The colonial archive and its fictions

Abstract

The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers.But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable.This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around these actors.Case studies are organized around objects made of ink and paper, the same materials as colonial documentation.These cases span a wide temporal range, a broad geographic frame, and a diverse set of period actors.Set out in reverse chronological order, they capture the longing and lament that colonial archives produce.The essay then turns to archival gaps that have been or might be filled, focalizing a range or methods-from historically sanctioned modes of recovery to patently fraudulent fictions-to explore generative methods of probing archival limits.

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