Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Encounters)

Rating:
Summary: Dusting off the archive
Review: Carolyn Steedman is a unique figure in contemporary social history. Her often idiosyncratic work in nineteenth and early twentieth century British history combines conventional social history with life-writing, literary analysis, and contemporary critical theory, while at the same time manifesting a healthy skepticism toward postmodernist theory's more extreme claims about textuality, power, identity, and so forth. This book--really a set of revised journal articles--provides a theoretical account of the role of the archive in modern history, historiography, and critical theory. As she wends her way through her eclectic argument, Steedman takes up everything from rag rugs and Michelet to _Middlemarch_ and _Our Mutual Friend_. "Dust," Steedman's central figure, is simultaneously the past as rubbish, the past as present, and the past as decay (as the papers and bindings in the archive crumble). Steedman's reflections on what historians really do in the archives, prefaced by the acknowledgment that, in reality, many historians do not "do" such research, are partly directed against the poststructuralist critiques of philosophers like Jacques Derrida, whose theories about the archive and power, she deftly suggests, do not account for the sheer ordinariness, or even dullness, of archival work.

Steedman is certainly one of the more graceful writers in contemporary history, and she demonstrates a welcome sense of humor (and unpretentiousness) often missing from academic prose. While most readers will find this book fast going, one cannot help wishing that the argument was better constructed--the looseness being the inevitable result of recycling individual articles into a purportedly coherent book. (The blurb's claims about _Dust_'s "sustained argument" are, alas, somewhat overstated.) Moreover, one also wonders about the whereabouts of Rutgers' proofreaders. George Eliot's Casaubon becomes "Causubon," the Scottish Enlightenment professor of law John Millar becomes "James," and the Canadian historian of racial attitudes Douglas Lorimer becomes "Lorimer Douglas" (!). Nevertheless, historians, philosophers of history, and literary scholars should find this book both thought-provoking and useful.