Archiving Loss

Book excerpt: Drawing together many stories from the archives of difficult events and volatile histories, Archiving Loss: Holding Places for Difficult Memories asks how we might cut and walk a path for memory, loss, and silence in the archive. The difficult events discussed in this book include state responses to refugees, events of genocide, alongside other less documented pockets of trauma, violence, and loss. This book describes the archives whose language and logic have shaped our ways we remember and respond to difficult events and the ways in which we expect memory and loss to be coherent, credible, and lead to clear conclusions. In asking what is missing and what is found in the archives of difficult events this book argues for the necessity of looking more closely at other ways of remembering loss and archiving memory.