Archives as Spaces of Radical Hospitality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Deploying feminist notions of embodied, relational archival practices, this article critically defines and creatively unites both ‘radical’ and ‘hospitality’ as a tool for enacting generosity in archives. Drawing on the complexities of Derrida’s Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present) alongside feminist scholarship and, what Cherríe Moraga calls ‘theories of the flesh’, it elucidates the urgent work of imagining archives as spaces of radical hospitality. The article uses embodied knowledges and storytelling as an archival methodology to propose a set of elements of radical hospitality and what it means and does in and for the community archives. It attends to the creative possibilities that acknowledging the relational complexities of the archives, its collections, and its records as integral to establishing socially just and generative spaces for its records creators and its visitors. Radical hospitality becomes not only a possibility but also the lively, animated, and joyous archival body and all of its parts.