Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective

A collection of Verne Harris's best writing during the first decade of South Africa's postapartheid democracy. While South Africa is his immediate context, Harris always engages wider geographical and conceptual worlds. He insistently explores two intersecting nexuses-archives and justice, local and global. Drawing on the energies of Derridean deconstruction, he suggests an ethics, and a politics, expressed in the maxim "memory for justice." And he portrays the work of archives as a work of critical importance to the building of democracy.

Terry Cook in the forward to the book says:
"Verne gives us the poetry and music of a new archive, and so many rich arguments for freeing ourselves from constraining shibboleths so that archives may be transformed for justice. In the new archive, ever opening, never fixed or closed, respecting story, inviting multiple stories, people in society will in turn be free from the meta-narratives of power."

To find out more about the book or order a copy go to: http://www.archivists.org/catalog/pubDetail.asp?objectID=2145