not very convincing. According to the theoretical model offered, power is fixed and the oppressed are trapped in perpetual and overlapping cycles of domination, an inescapable reality that archives reproduce and reinforce. So how do we go about actually changing the power dynamics of society, and thus archives? Caswell seems to believe it requires disinvestment in traditional establishment institutions and shifting those resources entirely away from these entities to those that pass a sort of ideological and political litmus test tied to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Notwithstanding the implausibility that such a scenario could unfold at the societal level, archives would be at once expected to restructure their operations fully toward narrowly defined liberatory purposes, while simultaneously acting to dismantle the institutional structures that enable their efforts in the first place.

It should go without saying that in a rules-based democratic system – whether one believes this type of system is fair or not – enacting such radical change would require significant political power and will – getting it, exercising it, hanging on to it, and accepting the consequences come hell or high water. Nothing in Urgent Archives attempts to contemplate what this would require and what archival work would look like, even if there are some suggestions based on current examples for how archives might support the documentary needs of Indigenous land claims or reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. Furthermore, in an ostensibly free society, this level of change would mean profoundly altering what people think and believe, at least to the degree that there would be enough detente between opposing groups in society to acknowledge that cooperation on such a major overhaul was in everyone’s best interest. This is the only way that transformation on the scale that Urgent Archives demands could possibly occur, and it would require a mind-boggling amount of future planning, not out of some misguided sense of progress but because otherwise these efforts would likely devolve into self-destructive chaos that helps no one.

The very idea of the future or “futurity” is denigrated in Urgent Archives’ theoretical construction, even though this notion is a regular feature in the thinking, organizing, and operation of institutions, including several of the community archives mentioned in chapters one and two. Despite providing the empirical lynchpin for Urgent Archives’ argument that oppressed communities reject Western notions of futurity, temporality, and fixity, it seems highly unlikely that the groups Caswell has studied all of these years would have coalesced and organized without some notion shared by those in the past that what they were doing would matter in the future. The new theoretical direction Urgent Archives pushes remains unconvincing because it overstates the supposed innate commitment by archivists and other oppressors to these concepts and the idea of progress as an inevitable move to some perfect endpoint. It assumes this undifferentiated mass understands these concepts on the same terms and uniformly works to enforce them. Similarly, it overstates the archives’ profession's supposed preoccupation with a value-free neutrality, which has not been persuasively argued or widely embraced for decades.

Urgent Archives’ formulation of humanity has a very prescribed and limiting sense of things like intention, agency, motivation, and cause/effect, propping up a reality that only makes sense in the theoretical model presented. Caswell seems to acknowledge this with several qualifying statements at different points in the narrative but presses forward convinced that a hard reboot is the only option for liberation. Certainly, Urgent Archives mostly functions as a thought experiment and seeks to emphasize the archival imagination, which is initially an intriguing prospect (p. 94). There is no doubt that archives can and should be focused on greater liberation, equity, inclusion, justice, and representation, which requires new ideas and vigorous engagement from archivists and their communities. But by the end of the book, it is clear this is less about the imagination as an organ of creativity and more about imagination as fantasy–a vision that seems intent on appealing to those less interested in working with the records and institutions that are already here than those that we feel should be here.

Feeling More Is Not Enough

The operationalizing of feelings (joy and anger, in particular) is the key to Urgent Archives’ vision of liberation, but there is no indication of what this might look like or how it would result in full equity, enfranchisement, and freedom for individuals within the apparently monolithic and helpless communities its aspirations target. Instead, it seems to advocate that constant struggle itself is the fulfillment of the vision—a vision that rejects all notions of progress as the chimeric invention of WEBCCCHAM malevolence. It is decidedly a vision without hope beyond marshaling the past to meet the immediate emotional and affective proclivities of those inclined to resist, especially those archivists just itching to burnish their radical bonafides. In this regard, Urgent Archives’ appeal to the audience's sense of self-satisfaction and self-loathing is remarkable (and kind of the whole point, I suspect).

The emotion-infused approach to archives that Urgent Archives promulgates has its appeal because emotion is impervious to empirical examination and reasoned criticism. I feel, therefore I am.

Undoubtedly, changing hearts and minds should be part of the archival enterprise and wider moral universe, but given the world’s experience since March 2020, an equally strong argument can and should be made against the further over-emotionalizing of public life. Indeed, the claim that emotion has been somehow absent from centuries of rationalist Enlightenment development up to this current era is laughable. As many instances in history tell us, when enacted carelessly or in bad faith, the type of emotions-based epistemological populism that Urgent Archives points to can be extremely dangerous and regressive. Very recent instances like the COVID-19 pandemic, the deadly attack on the U.S. capital, the uptick in violence against Asian people, the disturbing re-emergence of mainstreamed anti-Semitism, and the persistent belief of some that the world is run by a secret cabal of satanic pedophile cannibals are entirely grounded in emotional unreason. These phenomena also can be traced to real and imagined concerns about power dynamics and oppression within specific identity-focused communities.

Hastened by the toxicity of very online life in the social media era, the traditional guardrails of epistemic authority and consensus have effectively failed, piling on decades of attacks against our institutions from the outside and within. American academia—and by extension the archival field, largely—offers the prime case in point. Incessant calls for ill-defined liberation and justice emanating from elite quarters are matched only by an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge any progress toward those goals. Instead there exists a regrettable predilection to condemn anything linked to the establishment, while those who call the loudest for “material consequences” don’t seem in too big a hurry to do anything too radical to upset their own privileged positions.⁹ Would, for example, a tenured academic like Caswell entertain the notion of resigning their faculty position at an elite institution on the requirement that the position be filled by another person who checks more boxes in the oppression inventory? Probably not and it would be ridiculous to expect that, but this certainly would be a radical gesture, wouldn’t it?

In recent years, the general public (and often their less scrupulous political and financial stakeholders) have increasingly subscribed to this low opinion we project of our institutions, albeit for different reasons. These attacks (both internal and external) are frequently not reason-based and represent the steady rise of a fractured tribalist sentiment that sees no value to cooperation beyond how it might advance a prescribed set of identity interests in the now. I would offer that at this point we need more clarity than confusion and more stability than division; any commitment to liberation and justice easily crumbles if it is mostly upheld by performative agonizing, conspicuous symbolic gestures, and the enforcement of ideological purity to make white radical academic elites feel good about themselves.

I guess what I’m saying is that simply feeling more is insufficient—in fact it is counterproductive—if our first emotional impulse is to attack and destroy that which cannot instantly fulfill the wishes of the most radical among us. Radicalism frequently rejects any sort of incrementalism, compromise, counternarrative, or alternate way of doing things that might be equally or more effective. Radical disruption for its own sake, whether propelled by joy, anger, or something else, is no guarantor of justice or equity; it is just as likely to contribute to the cognitive dissonance and political demonization that undermine the necessary coalition building and mutual trust across disparate communities required for true and lasting liberation in a pluralistic society. Consider my stance taking the company line, if you will, but it seems a more feasible path to embrace than the almost gleeful pessimism presented in Urgent Archives.

Bradley J. Wiles is the Head of the Special Collections and Archives Department at Northern Illinois University’s Founders Memorial Library. He has worked in a variety of archives and library settings and his research interests include information ethics and public policy, social and political dimensions of archives and information, management and sustainability of cultural institutions, and library and archives in history and popular culture. Wiles is active in various professional organizations at the state, regional, and national level, and currently serves on the American Library Association’s Policy Corps.

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1. White, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, cis, citizen, heterosexual, able-bodied, and male. Michelle Caswell, “Feeling Liberatory Memory Work: On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger,” Archivaria 90, (Fall, 2020): 151.

2. Caswell, 152.

3. Caswell, 152.

4. Caswell, 152.

5. Viviane Frings-Hessami, “The End of Archival Ideas?” Archives & Manuscripts 48, no. 1 (2020): 2. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2020.1711606.

6. Caswell, “Feeling Liberatory Memory Work,” 153.

7. Caswell, 162.

8. Caswell, 160.

9. Caswell, 157.