• 1. Rationale. Authors’ literary papers are precious to cultural heritage and to scholarship, and many have wider popular appeal. They inform literary and biographical studies, textual studies, cognitive studies, and many areas of research. Above all, they are precious because of the information they provide about the creative process and what influences this, recording successive versions, drafts and variations. The preservation of these papers in public institutions will be welcomed by a wide range of users, in various fields of education, lifelong learning, biographical and cultural research and the creative arts, and the wider public. Authors are encouraged to think in terms of each literary work as passing through several archival stages of development and to seek to preserve each stage. When this guidance refers to “papers” this means all of the materials relating to an author's working life, in whatever format— paper or digital, or audiovisual.

• 2. What to keep. Authors may often be tempted to destroy early plans and discarded drafts. These should be kept wherever possible. Libraries and archives are interested in collecting early drafts, notebooks, handwritten and typescript versions, working notes, study notes, and research material in any format. In addition, there is an interest which extends beyond literary research:

• in correspondence: both incoming mail and drafts and copies of outgoing mail; both personal and professional correspondence;

• in emails, audio-visual materials (literary and personal), diaries, journals, and commonplace books;

• in disks, memory-sticks, and computer drives;

• authors’ personal libraries are also of great interest, especially where books and journals are annotated.

All kinds of materials and correspondence relating to literary festivals, reading tours, conferences, seminars and literary organizations should be regarded as an integral part of any author's archive. In determining what to keep, authors should bear in mind that, in addition to illustrating the creative literary process, their papers are likely to have a wider cultural and historical interest. If the literary work has been influenced by visual arts, music, or other forms of expressive culture then the author's information on these, programmes of concerts, exhibitions, and events would also constitute a vital part of a full “author's archive.” In short, all the raw material relating to a writer's life and work is likely to be of interest to an archive service and to researchers.

Diasporic Lives and Natural Archival Homes

The chapters in this book combine a wide variety of subject matter with consistency of theme, bound together by the notion of literary archives as characteristically “diasporic.” Most of the authors of the chapters participated and discussed together during the workshops of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, so, although they did not have the opportunity to read each other's contributions as the book took shape, it is perhaps not surprising that there is a notable consistency and a natural inter-relationship between the points of view expressed in the different essays.

The essays by André Derval, Alison Donnell, Maureen Roberts, and Jennifer Toews all lay stress on the diasporic lives lived by many literary authors, especially but not exclusively in a postcolonial and post-imperialist context. Authors from poorer countries, with fewer job opportunities and a less developed publishing industry at home, often gravitated towards richer countries, when they could. Authors whose origins lie in the former colonies of the Caribbean region or North and West Africa, for example, or in the “protectorates” of the Arab countries and southern Africa, would tend to move between the countries of their birth and the countries of the colonial rulers— for economic, financial, political, and sometimes literary reasons. Many of these diasporic lives were, of necessity, quiet and cautious in the new locations in richer countries, although Maureen Roberts gives us the quite exceptional story of Eric and Jessica Huntley, who, forced out of the then British Guiana because of their political and community activism, became unrelenting political and community activists in London. In many and varied situations, the archival collections have come to reside in the new diasporic destination, in the country of wealth and power and, sometimes, safety. The attitudes of Adonis towards France, C. L. R. James and Una Marson towards Britain, and Octavio Paz towards the USA combine a keen awareness of imperialist imposition with a sense of financial, literary, and even archival necessity. The archives of Octavio Paz are in the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas perhaps primarily for financial reasons whereas the archives of Adonis are in the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine for reasons of a more geopolitical nature, but both archival placements form part of the same wider diasporic pattern.

The essays collected in this book all derive or continue from the recent work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network and illustrate the innovative and exciting range of programmes and actions which it generated. The Network was conceived and planned by a team of archivists, researchers and scholars in the University of Reading during 2010– 2011, and came into existence on January 1, 2012, funded by a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Although the Leverhulme Trust's financial support came to an end in 2015, the Network has continued many of its projects and activities in the subsequent years and retains a clear identity through ongoing cooperation between its members and through regular updating of its website.

From the beginning, the Network proposed to take a comparative, transnational and internationalist approach to studying literary manuscripts, their uses and their significance. It took as its prime starting point the notion that literary archives differ from most other types of archival papers in that their locations are more diverse and difficult to predict; they may have a higher financial value which will lead to their more frequently being purchased— as opposed to being deposited or donated; and acquiring institutions for literary papers have historically had very little by way of collecting policies. Consequently, the collecting of literary papers has often been opportunistic, unexplained and serendipitous.

The first points of comparison for this defining view of the unpredictable mobility of literary papers were the existing sections and the proposed future sections within the International Council on Archives. Using these benchmarks, assessments could be made in contrast with national and regional official papers; archives of local, municipal and territorial government; architectural archives; religious and faith tradition archives; archives of sports and games; political, business, and trade union archives; archives of educational institutions, hospitals, prisons, museums, and palaces; legal, notarial, and judicial papers; parliamentary and political papers; and the archives of international organizations. The comparisons confirmed that no category of archival material was more subject to uncertainty of location and to haphazardness of acquisition.

The National Archives of Namibia signed up with enthusiasm to the Section for Archives of Literature and Art (SLA) of the International Council on Archives in 2010 and then to the emerging Diasporic Literary Archives Network in 2011— on behalf of a country with a strong literary culture but no established practice of collecting literary manuscripts, nor the correspondence and personal papers of literary authors.

Namibia was asked to play the role of the apprentice within the Network and has played that role fully and creatively— moving towards a position where by 2020 it aims to be a model in southern and eastern Africa for the collection and appreciation of literary and cultural papers.

Namibia accepted one of the principal messages of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, which was that literary papers themselves could serve as a key part of the cultural heritage of countries which had achieved their independence within current lifetimes, and could provide a source of national pride, diversity, and identity.

Diversity had always been a prominent feature of cultural archives in Namibia, adding great variety to the archival collections while also sometimes deriving from controversial and painful aspects of national history. There had always been South African authors who lived in Namibia and Namibian authors who lived in South Africa, for example. There were also archival fonds reflecting the colonial past of Namibia, and the successive regimes of Germany, Britain, and South Africa. For the documentation of colonial rule and occupation, the papers of the rulers survived more extensively than papers concerning resistance and the fight for freedom. This is no doubt a general truth found by archivists in newly independent countries, especially when independence has followed wars of liberation. As a result, in Namibia, papers of cultural interest (although not specifically literary) in the German and Afrikaans languages had been collected, as well as in English and in several Namibian languages. Historical literature and diaries of historical interest, in particular, had found their way into the archives, and the letter-journals of the Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi (died 1905), owned by the National Archives of Namibia, had been included on the UNESCOMemory of the World Register as long ago as 2004.