Joyce Wieland: À coeur battant; Joyce Wieland: Heart On. Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Art Gallery of Ontario. February 8 – May 4, 2025; June 21, 2025 – January 4, 2026. Curated by Anne Grace (Montreal Museum of Fine Art) and Georgiana Uhlyarik (Art Gallery of Ontario). Un article de la revue Archivaria (Legacies of Critical Theory in Archives) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. Documentary film, directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee. Banger Films and the National Film Board of Canada, 2024. 99 minutes. South by Southwest Film & TV Festival, Austin, Texas, March 8–16, 2024; Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Ontario, April 25 – May 4, 2024. Un article de la revue Archivaria (Numéro 99, printemps 2025, p. 6-183) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context. Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell, eds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2024. xii, 282 pp. 9780367206017. Un article de la revue Archivaria (Numéro 99, printemps 2025, p. 6-183) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Archives often preserve materials that reinforce privileged identities and marginalize LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disabled communities. Furthermore, there is only limited theoretical work addressing how to ethically document intersectional identities, especially the dual embodiments of Asianness and queerness. Inspired by K.J. Rawson’s theorizing of accessing transgender//desiring queer archival logics, we employ critical case studies to analyze how Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities are represented in archival collections. Our study finds that Asian/queer//queer/Asian theory offers a new lens and new tools to combat archival erasure and misrepresentation resulting from heteronormativity, white supremacy, and cisgender misogyny. This article develops three critical case studies focusing on the white queer gaze toward Asian queer bodies in archives, the disidentification of Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities within archival records, and the use of archival speculation to explore Asian/queer//queer/Asian identities. This work makes both practical and theoretical contributions. Practically, we advocate for proactive archival practices that better represent such identities, avoiding essentialist representations. We also highlight the importance of embodied knowledge and the positionality of scholars and practitioners whose lived experiences centre Asian queer identities along with approaches like revisiting collections, creating reparative descriptions, and reading against the archival grain. Theoretically, we argue for archival speculation as a legitimate mode of inquiry and a process of knowledge production, positioning archives as sites that encourage disidentification.

Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives. Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, eds. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: Lever Press, 2023. vi, 349 pp. 9781643150512. Un article de la revue Archivaria (Legacies of Critical Theory in Archives) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Mr. Dressup to Degrassi: 42 Years of Legendary Toronto Kids TV. Museum of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. May 24 – September 24, 2023. Curated by Ed Conroy. Un article de la revue Archivaria (Numéro 97, spring 2024, p. 5-230) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

On August 12, 2022, Tamil relatives of those forcibly disappeared during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) marked their 2,000th day of public protest. Since these roadside protests began, elderly women and men searching for their loved ones have passed away and transitional justice promises have failed, but the disappeared have not been found. This article examines archives of the disappeared: collections of files, objects, photographs, etc. about missing loved ones. Paradoxically, these archives, as evidence that the disappeared once lived, are at the core of the protests, yet they are still overlooked by the Sri Lankan state. I explore these collections by examining the intersection of critical personal archives, life writing scholarship, and South Asian studies. The emerging field of critical personal archives suits the unique quality of archives of disappearance, their constructed nature, and their underlying intimacy. Life writing scholarship focuses a much-needed critical lens on self-representation, power, and narrative in archives, especially regarding those whose stories are marginalized and/or not deemed archivable. Drawing on semi-structured interviews I carried out with mothers of the disappeared in 2016–2017 and 2022, I analyze these archives using three life writing concepts: relationality, cultural scripts, and autotopography. The result reaffirms the enduring cultural, political, and personal value of archives of the disappeared and calls for reimagining personal archives as politically and emotionally powerful forms of representation that carve space for love and resistance.

Between archives, as documentary by-products of human activity retained for their long-term value, and the archive, as a concept used outside of the discourse of professional archivists, there is a semantic, conceptual, and theoretical gap. However, this interval is particularly fertile. In this space, non-traditional archives users such as found-footage filmmakers find inspiration. Through the narratives of their work, they show what is not always visible in archives. Their artworks confront us with unarchived and unarchivable dimensions (what is not archived and what cannot be archived), constituent of how archives are created. In studying the archives that are part of found-footage works through an archival usage framework (exploitation), three main cat- egories of the unarchived and the unarchivable emerge: absence, which is linked to gaps, fragments, and incompleteness; the forbidden, which manifests in archives as material traces; and the invisible, which is not shown. These three categories have to do with an unconceived (impensé) state – a state of the archival field reflecting the intentional or unintentional inconceivability or omission of some of its theoretical or practical aspects. By investing in the unconceived – in other words, by studying archival science from practices on the margins – it is possible to renew ideas and discourses inside the discipline.