By Verne Harris. New York: Routledge, 2021. 166 pp. Softcover ISBN 9780367681142, Hardcover ISBN 9780367361075, eBook ISBN 9780429343827.

Reviewed by Jenifer Monger, Institute Archivist, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [PDF Full Text]

As someone who has read Verne Harris’s numerous publications and watched him professionally from the sidelines (always in awe), I jumped at the opportunity to review his latest book, Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis. This complex autobiographical corpus of work dives into concepts, contemplations, and self-reflections regarding ghosts, haunting(s), banditry, activism, spectrality, praxis, reckoning with the past, memory work, and forgetting (not exactly in that order) as they relate to work in archive.[1] Harris’s background is important when reading this book. He spent segments of his career serving on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission before joining the activist nonprofit South African History Archive, and then was the archivist for Nelson Mandela’s papers. These were professional experiences that, as Harris describes, forced him into “reckoning with oppressive pasts,” i.e., the aftermath of colonial rule and how oppression persists (p. 3). A main influence on Harris’s practice—which he meanders through in Ghosts—was his turn toward readings on deconstruction, specifically by Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, as a healing modality and as an attempt to make sense of the world, his career as an archivist, and what he has witnessed as the failures of democracy. Expanding his frame to a global perspective of archive work, Harris positions his experiences to other comrades and colleagues who have also reckoned with the emotional pain and labor left in the wake of oppressive political forces.

In the introduction to Ghosts, Harris propels the reader right into the main topic of this book: ghosts. From Harris’s vantage point, South Africa is filled with ghosts, and “in archival work, ghosts are unavoidable” (p. 1). Harris makes his positionality very clear, speaking as an archivist in a country traumatized by colonial rule, civil war, and apartheid. Archival work has never been a luxury for him, not “a terrain for quiet reflection,” but rather, a place “to protect and project the voices being silenced” (p. 2). In a word, archive work is “justice” (p. 1).

In the first chapter, Harris addresses the question “What is archive?” (p. 10) and proceeds to explain how archive makes him feel crowded. He explores this feeling through various lines of inquiry that he describes as disturbances: “the throngs of ghosts” (p. 16) he finds in archive; the Western scholarship of the archival turn along with the decolonization of this scholarship; his own experience; and discourses of memory studies. Harris ends the chapter with several questions including, “Whose voices get to be privileged, and whose are ghosted by exclusion or subordination?” (p. 30).

In chapter two, Harris tackles the question “What are ghosts?” (p. 10). His answer is more a reflection than a definition.[2] Harris recounts events in South African history that continue to haunt people (himself included), and he explores Derrida’s spectral studies and hauntology. Harris then examines the spectral structuring of archive in chapter three. Using Nelson Mandela’s archive as the prime example, Harris presents the reader with the various ways in which archive is formed and how the spectral (ghostly) is part of that formation, leading to an archive that is fragmented, haunted, full of ghosts, and rife with absences.

After laying this theoretical groundwork, Harris launches into chapter four, where he calls attention to his experiences working for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He details the TRC’s recommendations, which dealt directly with archiving and freedom of information initiatives, only to bear witness to those recommendations being largely ignored and countered. Harris describes frustration with what he saw unfold “from within structures of the TRC and the National Archives,” stating “It is a sorry tale. . .” (p. 68). And so, Harris left government employment, turning instead to a project with global reach and attempting to find meaning, value, and rewards in memory work and healing. Ultimately this work concluded in some successes and seemingly more frustrations. Harris’s frustration with memory work leads straight into chapter five and the topic of forgetting. This chapter focuses on Harris’s imperative to forget, asking “Do human beings have a right to forget?” (p. 83). He entertains the notion of forgetting as a possible healing modality—although not one that will work for everyone. Harris then concludes by postulating that forgetting can be liberatory.

With the first five chapters building one on top of the next, the reader is then launched into chapter six and the author’s deep analysis of Hélène Cixous’s writings.[3] As mentioned earlier, Harris turned to both Derrida and Cixous when he began experiencing the failures of democracy. Therefore, this chapter focuses heavily on how Cixous’s corpus of work is a vast archive that Harris can—metaphorically speaking—play in. He traces themes of ghosts, justice, and banditry (a topic he further explores in the next chapter) throughout Cixous’s work and describes how her writing embodies a “powerful deconstructive sensibility” (p. 97). Finally, in the last chapter, Harris lays out his schema for a justice praxis (aka practice) in archive, suggesting this work be comprised of the following: identifying what narratives are being ghosted by power; dismantling “intersecting vectors of power and vulnerability” (p. 123); respecting spectrality in archive; resisting kitsch forms of remembrance; and demonstrating the willingness to “engage in banditry” (p.124).

In essence, for Harris, justice work in archive comes down to banditry. Banditry is a fundamental fight against oppressive structural powers that “wanted to be done with the past” (p. 7) and the ways in which those structural powers use (or hide, confiscate, or twist) information in ways that prohibit those who have been oppressed from finding closure and healing. Though banditry (and acts of it) are peppered throughout the book, it is here in the final chapter that Harris places the greatest emphasis on this activist/archivist act as it relates to healing and justice.[4]

For me, Ghosts of Archive was challenging, impactful, and empowering (personally and professionally), and I loved every aspect of it. Ghosts is a matrix of Harris’s personal and professional life, local and global views, and theoretical and practical explorations of archive. Harris introduces new ways of seeing and digesting archival work through his self-reflections, analysis, and expansive views. Ghosts reads as a call (maybe a rallying cry) for another mode of archival practice above and beyond daily craft and business as usual (which I can only assume many of us are used to).[5] Furthermore, Harris lured me into looking more deeply at my positionality as an archivist. While I often grapple with this, I’m certainly inspired to do more introspection and take a deeper dive into who I am as an archivist. Ultimately, Ghosts is a beacon to shift the archival perspective and represents a magnifying lens I now want to look through to view archive.  

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[1] I use the word “archive” throughout this review out of respect for Harris’s use. Harris defines archive as “a phenomenon—embracing both noun and verb, both artefact and action—with . . . defining attributes, or movements” (p. 22). For a definition of archive(s), please see Society of American Archivists, “Archive,” Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/archive.html.

[2] This is specified as a reflection rather than a definition, even though on page 45, Harris uses the word definition, as he states “finally, a definition of ‘the ghost.’” But rather than a straightforward definition, Harris “pulls together all lines of enquiry” and admits he has “no idea what ghosts are.” Rather, he states what they do: “They haunt” (p. 45).

[3] Harris is referencing two of Cixous’s writings in particular: Hélène Cixous, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, translated by Beverly Bie Brahic, (Fordham University Press, 2007) and Hélène Cixous, Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang (Polity, 2013).

[4] Throughout the book, Harris describes other systems of power (other than and in addition to those in South Africa) that prefer to be “done with the past” and aligns his work on a global scale. He describes his compañeros, primarily in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and explains, “We were self-styled los bandidos de la memoria, memory bandits, fighting against systems that wanted to be done with the past, fighting in support of the ones being ghosted by those systems” (p. 7).

[5] A close friend in the digital repository arena recently described his work as being part of a “utility department.” We laughed about this (with frustration at the core of the conversation), but I realized I often feel the same way as an archivist.