The Importance of Context

If an archive preserves a zine, does this mean that it also preserves the ability to read and understand that zine as well as its particular significance? Should an archive include more than just the physical zine, such as interviews that might shed some light on the nature of the zines archived?

Historical records tend to favor dominant groups while ignoring marginalized peoples and activities. Popular examples of this include Columbus Day in the United States that is celebrated as the discovery of the Americas rather than the beginning of 500 years of genocide directed toward indigenous peoples; the Norton Anthology of English Literature celebrates culture as if it were largely only the product of white men writing poetry and narratives; and far too many North American high school curriculums celebrate warfare and economic imperialism. These materials tend to focus on the success of people in positions of power while ignoring women, people of color, and those who resist hegemony. One might not expect that an archive interested in zines and punk culture could be subject to the same logic in which some versions of the past dominate alternatives perspectives, but it is a possibility worth thinking about.

Jennifer Douglas questions the ethics of archives and selective archival practices in her article “Toward More Honest Description.” She notes that “archivists tend to view consciously created archives as untrustworthy and essentially unarchival [sic]” (29). As an example, Douglas notes a problem surrounding the Sylvia Plath Materials at Lilly Library at Indiana University. “The Plath collection…might best be seen as the archives of Aurelia Plath’s efforts to tell the story [Aurelia] wanted told,” writes Douglas. “Although the collection…is about Sylvia, it seems to have been largely created by her mother” (34). What exactly is the problem here? As Douglas points out, Plath’s mother wished to present the public with a more wholesome view of her daughter. In effect, Douglas realizes that this curation of Plath’s archives creates a mythic portrayal of Plath’s creative self.

Although this archival collection is nostalgic for Plath’s mother, the archival memory of Plath’s work becomes distorted. Is this a problem if Aeurelia Plath’s intentions are noted? Would self-reflexively acknowledging her own actions help build Sylvia Plath’s archives in the direction of complexity and fullness? Douglas goes on to mention a Douglas Coupland collection that explicitly ignores his male partner in its records. One can imagine this was done not unintentionally but rather as a way of selectively shaping Coupland’s identity, ostensibly without his consent. As we can see, archives can suffer from misremembering, distortion, nostalgia, heartache, and fervent curation.

Douglas suggests that an awareness of how an archive has been organized and to what ends it is curated or created should become part of the “acknowledged context of the records” (29). What does this mean for zine archives, specifically? Which contexts should be included in order to acknowledge how an archive, even inadvertently, tells a story?

Media scholar Red Chidgey recognizes that “archiving feminist zines is not without its methodological and ethical problems” because “there is often an inherent tension between the ephemeral form of zines and the new archiving impulse” precisely because they transform something personal that belonged to a specific historical space and time into some sort of representative expression of the archive in general (668). One is left with zines that one might not be able to make sense of in the ways they were originally intended, especially if their meanings are local and idiosyncratic.       

However, this same urge toward what is personal in a zine might also be a strength of zine archives. Zines are often sites of resistance, highlighting anti-hegemonic subcultural activity. They tend to include autobiographical accounts of movements, politics, and community. Although possibly counterintuitive, it is precisely this personal within the public that becomes salient for zine archiving.

Zine makers themselves act as memory agents using informal memory work methods, including self-reflective first-person accounts and strategic use of cultural and autobiographical ephemera, to critically and creatively theorize the world around them.

Chidgey, 662-3

An archive need not only include primary source material, then, but can also include interviews, first-person accounts, and community knowledge that would potentially not obfuscate the archive but provide a more complete understanding of the material at hand. Chidgey sees the interchange of personal memory and public archives as beneficial to all involved.

The norm of citing your own situated knowledges and experiences provides rich data for scholars looking to map individual lives and community scenes. 

Chidgey 666-7

She argues that zines are not static texts but “mobile, social, and shared documents” that would “benefit from interviews and insights provided by zinemakers themselves” as well as community members. Chidgey hints that rather than moving away from constructions of collections, such as the way Plath’s mother has curated her materials, we should embrace it—as long as we are honest.

The importance of memory-work lies not in discovering authentic experiences or memories, but in understanding ‘how individuals construct their identities, change themselves, reinterpret themselves and see what benefits they derive from doing so’; that is, how people ‘insert themselves into existing structures’.

Chidgey 662

The importance of the relationship of the individual within the community, particularly in relation to the zine, cannot be overstated. Feminist zines are not the only zines which rely on cultural memory and individual recollections. Consider, for a moment, vegan punk zines. Within vegan punk subcultures and zine scholarship, Elizabeth Cherry emphasizes the importance on the link between personal and public:

I analyzed the culture and structure of veganism and punk as subcultures and as lifestyle movements…while keeping the macro-micro link between subcultures, social movements, and individual participants.

If one focuses too narrowly on just veganism and punk, one may miss the other social movements that help to create this part of a punk subculture. Authors themselves may be in the best position to help to tell the story of what led them to publish zines on this topic. Because veganism, like feminism, is multifaceted, personal, and complex, it is important to broaden what an archive can look like. I suspect that this emphasis on the ways in which zines express singular and unique perspectives can be extrapolated to most subcultures’ zines, and perhaps to archives more generally.

As we have seen through the examples of Plath and Coupland, archival practices can be flawed, one-sided, and romanticized or sanitized. I raise these issues to point out that archiving is incredibly important, but that one should be mindful of broadening the spectrum of archives and incorporating cultural context. As Chidgey realizes, “present conditions affect the tellings of older stories” (659).

Archivists, scholars, and readers should celebrate the collaborative nature of zines rather than resist them. Chidgey says that “it is crucial that scholars and heritage workers understand the role and significance of these publications, and that these texts are taken up, exhibited, archived and passed on in ways which creatively and generously maintain the participatory spirit through which they were made” (669).What would this creativity and generosity look like in order to avoid both saccharine romanticism and distortion of the zinemaker’s voices? My hunch is that this would almost always involve collaboration and interviews. And this would broaden what it means to archive and may valuably remove impartiality from the process. This act of context-building can both acknowledge the blurring of lines between the personal, public, and political, as well as provide further information for readers of the archives.

By Britt MacKenzie-Dale