Glen McGillivray, ed. Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: Hidden Archives of Performance, edited by Glen McGillivray (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)

Abstract

Editor Glen McGillivray has compiled this collection that features twelve case studies examining the nature of the archive; and, in particular, the challenges that performance and theatre studies researchers face when they conduct archival research. The AusStage database project was the impetus for this anthology, as many of the authors in Scrapbooks were involved in establishing the online resource designed to help researchers research live performance in Australia. The authors write evocatively of being in ‘[s]ummer’s great room’ (McGillivray, 21), of being ‘captives of the archive’ (Casey, 30), and how in ‘the empty house’ (Card, 129), they search for the ‘accidents of survival’ (Hall, 105) that leak from ‘battered suitcases’ (123).