Toward an Embodied Poetics in Appraisal: Walt Whitman in the US National Archives

  • Nicole Gray

Abstract

In this article, I argue that a set of 19th-century documents written by the poet Walt Whitman on behalf of the US attorney general’s office and other government entities raises important questions for archival appraisal and description. These documents demonstrate that the creator of archival documents was frequently a corporate entity, involving many different actors, from authors to copyists to scribes. Peeling back the layers of creation can reveal the often-overlooked role of clerks and other minor figures in government agencies as well as forms of value that do not explicitly relate to the function of documents within the mission of the larger institution. Drawing on concepts of the records continuum and the archival multiverse, I propose an approach to appraisal that attends to an embodied poetics of records by focusing on human actions and interactions as important factors in the production and preservation of archival materials. Such an approach can help us to better perceive and describe bodies that speak in the archives in unexpected ways, sometimes through or as the voices of power.

RÉSUMÉ

Dans cet article, j’avance qu’un ensemble de documents écrits au XIXe siècle par le poète Walt Whitman au nom du bureau du Procureur général des ÉU et d’autres entités gouvernementales soulève des questions importantes au sujet de l’évaluation et la description archivistiques. Ces documents démontrent que le créateur de documents d’archives était souvent une entité corporative, impliquant de nombreux acteurs, des auteurs, aux copistes aux transcripteurs. En retirant les couches de création, on peut révéler le travail souvent passé sous silence des commis et autres figures mineures dans les organismes gouvernementaux, ainsi que des sortes de valeurs qui ne sont pas strictement liées aux fonctions des documents dans le mandat de l’institution de façon globale. Puisant dans les concepts de records continuum et de multivers archivistiques, je propose une approche à l’évaluation qui supporte l’incarnation poétique des documents en mettant l’accent sur les actions et les interactions humaines en tant que facteurs importants dans la production et la préservation de matériaux archivistiques. Une telle approche peut nous aider à mieux appréhender et décrire les corpus qui s’expriment d’une façon inattendue dans les archives, par le biais de ou en tant que voix du pouvoir.

Author Biography

Nicole Gray

Nicole Gray is a research assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a contributing editor to the electronic Walt Whitman Archive, and a student in the Library and Information Science graduate program at the University of Arizona. She has edited or co-edited a range of Whitman materials for the Whitman Archive, from early manuscripts to periodical fiction. Her articles on 19th-century US literature, culture, and book history have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and PMLA.

Archivaria 89 cover: image of Hon Lu with his cousin, Shanobi Lam
Published
2020-05-10
How to Cite
Gray, Nicole. 2020. “Toward an Embodied Poetics in Appraisal: Walt Whitman in the US National Archives”. Archivaria 89 (May), 106-27. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13735.
Issue
Archivaria 89 (Spring 2020)
Section
Studies in Documents

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