This article seeks to investigate the relationship between the National English Literary Museum (NELM) and the perceived legacy of its founding personality, Guy Butler. In so doing, the article unpacks the varied historic and contemporary responses to the institutional and cultural work of Guy Butler, while casting Butler as an archival ‘patriarch’, using Derrida’s Archive Fever ([1995] 1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press) as a theoretical framework. The article explores the conceptual reach of the term ‘archive’ according to contemporary South African academic archive studies, and posits that under this academic perspective the work of NELM and the legacy of Butler might be considered ‘archival’. The article concludes that Butler’s work on behalf of the institution of literary academia and historiography in the latter half of the twentieth century might be connected to the nineteenth century colonial roots of many of South Africa’s knowledge institutions, and that conceptually, the archive, the library, and the museum, are imbricated in a South African geography of coloniality. The article closes with a consideration of NELM’s contemporary moment, given the fraught relationship that South Africa is presently experiencing with its own heritage institutions.

中文翻译：

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Guy Butler 和 NELM 的文学项目：有争议的历史

本文旨在调查国家英语文学博物馆 (NELM) 与其创始人盖伊·巴特勒 (Guy Butler) 的遗产之间的关系。在这样做的过程中，这篇文章利用德里达的档案热（[1995] 1996.芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社）解开对盖伊·巴特勒的制度和文化工作的各种历史和当代反应，同时将巴特勒塑造为档案“族长”作为一个理论框架。本文根据当代南非学术档案研究探讨了“档案”一词的概念范围，并假设在这种学术视角下，NELM 的工作和巴特勒的遗产可能被视为“档案”。文章得出结论，巴特勒在 20 世纪下半叶代表文学学术界和史学机构的工作可能与南非许多知识机构的 19 世纪殖民根源有关，并且从概念上讲，档案、图书馆和博物馆都融入了南非的殖民地理环境。考虑到南非目前与其自己的遗产机构之间的紧张关系，本文最后考虑了 NELM 的当代时刻。