Back in the old days, when I was an academic, a good deal of
my scholarship had to do with narrative,
One of my interests was in narrative and identity. That is (using scholarship and theory), I
thought about the ways people “story” or “narrate” their lives. Out of all the things that have happened in a
lifetime, one chooses those events thought to be most salient and puts them
into a sequence that is both temporal and causal to suggest “who I am.”.
When my mother died, she left a letter in which she designated
for each child, what items she specifically wanted each to have. The rest was for us all to share. Part of what she wanted me to have were the
family papers and pictures, “so that they would stay together.”
I have thought about why she felt it was important that
these documents and mementos “stay together.”
It was almost like these papers were a collection, or an archive, that
had coherence and meaning. But what kind
of an archive was it?
I think many of us have such family “archives,” and the
documents collected in those archives will tell stories of families that are
both familiar and unique. In my case, the objects saved by my
mother (and before her my grandmother) included letters, pictures, diaries,
scrapbooks, autograph books, telegrams, recipes, and other artifacts. I have named this informal collection “The
Manning Archive.”
“The Manning Archive”
tells the multiple stories of my mother and her family in Manning South
Carolina, as well as those of my mother and father, brothers and sister while
we grew up. These stories include our
history as a particular family: marriages, births and deaths, life in a very small town in the American
South, Jewish Americans, people who valued certain accomplishments and
education. The collection was not put
together systematically; indeed, it survived as a jumble of papers in the
bottom drawers of a sideboard. But it
does represent objects that were chosen and saved, and it consequently narrates
a history.
What follows is a short video in which I tried to
document this archive and suggest its significance. It was given at an academic conference on
narrative and identity. Because the
narrative I wanted to describe and consider was constituted by material objects—the
things my grandmother and mother thought worth saving—I wanted to find a format
or a medium that would suggest these objects not just in my words but in some
version of their in material selves.
(Two formats: one on Blog; other on Youtube)
(Two formats: one on Blog; other on Youtube)
