“The only way we knew how:” provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials

Abstract

Although much has been written on the archival principle of provenance and the centrality of records creation to archival practices and processes, there has been little exploration of how records creation is figured and enacted across specific archival sites and spaces. This article centers records creation in two digital archives of feminist materials: Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive with the aim of demonstrating records creation as an imaginative and fabulatory process of meaning-making. By decentering the notion of a singular, remarkable creator in favor of a multiplicity of creating contexts and actors, Rise Up! and Alternative Toronto enable imaginative acts of records creation that play with the spatial and temporal boundaries of records, pushing them into new, oftentimes unanticipated relationships to other records, users, and intervenors. In this article, I propose that provenancial fabulation can be characterized through four dimensions: first, it plays with contradictory records contexts putting them in conversation with one another; second, it troubles the order and organization of the past; third, it extends the temporal and spatial boundaries of historical records and accounts; and fourth, it acts infrastructurally to circulate ideas, imaginaries, narratives, and relationalities. In creating and configuring digital records according to feminist understandings of archival value and historical continuity, Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! demonstrate provenancial fabulation as a structuring force in the circulation of feminist knowledges and desires.