The Kenyon Archive is Imbued with Potential for Re-remembering

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This week, my group, which is researching global politics at Kenyon, was tasked with beginning to select artifacts from the archive to put into our display. This came with some pressure as we looked through boxes and folders of materials on organizations and documenting events we often hadn’t ever heard about before. Especially when it came time to select boxes we wanted to pull for our appointment in the archive outside of class time, it was at the forefront of our minds how easy it was to miss something by just scrolling past a box name that didn’t make it plainly clear that it was relevant to our topic. Sometimes the names of student organizations were straightforward–“Kenyon Students for a Free Afghanistan” is obviously an organization that deals with international politics–but sometimes organizations aren’t named so clearly. What if we accidentally missed something important or interesting because we simply scrolled past it? And how do we decide which artifacts and memories are important to remember? Within the folders we looked through this week, there were materials from the 1960s and materials from last year. Is it more imperative to remember student action from over 50 years ago or student action that is still directly occurring in the present day?

Aleida Assmann (2011) discusses canon and archive in relation to active and passive remembering and forgetting. For Assmann, the canon “keeps the past present” and involves actively circulated memory, active remembering (2011:334). The archive, on the other hand, “preserves the past past” and is between the canon and forgetting (Assmann 2011:334). Assmann says that these cultural artifacts which are stored away in the archives have not been completely forgotten and always have the potential to be re-remembered as culturally relevant. As Assmann states, “they are open to new contexts and lend themselves to new interpretations” (2011:335) if only they are given new life and brought out of the archive and into actively circulated memory.

Digging through the archive as a group essentially tasks us with proposing selected cultural memories for canonization, bringing them back into the active memory of Kenyon. I think this week in the archive I at least felt a little bit of the pressure this comes with, but also the potential that the materials in the archive are imbued with. We looked through materials that were very much “open to new contexts and… new interpretations” (Assman 2011:335), that had been living in that archival space between forgetting and canon, that had been functionally forgotten to most of the people on Kenyon’s campus today. By placing them in our displays for the campus, however, we have the opportunity to re-remember them and bring parts of Kenyon’s history back into Kenyon’s collective working memory.


Bibliography

Assmann, Aleida. 2011. “From ‘Canon and Archive.” Pp. 334-337 in The Collective Memory Reader, edited by J.K. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, and D. Levy. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

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