Archiving America/American Archives

'Archiving America / American Archives' presents scholarship on the significance of archival practices and spaces at a moment of heightened crisis in US-American culture, and at a time when archives in the U.S. are reeling from political onslaught and are threatened with attempts to purge certain stories, voices, and experiences from the historical record. Archiving attains new urgency as core values of American Studies such as factuality, historicity, equity, and diversity are questioned. The volume features chapters on the archival functions of prison writing, filmic remediations of poetry, and contemporary U.S. fiction as well as investigations of nineteenth-century letter writing as a queer archival practice, archival absences and restorations in Native American/Indigenous and African American writing and performance, questions of archival accessibility and sustainability in the Anthropocene, and the implications of digitization on institutions of cultural memory and liberal democracy.