Author: Nandini Chatterjee

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The statuesque, the imperfect female body and fun in the archives

I finally found time in January this year 2024 to take myself to Reading, to explore the Tweed archive, the collection of private papers, sketchbooks and artefacts deposited by the daughters of the sculptor John Tweed in Reading Museum in 1968. I received a wonderful welcome from the art curator and her team, as she gave up an entire day in order to accompany me to the museum store and literally walk me through the materials. This of course, is the reality of research in smaller, regional archives and museums, there is rarely dedicated staff available to facilitate research and access depends on the generosity of very busy staff with many other things to do. However, when one does secure the time of such colleagues, the depth of knowledge that they can offer about the area is a resource in its own right.

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Absent in plain sight: Robert Clive in Shrewsbury

This week, I finally found the opportunity to take myself to Shrewsbury to undertake research on the history of the statue of Robert Clive situated in this historic market town in county Shropshire, near the border with Wales. The trip opened up as many questions as it answered.

Shrewsbury is a beautiful town, enclosed in a meander loop of the River Severn. The station building itself is gorgeous, with little decorative stars lined up on the top of the stone front – there must be a technical name for this, but I have no idea. The historic centre, a mere ten minutes walk from the station, boasts narrow cobbled streets with seriously odd names (Grope Street, for one), and many well preserved Tudor shop and house fronts, now also bearing signs for the best high street brands. The Shropshire Library and Archives is in a gorgeous old building too, just a minute’s walk from the station.

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Redver Buller’s Empire

Alan Lester

The statue of Sir Redvers Buller, a Victorian army commander, in Exeter has recently received a new interpretation board contextualising his career across the British Empire. I played a largely informal role in the project led by Prof Nicola Thomas, which led to that board. In this blog, I tell the story of Buller’s career, fleshing out the content of the new board.

Statue of Redvers Buller, Exeter from the website of Historic England

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Radical archiving: a Wits-Exeter workshop

Archives are about power. Documents, issued by the right authorities and stored in the right places establish truths – about people, events, countries, communities. Being ‘undocumented’ thus implies a dangerous and criminal invisibility – an undocumented person is assumed to be in breach of the law, undeserving of legal protections, even human sympathy: a body out of place.

Since at least the 1980s, historians, art historians, anthropologists and linguists (among others) have been thinking about the archives a bit more sceptically. Many now acknowledge a broad archival turn, which means that we are more aware than before that archives are not just neutral sources of facts. They are actually created by people in power to tell certain stories, and in many cases, those stories become so powerful that most people can only think in those terms, including those who are depicted unfairly and inaccurately in them. While this has made many scholars feel that archives are tools of oppression, others have noted efforts to harness the power of documentation, in order to tell other stories, to claim space.

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