AHA Convention, Seattle, Washington
6 — 9 January 2005
Friday, January 7, 11:45-2:15 –Table for CLGH Materials Including Syllabi.
Friday, January 7, 9:30-11:30, Center Room 211
ROUNDTABLE: THE HISTORIAN AS ARCHIVIST/THE ARCHIVIST AS HISTORIAN: THE POLITICS OF COLLECTING AND PRESERVING QUEER HISTORY
Panel Organizer: Martin Meeker, University of California, Berkeley
Panel Chair: Marcia Gallo, City University of New York, Graduate Center
Discussant 1: Terence Kissack, Ph.D., GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco
Discussant 2: Marcia Gallo, City University of New York, Graduate Center
Discussant 3: Horacio Roque Ramirez, Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies
Discussant 4: Tim Retzloff, University of Michigan
SUMMARY OF ROUNDTABLE GOALS:
The pursuit of historical research and the activity of collecting documents and other historical materials for archival preservation have been more closely linked in the practice of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) history than most other historical subfields. When both academic and independent/community-based scholars like John D’Emilio, Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Joan Nestle began studying the LGBT past in the 1970s, theirs was a project that entailed equal parts researching and collecting. In the wake of their work, a number of community-based archives and history projects were founded in both the United States and Canada with the goal of preserving the unique documents that the pioneering archivist/historians were collecting. A result of this collecting and preserving has been the accumulation of a vast amount of material (including personal papers, organizational records, newsletters and periodicals, photographs and ephemera, and oral history interviews) that is now stored and available to researchers at community-based archives, public libraries, and special collections departments at universities. Thanks to the work of scores of archivist/historians in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars studying the LGBT past no longer need to complain of the dearth of archival materials or that the historical record is silent on the experiences of LGBT people.
The work of the archivist and the work of the historian, however, are sometimes at odds as the historian and the archivist often have conflicting priorities and think about the materials that they handle in quite different ways. When the historian and archivist are one-in-the-same, the process of negotiation between the two roles becomes an occasion for contemplation on the practice of history-making from the collection of materials to the production of analytical books and articles. This roundtable discussion among a group of archivist/historians and/or historian/archivists will consider the implications of working at the intersection of those two, sometimes conflicting, sometimes conspiring, pursuits.
In particular, discussants will focus upon three related issues in their comments and in the ensuing discussion: 1) the relationship between doing historical research and seeking materials for archival collections; 2) the relationship of an individual’s manuscript collections to the collecting institution and the ways in which the link between the two might emphasize aspects of one’s identity (such as sexuality) and erase others (such as ethnicity); and 3) the act of mediating between collecting institutions and marginalized populations which have little or no experience with collecting and preserving their histories. After brief presentations by the discussants, the audience will be invited to engage in an exchange based on the issues presented with the discussants.
Saturday, January 8, 12:15-1:45, Sheraton, Suite 412
CLGH ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING
Saturday, January 8, 6:00 – 8:00, Sheraton, Suite 424
RECEPTION – CELEBRATING THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CLGH!