Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduction outlines the vision set out by the thirty-five chapters that follow in this volume, Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction. It emphasizes the urgent need for approaches to the archives that are interdisciplinary, global, cross-cultural, and that reach across professional knowledge siloes. We describe the ubiquitous and pluralistic character of the archive, which is both metaphor and material substance, framework and fission, and is continually evolving and being remade. The themes of ‘Power’ and of ‘Truth and Fiction’ that are highlighted in the title to this volume are here set in their larger intellectual contexts and the approaches taken by the various contributors are indicated. We outline the perceived advantages of our chosen structure in six thematic sections, which traverse periods, places, and professions and are designed to prioritize a concern with archives as process and performance: Conceptions, Frameworks, Materialities, Encounters & Evolution, Narrators, and Erasures & Exclusion. Our closing ‘coda’ analyses one iconic archival object, The Domesday Book, as an archival microcosm.

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