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One perception is in its literal sense of a place where it is imagined as a stable source of knowledge. Much of history has been produced through this understanding, and many still consider the archive to "speak for itself" without acknowledging the inherent biases, neglect, and erasure that occurs through archiving. More critical views of the archive acknowledge these power dynamics and are attempting to grapple with the silences and spaces.

This place is being re-thought because of the hegemonic notions it produces of particular peoples and places. There has been a movement toward interrogating the archive, learning to read between the spaces, one particular form is through speculative history through the traces left to work with. While subaltern studies acknowledged early on these power dynamics of the archive, some scholars more recently have taken the political move to disrupt the hegemonic practices of producing history through the archive.

Women, and people of color have historically been marginalized from being included in the archive. Peoples and communities have also been misrepresented through the archive which often leads to biased representation.

The symptom of toxicity in the archive begins with exclusion which produces gaps and emptiness. The overrepresentation of particular people and ideas are utilized to create history through a bias lens, imposing a kind of toxic violence.

It is the other way around. Essentialized constructions of people and places are mobilized through the archive and toxics of exclusion.

The notion of "trace" in the archive becomes more of a remedy to toxicity. Trace comes to mean a slight sign of what is excluded, a means of interrogating the silences in the archive.

"We are all Flint." Toxicity is generalized, spoken of as an issue impacting everyone equally. Much like "All Lives Matter," it presumes that toxicity has consequences for all who drink water. This statement is professionalized: according to doctors, journalists, and activisits, lead is an ongoing presence in everyday lives of all Americans, especially in older cities. Yet this discounts the fact that America is a place built on enduring racial and economic inequalities.

Toxic solidarities? When does solidarity take a toxic turn?The toxicity in this case is actually a misrepresentation of the toxicity itself. In an effort to promote solidarity and attention after the Flint water crisis, activists across the country argued “We are all Flint.” This statement argued that we (how is the we visualized in an American context? Nicole Fleetwood’s Intro to Troubling Vision: performance, Visuality, and Blackness might be good to think with this) are all vulnerable to toxicity in our water. Fennel argues this whitewashes the crisis in Flint.

In this case, the toxicity isn’t necessarily the chemicals themselves, but the imposed mismanagement from a structural and hierarchical level.  AND Fennel argues the real toxicity is the complete misunderstanding of the Flint Crisis as solely a water crisis. What about the role of “financially toxic housing?” To think of water infrastructures as separate, as a public good, and housing infrastructures as private and outside the notion of a public good, is the toxicity.

In “Are We All Flint,” Catherine Fennel describes toxicity’s relationship to infrastructure in the context of Flint, Michigan. In a town imagined as “staggered by waves of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and abandonment,” the image of crumbling infrastructures is how this place become essentialized. Fennel troubles this narrative, but we can see the damage. If something is crumbling or in decay, there’s justification for revival for interference. In the case of Flint, there’s justification for state oversight.