In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault characterizes the permanent, conflictual relationship that exists “between the two groups that constitute the social body and shape the State [as] in fact one of … permanent warfare” (Reference Foucault, Bertani, Fontana, Ewald, Fontana and Macey2003: 88). Foucault argues that acknowledging that “race wars” constitute the substructure of the state enables a new conception of power, one that is simultaneously implicated in knowledge regarding the source of that power: re-conceptualizing the bases of power also demands a shift in knowledge practices. This problem (of power/knowledge) was administrative/managerial from the start: it constituted the conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign power, and was itself sovereign-like. “The administration allows the king to rule the country at will, and subject to no restrictions. And conversely, the administration rules the king thanks to the quality and nature of the knowledge it forces upon him” (ibid.: 128–29). Foucault asserts that historical knowledge is produced at precisely this juncture, as a form of counter-knowledge that is the outgrowth of a race war or class war, in which the nobility seek to defend society—their society—from new challengers, “the people,” for example, as well as from the sovereign himself. Thus, modern history germinated as a form of knowledge against absolutist sovereign power, but it was grafted onto the edifice of the state to buttress the sovereign's threatened legitimacy. Thus, “From 1760 onward we see the emergence of institutions that were roughly the equivalent of a ministry of history” (Reference Foucault, Bertani, Fontana, Ewald, Fontana and Macey2003: 130 ff).

“Ministries of history” have indeed played a vital role in shaping how historians think about their craft, beginning with Jules Michelet's discovery of the forgotten voices that allowed him to write a (people's) history of the French nation. With its dual association of public access and state control, the archive appears to enable practices of publicity and the public revelation of secrets, producing the “reality effect” that is so seductive to disciplinary historians. When Nietzsche deplored “the consuming fever of history” for its relentless search for origins, however, it was because history's relationship to sovereign power compromised all efforts to disentangle history from a history of the state. As Jacques Derrida argues, the archive's relationship with law—with archon, or the magistrate, and with arkheion, his residence—renders all history an autobiography of the state. Given this relationship between history and sovereignty, the archival secret is that history varies with its mode of narration and memorialization: while it consists of facts, the sense of these facts is contingent on how they are arranged.

The books under review were written by disciplinary historians and a historical anthropologist, and they underscore the performative quality of historical narrative, its structures of concealment and disclosure, of mediation and materialization. Together and separately, the books engage with the subjects and objects that constitute figure and ground, the instantiation of and enabling context for doing history. These books examine history's transformation into artifact, and they suggest that not all history is textual, that not all texts are hegemonic, and that there are subjects who seek to make their own history even as they struggle to make history own them. Most importantly, however, these are books about bodies—gendered bodies, bodies of lack, national bodies, and the bodies imagined by politics and poetry. They expand the idea of the archive by showing how minoritarian subjects—the refugee, women with bound feet, the working poor, women without political rights—can demand but also refuse recognition. They point to the limits of historical narrative and imagination by alluding to the truths that emanate from—in Dorothy Ko's memorable phrase—the “stubbornness of bodies,” those forms of embodiment and alterity that resist the histories that seek to humanize them.

While Dust and Cinderella's Sisters offer object lessons in social and cultural history, Genres of Recollection both extends and focuses these concerns. Papailias offers a theoretically rigorous account of the materiality of historical practice, arguing that history is a form of narrative enabled by archival infrastructure. By examining the belatedness of a national historiography, and of the relationship between history and trauma in the identity of modern Greece, Papailias also proffers a powerful account of history as a form of memory-work, enabled by objects and artifacts that have only slowly acquired the status of historical evidence. Mrinalini Sinha, too, explores how a particular material object has “become historical,” namely, Katherine Mayo's book Mother India (1927), which equated Indians' incapacity for sexual self-regulation with their political ineptitude for self-government. Sinha focuses with imagination and insight on material outcomes, and addresses Mother India's unanticipated role in catalyzing debates about the relationship between Indian women, political rights, and the colonial state across national and imperial formations.

Though these books strain against the limits of disciplinary history, they neither reject the archive nor focus solely on its entanglements with the modern state. They examine the constitution of subaltern selves and their intense, if thwarted, desire for archival recognition. If these are books about desire, they are also centrally concerned with its historical formation, and with the desire for history. In Genres of Recollection, Papailias addresses the archive as a specific kind of object: it is an ordering of people and things that, in turn, produces popular desires to mimic both the ordered regularity and institutional authority of disciplinary history. By “turning the archive into the ethnographic field” and exploring the everyday life of the historical imagination, Papailias addresses the emergence of popular history and personal archives, an expansive (and expanding) domain of production by so-called amateurs without training in disciplinary history. Personal archives are suspect, but they compensate for archival shortcomings, which are both potent and poignant given Philhellenism's imagination of Greece as the origin of Western civilization. Papailias's “archival poetics” emphasizes the double labor of mediation and materialization: “In introducing a materiality sorely lacking in treatment of history as narrative, a theory of archive draws attention to the political economy of historical production” (p. 11). But because history is also an “ethical response to the discourse of others” (1), an ethnography of the archive should trace the semiotic processes through which things and people attain significance, and the modes of emplotment through which their histories “matter.”

Genres is an ethnography of archival acts: publications of urban histories by amateur historians, the establishment of a refugee archive documenting the lives of ethnic Greeks in Asia Minor relocated to Greece in the 1920s, a literary account of the Greek civil war of 1946–1949 and the defeat of the Communists, and the memoir of an early-twentieth-century Greek migrant to the United States. Papailias is lyrically attentive to the technological mediations of popular memory, such as sound recordings, note taking, and photographs. These are mechanisms through which the (amateur) historian emerges as witness to the “small voice of history” (Guha Reference Rajan1996). Personal archives become repositories of popular memory by enacting a distrust of the historian's habitus, and a disregard for the rules governing note taking, record keeping, and citation. These archives are enabled, however, by the democratization of history: everyone who has memory is a potential repository of history, and new publics and practices of commemoration are being inaugurated.

Sinha, too, focuses on the question of publicity. By situating Mayo's Mother India within what she calls an “imperial social formation,” she examines how publicity shapes the intersection of the staggered temporalities of national, imperial, and global frames to produce the eventfulness of the event. Sinha's book fundamentally transforms our understanding of the inter-war period. The debate over Mother India was symptomatic of a broader shift away from the British focus on infrastructural power and toward biopolitical models of imperial control. The latter were favored by the United States and by para-state actors such as the Rockefeller Foundation and other international organizations. The controversy over the book was situated as well at a political conjuncture that enabled a political critique of colonial domination to be linked with women's demands for rights and representation. Rather than limiting her analysis to a literal sequence of political events, Sinha points to a larger force field whose operations we can refer to as “publicity.” They produced a series of symbolic and virtual effects that instantiated, in this case, a crisis of empire.

Specters of Mother India and Genres of Recollection both approach publicity as that set of practices and strategies that make subterranean logics visible. Papailias is particularly attentive to how secreted logics can be differently articulated and thus transformed through the mediations of publicity. This is akin to the practice of “enframing” that Timothy Mitchell—drawing on Heidegger—describes as the ideological work of rendering concept into image, of materializing, or visually condensing, regnant structures of knowledge and power (Reference Mahmood1991). In other words, publicity is the result of mediation, and, in turn, it structures or frames historical contingency.

If Papailias and Sinha address the emergence of new publics, Carolyn Steedman, in keeping with her earlier psychobiography of working-class girlhood, Landscape for a Good Woman, addresses the invisibility of working-class desire and self-making. Although Dust is structured by a doggedly empiricist refutation of Derrida's Archive Fever, it aptly extends Steedman's interest in object histories beyond the use and abuse of objects into a concern with the people who made them.

Like Genres of Recollection, Dust is an account of the archive's materiality, but Steedman emphasizes that materiality in order to counter the invisibility of certain forms of life and labor in the archive. She begins with an account of the physical disfigurements that historians and other “literary persons” suffered due to “want of exercise … from the curved position of the body, and the too ardent exercise of the brain” (21). It was not merely that the body was contorted into unnatural shapes when reading. By the mid-nineteenth century the emerging field of occupational disease declared that books, the love object of the intellectual, were also toxic: legers and folios made of red-orange East India leather were routinely described as disease-producing “red rot,” and leather was understood to be an incubator for anthrax. Dust begins with an account of the historian's habitat as the locus of disease, and ends with a discussion of the stigmatized labor that enabled the historian's romance with the archive: the rag pickers and refuse workers central to the underground economy of collecting and recycling what was called “dust,” which was the material base for paper. For Steedman, the ethical task of the historian is to connect objects with the laboring bodies that produced them.

Understanding the connections between Chinese female subjectivity and bound feet is more complex, especially when one is tracing the transformation of the bound foot from sexual fetish to object of missionary and nationalist revulsion. In Ko's Cinderella's Sisters, the complex transaction between woman's status as “subject” and “object” is mediated through the shoe, a product of female labor and an instrument of female subjection. Through a dazzling account of the literary and visual archive of footbinding across seven hundred years, Ko challenges the separation of production from consumption—women made the shoes, while men fantasized about women with bound feet—that enabled the elevation of footbinding to the status of a “traditional practice,” and later, into an object of nationalist outrage and activism. Early-twentieth-century nationalists embraced tianzu, or “natural feet,” and engaged in the fangzu, or “letting out feet” campaigns. But they did not abolish the visual and literary culture around the “heavenly lotus” so much as they substituted for it a new culture of spectacle. Nationalists “turn[ed] the female body inside out” (42) through photos and x-rays of deformed feet, and women with bound feet became anachronistic forms of life, relics of the past without a place in the space-time of the Chinese modern.

Marx argued that the commodity was a “social hieroglyphic” that asked to be read because it was the material sign, the place-holder, of the social forgetting necessary to capitalist relations. While Papailias is attentive to the subject's desire for objectification for purposes of historical narration, Steedman underscores the extraordinary power that goods and objects—congealed forms of labor—have over those deprived of them. She addresses the working-class interior as a still life, but not to show that this interior was the product of bourgeois imagination, conceived by social commentators who thought it was “built upon the scavengings of the poor” (116). Rather, she explains how it was fashioned lovingly, replete with those very objects whose lack defined the deprivations of working-class life. Alternatively, Ko's focus on the shoe allows her to write about the practice of footbinding from outside received genealogies of the liberal subject (including feminism), in order to challenge the dominant representational modes—pain, suffering, and sexual fetish—through which the story of footbinding has been narrated. Ko notes that the modern discourse of footbinding makes the practice synonymous with either the erotic or the crippled body. What is forgotten is that “a pair of shapely bound feet was the lifelong handiwork of women” (323). Such bodily and sensory histories chart the terrain between subjection and subjectivity and, by so doing, address alternative histories of the commodity and its relationship to the female body.

Just as memory is a powerful alternative to history, so too are sanctioned forms of forgetting. Papailias discusses a new political subject, “the refugee,” whose emergence predated the juridical subject that was produced in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, and whose existence challenges efforts to forget historic violation. The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” in 1922, which saw the mass expulsion of historic ethnic Greek communities of Asia Minor, was a violent climax to Turkish acts of ethnic cleansing and Greek irredentism that preceded the final collapse of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the modern Turkish state. This was followed by the first compulsory population exchange in modern history: in the name of ethnic and religious homogeneity, one and a half million Greek Orthodox of Turkey and four hundred thousand Muslims of Greece were relocated to their supposed national-religious “homelands.” In Greece, the famous oral history project inaugurated by Melpo Merlier represented the Anatolian refugees as subjects of suffering, and sought to redeem them by capturing their experiences. Ordinary persons became legible as survivors who had witnessed catastrophe, but they were also relegated to remaining visual icons and artifacts of the Greek presence in Asia Minor, and tenuous objects of compassion.

Such a story of rescue and redress sits uneasily with another slice of political history, the intimacy of civil war and the defeat of the Communists in Greece between 1946 and 1949. This is censored history, which can only be written as fiction. It is threatening precisely because, unlike efforts to cast refuges as victims and emblems of national loss, it presents alternative political imaginaries and challenges the state form. While the state forgets, the Communists commemorate. A controversial 1994 novel, Thannassis Valtinos' Orthokosta, avoids the comfort of both positions and critiques both state violence and Communist counter-violence. Orthokosta portrays Communists' acts of revenge and retribution as inflicting a profound violence of their own, troubling ideologically bifurcated portrayals of the Communist past. Papailias, in a rich theoretical meditation on the relationship between literature, trauma, and history, addresses the ethical dilemmas raised by the structure of this text. It embeds testimonies and first-person narratives within the novel in order to “enact a new way of mourning the war that brought personal experience into the public domain to redefine, not multiply, historical knowledge” (177). Papailias observes that literature, by simulating historical knowledge, can highlight the omissions of history.

Similarly, women's labor, whether weaving or embroidery, was occluded by the fascination with footbinding, a residual practice from another time. This was fully realized by the urban dandies who between 1934 and 1941 compiled Pickled Radishes, a pornographic encyclopedia and exhaustive archive of footbinding. By then the radish lovers' erotic encounter with the bound foot was nostalgic: by holding the foot, these men beheld the work of time in a very specific sense. Cinderella's Sisters reminds us that the modern discourse of footbinding is one of anti-footbinding, and of exposing bound feet as deformed objects. Ko's history of footbinding focuses, instead, on the changing ratio between three kinds of time—the cosmological, the sociological, and the bodily—that map onto the idea, practice, and experience of footbinding, respectively. Politics of liberal universalism underwrote the nationalist politics of exposure and, as Papailias observes, enabled the recent turn to testimony and memory. By contrast, literary discourses from the twelfth century celebrated concealed feet: sexualized descriptions of feet were exercises in literary excess and circumlocution. By the sixteenth century, this had culminated in the elevation of footbinding into an elite practice, and enabled an extensive market in fashionable footwear with women as “designers, makers, and wearers of sleeping shoes or arched high heels, [who] engineered an artifice of concealment and illusion, thereby manipulating the viewer's gaze” (212). In becoming elite, footbinding had also become “natural.” Vernacular plays from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasized the social labor of caring for bound feet, and “the density and tactility of things [women] produced and consumed corporeally” (182). By highlighting the incommensurability between Chinese cultural practice and dominant frames of female emancipation, Cinderella's Sisters lucidly counters the problematic envelopment of the feminist subject within Western liberal norms.Footnote ¹

Ko embraces female embodiment as lived alterity, a position that forecloses a “political” resolution to the culturally over-determined problematic of female subjectivity. By contrast, Mrinalini Sinha seeks to carve out a space within political liberalism for feminist emancipation. In Specters of Mother India, she focuses on two related questions: Are women a political collectivity? What are the grounds for their claim to enfranchisement? While these are enduring concerns for feminist scholars and activists, women's awkward position between community and state transformed debates over suffrage in India, and produced alternative genealogies of subject formation more broadly. For instance, Joan Scott has made the important argument that the demand for female suffrage generated a tension between sexual difference and political equality in French political thought (1996). In India, however, the issue of sexual difference was complicated by the mediatory role of community: gender was differently political with regard to community and state. The colonial response to the problem of female emancipation was to castigate tradition, especially the customary practices of Hindu upper-castes, and to use the state as a vehicle for social reform, while the nationalists recuperated women as symbols of a transformed tradition. If anti-colonial nationalism reprised or revalued the relationship between “the social” and “the political” domains, gender played a central role in this maneuver: anti-colonial nationalists relegated women to the inner recesses of community while simultaneously arguing that gender could best be modernized from within the community. Sinha examines a third conjuncture, however, and thereby complicates arguments regarding the derivative and reactive nature of anti-colonial thought. She addresses the inter-war years, when demands for self-government enabled a partial nationalization of the state, which came to be viewed as the arbiter of gender justice. Sinha explores the history of “an agonistic or truly adversarial liberalism” (13) by focusing on demands by women from all communities for criminalizing child marriage (and the passing of the 1929 Sarda Act) in response to the Mother India controversy. Because gender was a form of embodied particularism, it was also the category through which universal citizenship was imagined in the colony: for a brief while, the citizen-subject was imagined as female. Why, then, did the bid for political rights for women fail so spectacularly?Footnote ²

Debates about political safeguards for women shuttled between two positions: “that women's interests are valid only within the collective interests of religious communities, or a view of them as entirely apart and separate from all other social relations” (Sinha, 245). The choice was understood as between universalism or abstract equality, and particularism. In this case, an unmarked “equality” won out over the demand for special safeguards. This inadvertently aligned women with the same structural position occupied by upper-class, upper-caste Hindu men (245). Thus, a political resolution to the problem of female emancipation was impossible in colonial India because elite upper-caste women did not understand the position of women from minority communities. The latter continually staged their incommensurable identities, for example, as women, Muslims, or Muslim women. Without engaging with “the religious,” women could not redress their political marginality. Greater attention to the limits of liberal secularism might have sharpened Sinha's analysis of the enduring legacy of colonial categorization, especially regarding the politicization of the religious domain.

These books provide compelling accounts of what historians do with the texts, objects, and bodies that appear before them, torn from their social and political moorings, as parts standing for wholes, fragments of an impossible totality. Vulnerable subjects appear in these texts as political collectivities, as subjects of corporal violence and regulation, and as objects of epistemic erasure. These studies remind us that the archive is in part the archive of loss, a missing presence that must be reconstituted through two simultaneous operations: interpreting the significance of that absence, and reclaiming the possibility of insurrectionary speech through archival fragments. If the relationship between persons and things is at the heart of received Western accounts of political subject formation, these object histories address the other bodies of political reason, thereby transforming our understanding of the perceptual field that is history. Representatives of the new history, these books help to transform the political: they de-center and disperse its field of effectivity, and pose aggressive claims of contemporary sovereignty against reigning orthodoxy. In doing so, with empathy and imagination, they raise the stakes in the race or class war to which Foucault referred.