The Lure of the Archive: The Atlas Project of Walid Raad

Abstract

The last thirty years have been described as ‘the era of the witness’, a time when the systematic collection of testimonies has proliferated.1 This period could with equal validity be called ‘the era of the archive’. Not only has the collection of documents and the establishment of archives increased dramatically, but the archive is now one of the central topics of reflection throughout the humanities. For literary studies in particular, both engagement with archival documents and attention to the ‘archive’ have shifted from the margins to the centre of the field. Jane Gallop even notes – disparagingly – the remark of a recent job candidate in a literature department that it is now ‘impossible to get published without archival work’.2 The lure of the archive has also changed. The archive appeals to the desire to come into contact with the material of history, and to touch and read that which is not accessible to everyone, and may have been overlooked or ignored. But a shift has taken place at the conceptual level, and the scholarly desire today is often less to unearth this or that particular content in an archive than to engage with the archive itself, both as an institution and as a constitutive and transformative force. In literary studies the concern is no longer primarily with the work itself but with the discursive systems that regulate what is enunciated and written, with what is seemingly supplemental and other within the literary work, and with transformations in the forms of recording, assembling and disseminating information and memory. All of these tendencies might be described as a shift towards the archival. Our reading practices have changed, and they have done so in part through an engagement with