Unarchived Histories

<p>For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled <i>within</i> – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume.</p><p>Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.</p> <p>1. Unarchived Histories: The "Mad" and the "Trifling" <strong>Part 1: </strong><strong>The State and its Record(s) </strong>2. Peasant as Alibi: An Itinerary of the Archive of Colonial Panjab 3. A Death Without Cause: Mary E. Hutchinson’s Un-archived Life in Certified Death 4. "Standard Deviations": On Archiving the Awkward Classes in Northern Peru <strong>Part 2: </strong><strong>Everyday as Archive </strong>5. Feminine Ecriture, Trace Objects and the Death of Braj 6. Brown Privilege, Black Labor: Uncovering the Significance of Creole Women’s Work 7. Unfriendly Thresholds: On Queerness, Capitalism and Misanthropy in 19th Century America <strong>Part 3: </strong><strong>Signs of Wonder </strong>8. Of Kings and Gods: The Archive of Sovereignty in a Princely State 9. Geography’s Myth: The Many Origins of Calcutta 10. Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak </p>