16-01-2023 | Reading Materials

Here is a selection of my key text based resources. To draw on a couple I want to pull out Susan Pearce’s book, ‘On Collecting’ in which she outlines three styles of collection - the souvenir, the fetish, the systematic. I’m particularly interested in the souvenir, which refers back to Alice Rekab and their exhibition, ‘Family Lines’ which makes use of souvenirs from their family archive to help build up a history via the objects themselves, and the oral histories surrounding them. In relation to this, Edmund De Waal’s family memoir, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ discusses the collectible in conjunction with the dissemination of stories. Finally, I’m linking this with the work of writer and mythographer, Marina Warner, whose academic examination of myth, fairytales and metamorphosis underpins my interest in further exploring the significance of the archive’s oral histories and their relationship to a family member’s ideas of their identity, specifically in the case of mixed race backgrounds.

1. Pearce, Susan M, On Collecting, An Investigation into Collecting in The European Tradition, First (Routledge, 1999)

2. De Waal, Edmund, The Hare With Amber Eyes, A Hidden Inheritance, 2011th edn (London, England: Vintage, 2010)

3. Warner, Marina, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds : Ways of Telling the Self, The Clarendon Lectures in English, 1st ed. (5. Feb 2004) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 2001 <https://0-web-p-ebscohost-com.emu.londonmet.ac.uk/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzc1NTgzNF9fQU41?sid=ee242f91-c444-4374-844a-8daf948b16e6@redis&vid=0&format=EB&lpid=lp_1&rid=0> [accessed 11 October 2022]