The British Cartoon Archive

Policing the Boundaries of the Archive

Posted: 2 July 2010 - 11:39am

The British Cartoon Archive holds the national collection of political and social-comment cartoons. Founded in 1973, its collection now includes around 150,000 original drawings, and 90,000 cuttings from national newspapers and magazines. Its website at www.cartoons.ac.uk has a catalogue of 125,000 British political cartoons, and is a major academic resource.

 

Most of the exhibitions mounted by the BCA involve material from its core collection of political cartoons. But this exhibition, organised for the British Comparative Literature Association’s “Archive” conference, looks instead at the margins of the collection. It is here, on the boundaries, that the process of defining the archive takes place, and only by constantly policing those boundaries can the activity of collecting be contained.

The BCA shows itself to the public as an academic archive of political cartoons. But it is in this liminal world of obscene postcards, accordions, policemen’s helmets, and Italian underpants that the process of definition really takes place.