Up Against the Archive
Experiments in Writing British Empire History Otherwise
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Publishing:5th Jan '27
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 5th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In essays covering five centuries of British imperialism and a variety of genres and forms, the contributors to Up Against the Archive make the case for experimental historical writing as a way to work through the gaps and erasures of imperial archives. Drawing on Black feminist theory and Saidiya Hartman’s method to “creatively disorder the institutional fictions and the violent abstractions authorized as fact and truth,” they challenge ways of knowing and telling inherited from British imperialism. Each contribution centers on a distinct archival object or moment in time, exploring ways of understanding historical subjectivity from means and material not included or legible in the traditional archive. In Up Against the Archive, interdisciplinary scholars meet the challenges of our contemporary moment with inventive forms of storytelling that suggest possibilities for doing empire history in an anti-imperial mode.
“Up against the Archive offers an exhilarating set of experiments in unconventional modes of anti-colonial history writing. The collection explores literary form as a means of tussling with the archive, of mixing and remixing, of amplifying its possibilities and erasures. The result is a powerful collection of exquisitely crafted essays that explore speculative biography, poetry, letters, family biography, ancestral invocations – in all a book of treasures.”—Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House
“As national histories continue to be rewritten in the service of political interests, the questions raised in Up Against the Archive cut like live wires — unsettling normative frames and showing us how to imagine and write the past otherwise.”—Susheila Nasta, Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures, Queen Mary College, University of London
"Audre Lorde's assertion that the master's house cannot be dismantled with the master's tools presents a special challenge to the craft of writing history, with all its tight disciplinary constraints. As a leading historian of empire, Antoinette Burton has been grappling with that challenge for decades, and now, by inviting a wide range of scholars to join in the task, she has catalyzed a rich and stimulating collection of experimental approaches to forging new tools for narrating and remembering the past."—Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
ISBN: 9781478039532
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 445g
244 pages