A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction

generational feminisms. Zines, she concludes, have links to earlier grassroots feminist media practices, including the mimeographed manifestos that were widely produced and distributed by second-wave feminists. As such, Eichhorn points to the limitations of segregating generational feminisms into a series of successive ‘waves’ that celebrate ‘newness’ rather than feminism’s enduring practice of historical cross-pollination. While Eichhorn is certainly not the first to critique the reifying tendencies implicated by the ‘wave’ metaphor, this example demonstrates how zines may be seen as an extension of the rich media practices of feminist communities across history. Such insights convincingly illustrate how feminist archives enact their own disorderly encounters and uncanny moments of proximity which, far from preserving the archive’s fixed relation to the past, allow the past and the present to be imagined differently. Thus for Eichhorn the subversive potential of the feminist archive lies in the way it continues to legitimise forms of cultural production and political alliances at risk by a neoliberal investment in entrepreneurial individualism. While Eichhorn’s compelling investigations of the archive’s complex field of cultural production (donating, collecting, cataloguing) give us a rare insight into the important intellectual and logistical work carried out by archivists and librarians, the book also tackles the trickier question of what is at stake, politically and culturally, for the future of feminism. In other words it brings into view some of the tensions that continue to define feminism – as a site of activism and politics as well as a site of scholarly and intellectual engagement. Refreshingly, the book never attempts to resolve this tension but convincingly argues that feminism’s emotional investment in outrage lives on in the archive, strengthening contemporary feminism as a form of genealogical politics. This is an original and perceptive book that provides an exemplary interdisciplinary model for future work on archives, all the while demonstrating the archive’s central importance to the kinds of stories we tell about feminism’s past, present and future.