‘The Archive’ is Not an Archives

Abstract

Abstract Little of the humanistic inquiry at ‘the archival turn’ has acknowledged the vast intellectual contribution of archival studies as a field of theory and praxis in its own right. This chapter argues that the refusal of humanities scholars to engage with scholarship in archival studies is a gendered and classed failure in which humanities scholars—even those whose work focuses on gender and class—have been blind to the intellectual contributions and labour of a field that has been construed as predominantly female and professional (that is, not academic), and as such, unworthy of engagement. The chapter proposes concrete solutions for bridging this intellectually unsustainable divide through workshops, collaborative scholarship, and interdisciplinary reading clusters that educate humanities scholars about the intellectual contribution of archival studies.