ABSTRACT At no time have archives, and colonial archives in particular—with which the author has worked for some forty years—been so subject to an engagement with the logics of governance, rationales of violence, and the misnomers used for colonial massacres. Rather than substantiations of what “really happened,” young and seasoned scholars are increasingly taken with the archives as sites of tensions and contorted truths, assertions of the proper colonial order of things . . . imperial formations inscribed in a governor’s disapproving scrawl across an archivable document. To underscore again: archives, and not only colonial ones, have emerged not as objects but as subjects of inquiry in their own right. This article’s attention attention turns to where those new forms have taken the field, the sorts of reading they call into play, and the practices such pursuits demand. Seamless narratives of rule are questioned, repetitions are sourced, changes in the nomenclatures of racialized categories invite queries, as vocabularies emerge as mobile and newly altered. Working with and on archives no longer looks the same.
Ann Laura Stoler (Fri,) studied this question.