ARCHIVES AND JUSTICE: A SOUTH AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE is collection of Verne Harris's best writing during the first decade of South Africa's post-apartheid democracy. Harris is the project director of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg. While South Africa is his immediate context, Harris always engages wider geographical and conceptual worlds.

The volume is organized into five sections. "Discourses" illuminates Harris's engagement with writings and discussions related to archives. "Narratives," the second section, "explores the stories that archivists tell in certain domains of professional work-appraisal, electronic recordmaking, and arrangement and description." The third and fourth sections, "Politics and Ethics" and "Pasts and Secrets," recount and reflect on events and issues with which Harris has wrestled as a South African archivist. The op-eds contained in the final section, "Actualities," provide evidence of Harris's "deliberate endeavors to bring awareness of archive to popular debates in South Africa."

Drawing on the energies of Derridean deconstruction, Harris 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.

"Harris has a formidable intellect and writes extremely well. His style is engaging...He shares with Derrida the ability to deconstruct his own language as he goes along. A wealth of unexpected semantic interplay is revealed as he does this and a great deal of wit."
--MALCOLM TODD, Parlimentary Archives, BUSINESS ARCHIVES: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE(May 2008)

"With Archives and Justice, Harris invites the reader to enter into an ever-evolving and unfolding dialogue about the nature of the archive, records, and memory; their significance in the lives of individuals, communities, and societies; and the roles and responsibilities of archivists...Above all else, Harris urges us to question, to contest, to trouble, to undefine and redefine, our professional and societal assumptions, stories, and narratives."
--JENNIFER A. MARSHALL, School of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina, THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST 71:2 (Fall/Winter 2008)

"Harris's writings are written with candour and are full of illuminating anecdotes...Harris ably connects the local with the international, demonstrating how lessons learned by archives in South Africa are relevant to the global archival community."
--HEATHER DEAN, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, NEW ENGLAND ARCHIVISTS NEWSLETTER, April 2010

Foreword: Archival Music: Verne Harris and the Cracks of Memory
Terry Cook
Introduction: Reaching for Hospitality

SECTION I: DISCOURSES
Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of
Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa
On (Archival) Odyssey(s)
A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive
Concerned with the Writings of Others: Archival
Canons, Discourses, and Voices
“Something Is Happening Here and You Don’t
Know What It Is”: Jacques Derrida Unplugged

SECTION II: NARRATIVES
Exploratory Thoughts on Current State Archives
Service Appraisal Policy and the Conceptual
Foundations of Macroappraisal
Postmodernism and Archival Appraisal: Seven Theses
Law, Evidence, and Electronic Records: A Strategic
Perspective from the Global Periphery Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings with Wendy M. Duff
The Record, the Archive, and Electronic Technologies in South Africa

SECTION III: POLITICS AND ETHICS
Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public
Archives and Society in Transition, 1990–1996
Knowing Right from Wrong: The Archivist and
the Protection of People’s Rights
Archives, Identity, and Place: A Dialogue on What It (Might) Mean(s) to be an African Archivist
with Sello Hatang
The Archive Is Politics
“A World Whose Horizon Can Only Be Justice”:
Toward a Politics of Recordmaking

SECTION IV: PASTS AND SECRETS
Toward a Culture of Transparency: Public Rights
of Access to Offi cial Records in South Africa
with Christopher Merrett
Contesting Remembering and Forgetting:
The Archive of South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission
“They should have destroyed more”: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–1994
Using the Promotion of Access to Information
Act (PAIA): The Case of the South African
History Archive
Unveiling South Africa’s Nuclear Past
with Sello Hatang and Peter Liberman

SECTION V: ACTUALITIES
Actualities: Telling Truths about the TRC Archive

Index