Fragments of Relatedness: Writing, Archiving, and the Vicissitudes of Kinship

This article considers an archive of letters written by three generations of female kin as offering a form for thinking about the nature of kin relations. It tells the story of how the archive came into being, and examines the ways writing and archiving makes visible the shifting relations that constitute kinship. Highlighting the narrative acts of selected letters, it grapples with the failure of things being properly ‘passed on’ within the web of kinship, as well as the potential that this failure generates.