Unsettling Feelings: Colonial Archives, Decolonial Possibilities

Abstract How does the turn to colonial archives in social research connect to decolonial politics? In this paper, we explore this relationship by attending to the affective experience of encountering archival materials. While we affirm the epistemic and political limitations of the colonial archive—its necropolitical constitution, its systematic silencing in the formation of colonial reason—we argue that accounting for the affective registers in which archival encounters happen can allow for epistemic openings that make possible novel forms of decolonial political subjectivity. While there is nothing inherent about the archive in producing decolonial politics, we maintain that by interrupting the everyday modes of engaging with coloniality such affective encounters contain within them the possibility of appreciations for the constitutive role of colonialism in contemporary political orders as well as imaginations of decolonial solidarities and subjectivities.