How forgotten objects reveal hidden history—and why archives need rethinking
A new study examines how overlooked materials—letters, photographs, everyday items—can reshape how we understand the past. For museums, libraries, and cultural institutions managing historical collections, the finding suggests that organizing archives around unexpected sources may unlock narratives currently invisible in traditional records.
Originaltitel: Accidental Archives and Diffractive Reading: Gladys Mgudlandlu and the Resistant Periodical Memory Object
<p>Ann Rigney’s exploration of the medial and material uses of literature is rich andencyclopedic ranging from historical imperfections of literary history to the after-lives of hope in cultural activism remembrance.1Rigney’s seminal workThe After-lives of Walter Scott(2012a) investigates the medial reception and textual afterlivesof Scott’s novels asmemory on the move. It also traces how these texts produce ma-terial emanations and become objects of remembrance in their own right. In her2015 article“Things and the Archive: Scott’s Materialist Legacy,”she turns fromScott’s novels to his collection of“zany and highly original”relics of the past or“ga-bions”(18) to explore the role of objectsinmemory and objectsofmemory. Shepoints out that objects and landscapes can“turn out to be an unexpected repositoryof memory, or‘accidental archive[s]’”(14). </p>