<Emphasis Type="Italic">Qui est Charlie…</Emphasis>? A Sociological Perspective on <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and the Culture of Comics

In this paper, I will argue for key role played by the global culture of comics, of which the French publication Charlie Hebdo is but one small part, in the development and aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015. I begin by exploring and elucidating this culture of comics that exists across France and other comic book producing nations and its associations with youthful rebellion, anarchy, and, more recently, misrecognized privilege and bigotry. A sociological perspective on the cultural history and practice of comics publishing through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries adds important context to the Je Suis Charlie movement and its place in the public discourse—while also further problematizing it.     

‘<Emphasis Type="Italic">Arca,archivillo, archivo</Emphasis>’: the keeping,use and status of historical documents about the Spanish <Emphasis Type="Italic">Conquista</Emphasis>

Developing a relativistic concept of the pre-modern archive, this article considers the relationship between knowledge inside and outside the archive to determine how Spain’s historical documents about its new American territories were kept and used. The starting assumption is that collections of documents about the Spanish Conquista circulated among people and were not permanently stored within fixed archival spaces, such as small lockable cases (arcas), private collections of documents (archivillos), or the actual state archives (archivos). This article thus re-evaluates the state of knowledge about the new American territories of Spain and its distribution across various archives and collections. It draws particular attention to the use of historical documents by official chroniclers of Spain and historians of the Conquista of the Spanish Americas.     

Room for archives? Use of archival materials in <Emphasis Type="Italic">No Gun Ri</Emphasis> research

Archivists have long tried to understand users from the viewpoint of their archival collections. Such an approach misses important perspectives about use in, and users of, archives; how they perform research and develop knowledge while using archives. This study aims to comprehend the use of archival materials in research from the users’ perspective. It attempts to understand users’ perceptions of the impact of archival collections on their research, how and when archival materials are involved in the research process and how much weight they grant those materials in support of their thesis, from an actual research topic, the No Gun Ri massacre. The case of the No Gun Ri incident provides a good example of how archival materials play a role in historical discussions and an opportunity to look at archival contributions. No Gun Ri researchers acknowledged that archival documents were essential source materials for details about the incident and a major player in stimulating controversies and, consequently, provided the impetus for further publications. General recordkeeping situations also provided a circumstantial context of the incident. However, No Gun Ri researchers agreed that oral history was the most valuable and influential evidence for their major ideas and used archival documents to provide hard facts about the details of oral history. There are some unique research patterns of No Gun Ri researchers identified in this study which are different from the typical assumptions of archivists.     

Is the archivist a “radical atheist” now? Deconstruction,its <Emphasis Type="Italic">new wave</Emphasis>, and archival activism

Hägglund’s “radical atheism”—innovative thinking within the philosophical current of “speculative materialism”—revitalizes deconstruction and provides an important basis to define parameters for the archivist’s role as activist for social justice. This paper argues postmodern archival theory gets deconstruction wrong by misreading Derrida’s “Archive fever” as a theory of “archontic power”; this misleads archivists on the call for justice. Properly understanding that justice is undecidable, radical atheism explodes the tension between postmodernists’ appreciation of all views and perspectives and their commitment to right unjust relations of power. This paper first advances the negative argument that “Archive fever” is not about power and injustice. It then advances the positive argument that “Archive fever” is Derrida’s effort to look at actual archives to resolve Freud’s problematic theorizing of a “death drive.” In a close and comprehensive reading of “Archive fever,” this paper explores the notion of “archive fever” as a death drive and suggests Derrida’s efforts are inconclusive. Viewed through the lens of radical atheism, the archive’s “traces”—the material of actual archives writ large in the manner of Derrida’s thinking about a universal archive—serve to mark the flow of time. Understanding the structure of the trace reveals the source of internal contradictions, discontinuities, and instabilities in the meaning of all things. It explains why justice is undecidable. In face of the unconditional condition of this undecidability, we as archivists and humans are compelled to make decisions and to act. Deconstruction politicizes our actions and evokes a responsibility that cannot be absolved.