Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl, eds., Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Exploration in Canadian Women's Archives (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2012)

In Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women's Archives questions about the ethics of doing research in women's archives are explored from numerous different perspectives. As they question what it means to conduct ethical research, contributors also consider how archives form and re-form over time; essays address questions about what makes up an archive, what it means to do archival research and what it means to archive and to be archived.

In their introduction, Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl explain the book's separation into three sections: reorientations, restrictions and responsibilities. In the first section, "Reorientations," questions about what constitutes an archive are considered in essays that expand traditional definitions of "archive." Cecily Devereux argues convincingly for the ability of eBay to act as an archive of cultural history in her essay on the presentation and consumption of "Indian maidens" on the online shopping website. Devereux suggests that the "records" on eBay help fill gaps in the institutional record; other essays in this section likewise call attention to such gaps. Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl present the blog of poet Sina Queyras as a "shifting and unpredictable" (60) archive, but one which provides researchers with unique opportunities to investigate the tensions between print and digital culture that currently affect writers' lives and works. T.L. Cowan's contribution to this section is particularly provocative in its challenge to the traditional archive; writing about how to "preserve" feminist cabaret, Cowan speculates about the archival nature of the anecdote as the primary source in what she calls "repertoire knowledges." (71) As archive, the anecdote emphasizes how we remember rather than what we remember. Other essays in this section consider how archives are made and/or found in fiction and film, foregrounding the need to read "against the grain," to develop alternative strategies of reading women's archives.

In the second section, "Restrictions," writers focus on the limits and exclusions of archives. Susan Butlin discusses how national archival institutions have failed to recognize the significance of popular commercial artwork in the archives of artist Florence Carlyle; focusing on "high art," these institutions have formed collections that are not representative of Carlyle's life or artistic output, and Butlin describes her search through more local, "small and obscure archival deposits" (144), where less culturally constrictive acquisition practices have led to the formation of often overlooked but very useful collections. Butlin also discusses her own resistance to accepting Carlyle's commercial work as a central aspect of her archive and her life, explaining that as she worked through the "unexpected" (148) in Carlyle's archives, she was confronted by her subjectivity as researcher and by the realization that she had to let go of expectations and let the material lead her. Essays by Andrea Beverley and by Ruth Panofsky and Michael Moir address issues of privacy in archives. Panofsky and Moir discuss restrictions placed on the Adele Wiseman fonds at York University from the perspectives of the researcher and the archivist, while Beverley considers the archival subject's desire for privacy and the researcher's responsibility in the face of that desire. Catherine Hobbs' article in this section is the only contribution in the book by a professional archivist and offers a nuanced analysis of the ethical responsibilities of archivists who work with personal collections. Hobbs asks, "What does it mean to 'do right' by someone's archives?" (181) This is a deceptively Simple question; her essay introduces new ideas about how the everyday work of appraisal, arrangement and description has ethical implications and should be required reading in archival studies courses. In the final essay in this section, Karina Vernon explains how the absence of archives of racial minorities in national institutions is often portrayed as a sign of exclusion or "disenfranchisement" but argues that in some cases these exclusions are chosen; Vernon suggests that by keeping their own archives, black Prairie settlers have deployed specific "tactics of invisibility" that need to be read as "potential signs of empowered self-exemption" (203) and that, like so many of the types of archives discussed in this book, test the boundaries of the traditional archive, which has been conceptualized from within national institutions.

The final section, "Responsibilities," highlights the relationships between the archive, the archived, and their various interpreters --researchers, family members, editors and biographers. Here, many of the articles emphasize the deeply personal, intimate nature of some women's archives. Kathleen Venema and Julia Creet each discuss their mother's archives. Venema's mother has Alzheimer's disease and Venema recounts how she used an archive of letters mother and daughter had written to each other as a starting point for conversations which she recorded, forming a new archive out of the old; the old archive is used "as a means of shoring up self, identity, and relationship" (282), but Venema learns that "there is no capital A-Archive, no capital-M Memory." "Whatever the archive will do," Venema writes, movingly, "it will not heal my mother's memory, and it will not bring her back to me." (289) Creet's essay about the disposition of her mother's archives calls attention to the "violence inherent in the process of archivization itself." (303) Creet describes her encounters with different archival institutions as she sought a home for her mother's fonds and though she eventually determines to keep the material in her possession, her experience causes her to reflect on how the process of disposition affects how an archive is interpreted.

"How and where we lock up a life indefinitely," Creet asserts, "will define how that life is read in the future and the past." (316) Other essays in this section discuss the responsibilities of researchers to seek out underused archives, to ask themselves questions about how and why they determine what materials are significant, and to recognize the way in which the story an archive tells is always a function of the act of interpretation. As the title of Morra and Schagerl's introduction reminds us, "No archive is neutral," and the essays in this final section remind us that no researcher or archiver is neutral, either.

One of the many strengths of this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of those who have been archived. Each section contains at least one article by a creative writer; Daphne Marlatt, Penn Kemp, Sally Clark and Susan McMaster each reflect on how their personal archives have accumulated and what it has felt like to have their archives collected. This is a perspective that is often missing from 'archive stories,' which have tended, so far, to focus on the experiences of the researcher. As well, I find the inclusion of an archivist's perspective valuable, and Hobb's essay, in conjunction with Creet's, serves as a reminder of the impact of the actual work of archival appraisal and processing on a body of records. The book includes twenty chapters (not all of which I could refer to directly here, unfortunately) in addition to an introduction and an afterword. As a result, a wide range of research methodologies, types of archives and ethical questions are addressed; however, the number of essays also requires that each remains relatively brief and in some cases I wished the writer had been allowed more space to expand her arguments.

In her thoughtful afterword, Janice Fiamengo regrets the lack of training she received in archival research as a graduate student in English. Morra and Schagerl's collection of essays could easily act as the beginnings of such an education. Though it does not offer a how-to, it does present the reader with numerous thoughtful and engaging points of view on the nature and value of the archive, on the challenges of archival research and its risks and benefits, and on the ethical imperatives associated with all different types of archive work. The book provides an excellent starting point for an investigation of Hobbs' fundamental question: "What does it mean to "do right" by someone's archives?"

JENNIFER DOUGLAS

University of Victoria and University of British Columbia