Whose Memories Get Forgotten? Historical Canonization and Archival Gaps

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This week we finalized our displays in preparation for our presentation. Looking around all of the other groups’ displays and hearing them present their materials and the experiences they had working in the archive, I was struck by a couple of things. One was that I had never heard of many of the organizations whose materials my group had been looking at, whereas other groups had pulled materials and history from ones that I had heard of. Another was that other groups said that one of the hardest things about this project was the sheer amount of materials they had to look through and choose between, whereas my group kept coming up slightly empty when searching for materials that fit our theme–Kenyon student’s reactions to global politics.



In chapter 6 of The Struggle for the People’s King, Hajar Yazdiha discusses restoration, reconciliation, and reckoning in the context of conflict along racial lines within the feminist movement and feminist activism. Yazdiha outlines that in order for coalition to be built across similarity and difference, a past must be collectively constructed and agreed upon, creating the possibility of a shared present and future. For Black and white feminists, this meant (and means) recognizing the contributions of Black women to the feminist movement, bringing them into collective memory by canonizing them and their work and accomplishments, and confronting the fact that they were (and are) excluded from this canon.



The particularities of my group’s experiences working on this project made me think about the gaps that exist in the archives and the often short length of institutional memory. For example, whereas groups like the women and gender group could look at the Crozier Center for Women, which is a relatively institutionally embedded organization for students, our group were more unsure of where to begin, continue, and conclude our search for materials and often opened folders to find practically nothing in them. This in combination with chapter 6 of The Struggle for the People’s King brought questions to the front of my mind like: Which organizations’ memories get forgotten, and why? Whose memories is there investment in remembering? What history, and what narrative of history, is Kenyon invested in? This is not to say that the archive is selective in the materials they accept, but rather to ask what does Kenyon do to make some memories in the archives more accessible than others, who has to carve out space for themselves and their materials in the archives, and who slips through the cracks when it comes to producing archivable ephemera and actually getting those materials to the archives? What institutional barriers are there to inclusion in the archives?




Bibliography



Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press.

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