In different parts of the world, the gesture of making private archives public is becoming increasingly common. Family archives, photo albums and cookbooks, diaries, and other forms of private writing that have remained for decades in drawers and storage spaces are now being published, exhibited or incorporated into new creative projects. This tendency is enabled both by the technological change, such as wider accessibility to printing and self-publishing, but also the desire to recover, revive and revalue forms of vernacular and previously marginal cultural production and narratives.

This seminar aims to reflect on the gesture of rendering private archives public and on its various implications. Drawing on fieldwork experiences in Egypt and France (where this gesture took an official form with the creation of the Association for Autobiography in 1992), it envisions a roundtable discussion as a starting point of a future wider conversation. It suggests some preliminary questions: What do the increasing possibilities of self-publishing do to private archives? How does the retrieval of private archives become part of literary plots in contemporary literature? How is the decision made about which particular parts of an archive to make public? How can the junk, or archives that have been discarded, forgotten, or sold in flea markets, become a corpus for scholarly study? And what are the legal implications of such gesture, particularly in terms of privacy and intellectual property rights? Are we witnessing an epistemic shift that makes previously intimate histories interesting to a wider public?