Archival holdings are traditionally understood as sources for academic research. By the other hand, studies on history of reading are dedicated to books, libraries and printed material that circulate among the public one way or another. The proposal of one dossier which has the archives themselves as object implies thinking about it by the follow angles: their formal aspects, in relation to writing production, paleography, diplomatics, the historicity of creating these artefacts and their preservation; archives seen from the point of view of their own organization, as a manifestation of a domination logic; archives analyzed from the point of view of their own discourses, practices and representations, that is as producers of knowledge, more than only source, also as agents of power, by the constitution and circulation of knowledges which are governments’ tools.
It is also possible to consider a dimension that few historians approach: the need to question what has been preserved in the archives. The intent to preserve some archival groups, the personal dimension and sensitivity present in the act of keeping a private correspondence, or even, the existence of copyists books, originals and spare copies, aspects that present clues of the meaning of records at a given time. As well as, when they are reorganized by the agents of a determined institution, and new meanings are created, inhibiting the possibility of understanding the meanings in the original order.
Dealing with this set of questions, the dossier is composed of articles that discuss the role of archives in the exercise of various forms of power, in the historiographic tradition, in the valorization of written culture, in the formation of new sensibilities about the materiality of records and their supports, in the constitution or erasure identities and memories.
The dossier on “The Archive as object: written culture, power, and memory” is edited by Claudia Beatriz Heynemann, PhD in Social History by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and researcher at the Arquivo Nacional and Nívia Pombo, PhD in Social History by the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), professor at the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas and at the Graduate Program on History at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Uerj) and researcher at the INCT Proprietas.
