About This Unit

Every archive is a decision about what deserves to survive. This unit opens the module by treating that decision as a site of power: who collects, who catalogs, who is allowed in the reading room, and whose lives leave no trace at all. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past — the unit's foundation, written by a Haitian anthropologist about a revolution the West found "unthinkable" — shows that silences enter history at four distinct moments: when sources are made, when archives are assembled, when narratives are composed, and when significance is assigned. Silence, in other words, is manufactured at every step, which means it can be located, dated, and sometimes repaired. The unit's recent scholarship extends the analysis into the digital present, where Tonia Sutherland shows Black death circulating online while Black life remains under-documented — the archive's old asymmetries running at platform speed.

The unit's second concept names what the silences do to people: epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker's term for the wrongs done to someone specifically as a knower — testimony discounted because of who gives it, experience left unintelligible because the collective vocabulary for it was never built. Archives sit at the junction of both wrongs: they certify whose word counts as evidence and whose past counts as history. Against this, the unit assembles the repair tradition — community archives built against "symbolic annihilation," reparative description rewriting racist catalog language, and practical toolkits that put archival research in learners' own hands. The module begins here because everything that follows — fragments, storytelling, time itself — depends on what this unit establishes: the record is an argument, and it can be argued with.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain Trouillot's four moments of silencing and apply them to a concrete case of missing or destroyed records.
• Define testimonial and hermeneutical injustice and analyze how archival practices — appraisal, description, access rules — produce each.
• Evaluate a repair practice (community archiving, reparative description, digitization-for-access) for what it can restore and what remains unrecoverable.
• Conduct a basic critical reading of an archival finding aid or catalog record: provenance, description language, gaps, and the institutional choices they encode.

Keywords

• Archival silence
• Epistemic injustice (testimonial / hermeneutical)
• Symbolic annihilation
• Reparative description
• Provenance
• Community archives

Open Educational Resources

• "Archival Research." Transformative Research Toolkit, Othering & Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley. Explore the toolkit module.

Research toolkit module · Open access.

A practical, justice-oriented guide to doing archival research — locating collections, reading finding aids, handling absence and bias in the record — written for researchers who come to archives from communities the archives were not built to serve. The toolkit converts the unit's theory into method: learners use it as the working manual for both case studies, and its framing (research as transformative practice, not extraction) models the ethic the whole module teaches.

• "Anti-Racist Description Resources." Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP), 2019. Visit the project site.

Practice guidelines · Open access.

The working document, produced by a collective of Philadelphia-area archivists, that turned reparative description from aspiration into checklist: concrete recommendations for describing enslaved people by name rather than as property, naming enslavers as such, flagging racist creator language instead of reproducing it neutrally, and auditing legacy finding aids. The unit's second case study applies it directly; as a text it also demonstrates that archival repair is a labor practice with authors, drafts, and debates — not an abstraction.

• Blake, Kellee. "First in the Path of the Firemen: The Fate of the 1890 Population Census." Prologue (National Archives), Spring 1996. Read the article.

Archival history article · Open access.

The definitive account of how the 1890 census — taken between Reconstruction's end and Jim Crow's consolidation, with uniquely detailed data on the Black population — was damaged by fire in 1921 and then, over the following decade, almost entirely destroyed by bureaucratic decision rather than flame. Blake's reconstruction shows Trouillot's framework operating in documented sequence: the loss everyone calls "the fire" was mostly an appraisal choice. Primary scaffold for the unit's first case study.

• Michaelis, Kathryn, and Nicole Milano, eds. Social Justice Sampler. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2017. Download the sampler (PDF).

Edited collection (PDF) · Open access.

A free compilation from the Society of American Archivists gathering excerpts from the association's own publications on the intersections of archival work and social justice, assembled for classroom and discussion use. The sampler lets learners hear the profession speaking to itself — how working archivists frame questions of power, representation, and responsibility in their own literature. Within the unit it supplies the professional-association register alongside the toolkit's activist method and A4BLiP's practice guidelines: three genres of the same repair conversation.

Key Scholarship

• Sutherland, Tonia. Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Publisher page.

Book.

Sutherland — an archival studies scholar — examines what the digital age does to Black death and Black records: viral videos of killing replayed without consent, holograms and posthumous performances, genealogy platforms surfacing enslavement records to descendants without care, all while the ordinary documentation of Black life remains thin. The book extends the unit's questions of silence and access into the platform era, where the problem is often violent hypervisibility without control rather than absence — and argues for Black digital practices of care and refusal as the repair tradition's newest chapter. The unit's 2023 anchor.

• Caswell, Michelle. "Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation." The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 26–37. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

Caswell imports "symbolic annihilation" — the media-studies term for groups erased or trivialized in representation — into archival studies, and documents the counter-practice: community archives through which marginalized groups collect themselves, producing what her interviewees describe as the shock of seeing yourself in history. With Cifor's companion piece on radical empathy as archival ethics, the work supplies the unit's affirmative program: not just critique of the record but the building of new ones — the scholarly frame for every community collection the module visits.

• Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Publisher page.

Book.

The philosophical source of the unit's title concept. Fricker distinguishes testimonial injustice — credibility deflated by prejudice, the witness disbelieved because of who she is — from hermeneutical injustice, in which structural exclusion from meaning-making leaves whole experiences without names. Archives commit both: they are credibility machines (what counts as a source) and vocabulary machines (what the finding aid can say). The book gives learners precise instruments for wrongs they will recognize immediately — and a standard for what epistemic justice in an archive would require.

• Carter, Rodney G. S. "Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence." Archivaria 61 (2006): 215–233. Read the article.

Journal article · Open access.

The archival profession's own reckoning with silence, written from inside the reading room: Carter surveys how appraisal, description, and access decisions marginalize, and — the article's distinctive turn — asks when silence is also chosen: communities withholding records from institutions they distrust, silence as resistance rather than only erasure. The piece complicates the unit's repair instinct productively: not every gap wants filling, and the right of refusal belongs to the documented. Pairs with the Indigenous-protocols thread in Further Readings.

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995 (20th anniversary ed. 2015, foreword by Hazel Carby). Publisher page.

Book.

The module's foundation stone — exactly the kind of text this module exists to move from margin to center: a Haitian anthropologist's account, long more cited in history and Black studies than taught in sociology, of how power enters historical production at four moments (source-making, archive-making, narrative-making, retrospective significance), demonstrated through the Haitian Revolution that Western thought could not think and the Columbus celebrations that manufacture significance on schedule. Every later text in the module elaborates one of Trouillot's moments; learners should leave able to name which.

Case Studies

• The Silence You Can Date: The 1890 Census

Kellee Blake's Prologue account (1996), with the surviving 1890 census fragment (National Archives) · Archival-forensics analysis.

An archival-forensics exercise in which learners work a documented silence through Trouillot's four moments: what the 1890 schedules uniquely recorded — the first detailed federal portrait of the post-emancipation Black population — the 1921 fire, the decade of storage and neglect that followed, the 1933–34 destruction authorization, and the genealogical "wall" that researchers, disproportionately Black family historians, hit at 1890 today. The closing move locates the destruction decision precisely in Trouillot's schema — archive-making, not source-making — and asks what, if anything, repairs a silence that can be dated.

• Rewriting the Finding Aid: A Reparative Description Audit

A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources and the Othering & Belonging Institute toolkit, applied to published archival description · Reparative-description practicum.

A practicum in which learners audit real archival description: each group takes one published finding aid or catalog record from a major repository, identifies the description choices it makes — naming, euphemism, whose perspective the abstract takes — and drafts a reparative revision with a justification memo. The activity makes the unit's argument physically: description is authored, and therefore re-authorable. This is the module's first practicum-type case study — learners do the practice rather than analyze a completed case.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Trouillot: Choose a historical event you learned about in school and run it through the four moments: where in the chain — sources, archives, narratives, significance — were the silences in your version produced? Which moment surprised you most once you looked?
2. On Fricker: Describe one real or plausible scenario of testimonial injustice in an archival or documentary setting — a witness account filed as "unverified," a community's records deemed "non-historical." Then identify the hermeneutical layer: what concept would the record-keepers have needed, and lacked, to file it justly?
3. On Sutherland: The digital archive's problem is often hypervisibility without control — death circulating, life undocumented. How does this complicate the assumption that more access and more digitization equal more justice? Where would you draw a line, and who should hold the pen?
4. On Carter and chosen silence: When is withholding records from an institution an act of power rather than a loss to history? Construct one case for refusal and one against, and identify who has standing to decide.
5. On repair: The 1890 census cannot be recovered; a finding aid can be rewritten. Comparing the two case studies, what distinguishes repairable from unrepairable archival harm — and what obligations follow from each?
6. Synthesis across the unit: Trouillot locates silence in the production process — four moments where power enters the making of history. Fricker locates injustice in the knower — credibility deflated, experience left without a name. Choose one record, collection, or absence you have encountered — a family archive, an institutional catalog, a digitized collection — and analyze it with both frameworks: at which of Trouillot's moments was the silence made, and which of Fricker's injustices does it commit or repair? Which framework tells you more about what justice in that archive would require, and what does each miss that the other catches?

Further Readings and Resources

• Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

Hartman confronts the archive of Atlantic slavery, in which enslaved girls survive only in the records of their violation — a ledger line, a legal proceeding — and names the dilemma the unit's repair tradition cannot resolve: what cannot be recovered. The essay proposes a method, critical fabulation, for writing toward such lives at the limit of the archive without exceeding it. Taken up at length later in this module; listed here as the bridge.

• Harris, Verne. "The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa." Archival Science 2 (2002): 63–86. Read the article.

Journal article.

The South African counterpart to Trouillot, written from inside the post-apartheid records struggle. Harris, an archivist who worked through the transition, argues that the archive is a sliver of a sliver of a sliver — social memory drastically reduced at every step from experience to record to repository — and documents both apartheid-era records destruction and the contests over custody that followed. A working demonstration that archival power is state power, and that archivists are actors in it.

• Hughes-Watkins, Lae'l. "Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories." Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5 (2018). Read the article.

Journal article · Open access.

The reparative-archive program stated as a roadmap: Hughes-Watkins outlines a holistic approach — acknowledging institutional complicity in exclusion, prioritizing the acquisition of materials documenting marginalized communities, and building utilization and outreach so recovered records are actually used. Where A4BLiP supplies the description-level checklist, this article supplies the program's scholarly architecture; the backbone for the unit's reparative-description practicum.

• First Archivist Circle. "Protocols for Native American Archival Materials." 2007. Read the protocols.

Protocols document · Open access.

Indigenous-authored standards for the culturally appropriate stewardship of Native American archival materials, developed by a gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous archivists and information professionals. The protocols address consultation with communities of origin, culturally sensitive restrictions on access, and the recognition that some knowledge is not for general circulation. The chosen-silence and community-authority thread of the unit — Carter's argument — in protocol form.

• Dotson, Kristie. "Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing." Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–257. Read the article (JSTOR).

Journal article.

The philosophical extension of Fricker for learners who want the concept's next generation. Dotson identifies two practices of silencing that operate on testimony itself: testimonial quieting, in which an audience fails to recognize the speaker as a knower at all, and testimonial smothering, in which the speaker truncates her own testimony anticipating that it will not receive competent uptake. The vocabulary sharpens the unit's account of how archives receive — or fail to receive — the word of the documented.

• Society of American Archivists. Dictionary of Archives Terminology. Explore the dictionary.

Reference dictionary · Open access.

The archival profession's open dictionary of its own trade language. Learners use it to decode the terms the unit's texts assume — appraisal, provenance, respect des fonds, finding aid, deaccession — with definitions, usage notes, and citations to the professional literature. A working reference for both case studies, and a reminder that the vocabulary of record-keeping is itself a professional artifact with a history.

• Documenting the Now (DocNow) project. Visit the project site.

Digital archiving project · Open access.

A collaborative project building tools and ethical frameworks for archiving social-media content documenting protest movements — with the consent and participation of the people who created it. DocNow puts Sutherland's questions in working-project form: how to preserve the record of movements born online without reproducing the surveillance and non-consensual circulation the unit examines. A bridge to the storytelling material later in this module.

• Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Publisher page.

Book.

An essay collection on the epistemology of ignorance: the argument that not-knowing about race is often actively produced and maintained rather than a simple absence of knowledge. The volume assembles the ignorance-production literature that the unit's epistemic-justice frame complements — where Fricker asks how knowers are wronged, these essays ask how whole societies arrange not to know — and gives learners the other half of the epistemic account of the racial order.