On Biography and Archive: Dorothea Bleek and the Making of the Bleek Collection

Abstract

This article describes the making of the Bleek Collection, its formation into a coherent, scientific archive over decades, and the particular role of Dorothea Bleek (Wilhelm's daughter) in this process. It draws on the theoretical writings of Michel Foucault and Anne Laura Stoler to elaborate notions of ‘archive’ as process and product of history, and to complicate its meanings in regard to the making of knowledge about the past. In interrogating the making of the Bleek Collection, I seek to offer additional layers of nuance that can be gleaned from situating the making of the collection within time. I describe how the collection has been fragmented and consolidated over years through a range of archival interventions, and the ways in which the particular life and scholarship of Dorothea Bleek has directed this process of archive making.