The Hawthorn Archive

The Hawthorn Archive: letters from the utopian margins, by Avery Gordon, is a repository of conversations, intimate epistolary exchange and critical public manifesto, introspective and declaratory commentary.Its interventions are both acute and startlingly applicable across broad swathes of social thought.Gordon demonstrates the skill of a seasoned curator fluent in the power of association, intertextuality, and the multiple registers and textures possible in the presentation of textual and visual material.If conventional historical work is imagined to be a freighter, moving smoothly over the sea, shifting neatly stacked aluminium containers, The Hawthorn Archive presents the containers and their spoils and riches, crashing and partially submerged in the violence of the waves, acknowledging that this turbulence, and the effects of the encounter on our perceptive range, are also constitutive of the archive.In this way, The Hawthorn Archive resists a naive reading of the terrain and climate of the archive -its thick, disciplinary gloss.Instead, it takes on a much more layered, complex and, in many ways, realistic view of historical engagement.These are the utopian margins, the picture beyond the frame of the idyllic, where envisioning history is in contention with linear configurations of time and uncritical, unimaginative reliance on historical 'fact

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