Introduction

The introduction begins with a letter found in an archive (FUNVISOL) in Santiago, Chile. Using this as a starting point, the chapter considers the promise of the archive. The promise at stake is not made to those who have disappeared or died alone, but to the community to come, those who will inherit from us. The archive appears at first blush to be the perfect institutional form of the promise of memory. Documents gathered there proclaim the importance of the past and seek to make public these histories as shared concerns. The archive grants survivance, to use Derrida’s term, to the lives and issues contained in the documents collected there. Yet to fulfill and retain its potential vitality, to achieve survivance, the archive walls have to be breached, its contents “breathed back to life,” and creativity invited in. An outline of each chapter is also provided.