This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

Carla Della Gatta considers the relative abundance of the Fornésian archive – several dozen published scripts, very few “lost Fornés plays,” and an artistic practice that is nearly as documented as the productions and plays themselves – in tandem with the disproportionate lack of scholarship on someone so influential to the American theatre. To explain, Della Gatta evinces the challenges posed to documentarians by a bilingual, bicultural artist such as Fornés and argues that the task of documenting Fornés requires an unusually comprehensive sense of her entire canon in order to develop meaningful analysis, context, and criticism. Della Gatta also details the emerging tradition of Fornésian documentation that has evolved since the 1990s, and that not only includes the balance of archive formation, critical analysis, and artmaking necessary to draw forward the integration of Fornésian styles, forms, and perspectives, but also prioritizes a distinctive ethics of care.

José Rizal spearheaded an anticolonial literary movement that aimed to deepen the understanding of Filipinos’ emerging identity through critical engagement with colonial archives. Through his writings in Spanish, the Filipino anticolonial leader gathers and constructs his people’s prehistory in order to promote and comprehend the identity-political transformation his writings describe and prescribe, the consolidation of a “Filipino” identity different from the term’s previous definition of “Spaniards born in the Philippines.” Through analysis of his annotations to Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas and his novel Noli me tangere, I argue that Rizal serves as a useful prototype for Colonial Latinx studies, as both model and cautionary tale. I eventually conclude that Rizal’s literary and historiographical contributions must be understood as on the one hand, a register of colonial maladies – frustrations with powerful Spanish friars and inept and naïve colonized peoples alike – and on the other hand, a rehearsal space for future liberties, including the freedom to define one’s own identity in dialogue with and against colonial expectations and discourses.

On his death in 1703, Pepys left his library to his old college, instructing that it be preserved ‘for the benefit of posterity’. Among this collection was his diary. This chapter demonstrates that Pepys’s choice to save his journal was part of wider plans to shape the historical record. It was a response to the hostile political climate of the 1690s and to the types of histories then being written. Pepys was an expert in creating and controlling archives – his own and others. He intended his diary to be read alongside his naval records and in conditions that would secure it a sympathetic reception. Pepys’s collecting also shows he had an expansive sense of what (and who) might be worthy of future historians’ attention. What he termed his ‘scheme’ for his library’s future was, ultimately, a design on future readers and we need to factor this in when interpreting his records.

In this chapter I suggest that anthropology’s project of the reflexive and explicit “comparison of embedded concepts” provides useful tools for Ottomanists. Reflexivity and explicit comparison, especially with the present, would bring debates usually left to historiography – concerning comparison, theory, and archives – to the fore, highlighting the contributions of Ottoman history to rethinking our present. Given my emphasis on comparison with the present, I begin with a consideration of presentism and argue that all histories involve an often-unspoken comparison with the present and our contemporary concepts. I then introduce how anthropological comparison operates, especially in making comparison explicit and reflecting on the anthropologist’s position and process. I end with an initial place where Ottomanists could put this reflexivity and explicit comparison to use: a more explicit discussion of how each historian constructs, accesses, and approaches their archive while reflecting on what counts as an archive.

This chapter discusses the subject of archives: what they are, how they are uniquely constructed and preserved, their importance for creating historiographies and scholarly traditions, how they are subject to human error, the consequences of said error, and alternative sources of historical records. These topics are explored primarily through the case study of Nigeria’s Colonial and National Archives. The chapter will explain how the Colonial Archives were used as tools to extend colonial power while also springboarding African historiography through consequential and highly problematic methods. Next, it will explore the transformation of the Colonial Archives into Nigeria’s National Archives, pioneered by Kenneth Dike at the University of Ibadan. This transformation fostered significant changes in Nigeria’s historiography, the details of which will be examined. The chapter will also address the many issues present within Nigeria’s National Archive. Finally, it will explore the alternative voices to the domineering Eurocentric frameworks in “modern” (colonial) African historiography. They include but are not limited to written documents from Northern Nigeria, such as the Kano chronicles, oral traditions from the Yoruba and Igbo peoples from Nigeria’s south and east, rituals, customs, festivals, and much more.

The Conclusion chapter reiterates the book’s approach, focus and main points. It reminds the reader that the book has concentrated on local, provincial, peripatetic and otherwise relatively marginal sites of scientific activity and shown how a wide variety of spaces were constituted and reconfigured as meteorological observatories. The conclusion reiterates the point that nineteenth-century meteorological observatories, and indeed the very idea of observatory meteorology, were under constant scrutiny. The conclusion interrogates four crucial conditions of these observatory experiments: the significance of geographical particularity in justifications of observatory operations; the sustainability of coordinated observatory networks at a distance; the ability to manage, manipulate and interpret large datasets; and the potential public value of meteorology as it was prosecuted in observatory settings. Finally, the chapter considers the use of historic weather data in recent attempts by climate scientists to reconstruct past climates and extreme weather events.

This chapter argues that Kerouac’s oeuvre must be reassessed as a unique case of the literary deployment of the archival. “Spontaneous” names the author’s instrument of choice because it serves his goals of leaving a “complete record” behind and becomes the means of (re)capturing the origins – or provenance – of the poetic insight and narrative structure of his innermost memories. Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose method is thus a technique in the service of the most archival of impulses; the wish to record and preserve all experience for posterity. Spontaneous poetics is where provenance meets recording eye. This thirst for capturing the moment is motivated by Kerouac’s passion for origins – not just regarding his own ancestry and French-Canadianness but, as a writer, he further hopes to record the very inception of all epiphanies, emotions, sensations he experiences. In particular, this chapter examines Visions of Cody, in which his archival sensibility is most evident, showing that the novel both embodies the archival character of Kerouac’s novelistic form while simultaneously serving an archival function of preservation.

Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.

This chapter examines the ontological questions raised by the encounter with poems in archives, whether in the form of drafts, post-publication revisions, or unique or multiple versions circulating in manuscript alone. Most poems in most archives prompt the same question – what is this? – and they thereby challenge expectations of what a poem will be. When are two related texts versions of the same poem, for instance, and when are they instead two different poems? What about poems that were never finished or were never originally conceived of as “poems”? And how are poems in archives framed by surrounding materials, be those materials other poems or other kinds of writing altogether? Through a close study of Thomas Gray's commonplace book, this chapter focuses on the interpretative challenges prompted by such ontological questions. Using Gray's methods as its example, the chapter experiments with what it means to read manuscript poems synchronically within the archival documents in which they are found, rather than diachronically in search of sources or variants.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.