Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams lead a cast of renowned scholars to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the mechanisms of power that have shaped the nineteenth-century archive, to ask: What is a nineteenth-century archive, broadly defined? This landmark collection of essays will broach critical and topical questions about how the complex discourses of power involved in constructions of the nineteenth-century archive have impacted, and continue to impact, constructions of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond academic confines. The essays, written from a range of disciplinary perspectives, grapple with urgent problems of how to deal with potentially sensitive nineteenth-century archival items, both within academic scholarship and in present-day public-facing institutions, which often reflect erotic, colonial and imperial, racist, sexist, violent, or elitist ideologies. Each contribution grapples with these questions from a range of perspectives: Musicology, Classics, English, History, Visual Culture, and Museums and Archives. The result is far-reaching historical excavation of archival experiences.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction: Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive, Rachel Bryant Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams Part I: Archival Ownership 2. ‘Found in Store’: Working with Source Communities and Difficult Objects at Durham University’s Oriental Museum, Rachel Barclay, Lauren Barnes, Gillian Ramsay, Craig Barclay, and Helen Armstrong 3. Transforming the Archive of Slavery at the Tropenmuseum, Adiva Lawrence 4. Maqdala and the South Kensington Museum: 150 Years Later, Alexandra Watson Jones Part II: Colonial Power 5. Encountering Colonial Science in the Visual Archive: The natural history paintings of Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore (1777–1832), David Lowther 6. Enclosing Archival Sound: Colonial Singing as Discipline and Resistance, Erin Johnson-Williams 7. The Infantilisation of Indigeneity in Colonial Australia, Roisín Laing 8. ‘Some Nameless, Dreadful Wrong’: Reading the Silencing of Police Rape in the Indian Colonial Archive, Deana Heath Part III: Biographical Silences 9. Completing the Mosaic: Sara Baartman and the Archive, Tiziana Morosetti 10. Mercury, Sulphur Baths, and Fine Art: Censorship and the Sexual Health of John and Joséphine Bowes, Founders of The Bowes Museum, Judith Phillips 11. Empowering the Invisible: The Archival Legacy of Christian Cole, Philip Burnett Part IV: Layered Archives 12. The Power of Invisibility: Nursing Nuns and Archival Gatekeeping, Jemima Short 13. The Instability and Ideology of the Archive: Archival Evidence and Nineteenth-Century British Theatre Audiences, Jim Davis 14. ‘Our Mind Strives to Restore the Mutilated Forms’: Nineteenth-Century Virtual Museum Tours in Children’s Periodicals, Rachel Bryant Davies Afterword, Intersectional Albertopolis, Tim Barringer Index