memory

Dust – The Archive and Cultural History

startind

In this witty, engaging and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced a highly original and sometimes irreverent investigation into the development of modern history writing. Dust is about the practice and writing of history. Dust considers the immutable, stubborn set of beliefs about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern history writing attempts to grapple. Drawing on over five years worth of her own published and unpublished writing, the author has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world. Steedman begins by looking at the attention paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, what has become known as the practice of ‘archivisation’. By definition, the archive is the repository of ‘that which will not go away’, and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the ‘matter of history’ can never go away or be erased. Historians who want to think about what it is they do will find this work enlightening, and this book is essential reading for all undergraduates and postgraduates studying historiography, and history and theory.

Text and image repsoduced form Amazon (acccessed 29/10/25)

Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory

startind
Fieldwork as Fiction: Phyllis Dare, explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer

This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.

Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.