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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| Antoinette Burton. Dwelling in the Archive: Women, Writing, House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 202. Cloth $60.00, paper $19.95.
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| At the outset of this book, Antoinette Burton asks: "What counts as an archive? Can private memories of home serve as evidence of political history? What do we make of the histories that domestic interiors, once concrete now perhaps crumbling or even disappeared, have the capacity to yield?" (p. 4). Her response challenges academic disciplinary regulations through a feminist Foucauldian critique of institutional knowledges and their mode of production as technologies of male social power. The definition of "archive" here is both expanded and contested, and the conventional deployment of the archive as an ideological endeavor is exposed. In this critique, officially designated archives turn out to be repositories of objectified knowledge characterizing mainstream/male stream history. The positivism or scientificism required by this archiving process removes all subjects, their memories, and their experiences from history. Burton attempts instead to return the subjects of history to the status of makers of history. |
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Through her criticism of the archive, Burton opens the door to a "different" historiography and presents a theory of representation of difference as a way of reinstating history's "others." She speaks of women as subjects of nationalism and colonialism both in terms of subjectification and agency. The archives here are of material and memorial resources—both physical and experiential spaces—as used by three Asian women authors: Janaki Majumdar, Cornelia Sorabjee, and Atia Hussein. Their lives span the late nineteenth century to the emergence of India and Pakistan through the violent partition of the British-ruled subcontinent. The reconstructions, recollections, and recommendations of these women reveal the experiential-historical dimensions of patriarchy within nationalism and colonialism in their complex sociological, psychological, and ideological fusions and formations. Burton's "other" archives encompass unpublished family history and published autobiographical tracts and fiction. |
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Burton's most important theoretical contribution, in my view, is her successful attempt to bridge or bypass the public-private divide for a holistic notion of the social. She challenges the Hegelian approach that sections off a portion of the social into the netherworld of civil society, thus relegating a substantial portion of daily living into the construct of the private or the domestic, the "unhistorical" women's domain. In the process we enter a world of voices, of lives silenced, erased, occluded, or even substituted through such ruses of reason as "facts" and "evidence" that cannot accommodate the social history of actual subjects. Burton calls her historical method postmodernism, through which she displaces modernist transhistorical, even suprahistorical truth claims. Burton's counter-history echoes older etymological connections between "story" and "history." Through stored and storied memories and reconstructions of life spaces, coding of norms and meanings, reflections on political and domestic duties, and the journeys of her authors in India, Pakistan, and England, we see how subjectivity is formed experientially and how history is embodied in and through such formations. We also learn to think of "diaspora" not as a trope of loss but as a vantage point of critical subjectivity. The "West" and the "East" cease to be reified categories for producing further reifications and bifurcations. |
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