Power, Erasure and Resistance in (Post)Colonial Archives

This volume critically examines the complex and contested role of archives in colonial and postcolonial contexts, exploring how these repositories construct historical narratives and reinforce power dynamics. Colonial archives have long been recognised as deeply entangled with power, but this volume moves beyond diagnosis to ask how historical knowledge is produced when archival conditions are unstable, contested, or deliberately destructive. Drawing on case studies from Algeria, Mali, the Indo-Caribbean, India, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Bangladesh, the volume advances two original conceptual tools. Trans-imperial archival entanglements trace how bureaucratic procedures, classificatory systems, and strategies of memory-making circulate and mutate across imperial and postcolonial contexts. The volume also illuminates how hierarchical and dispersed archival logics coexist and coproduce one another, resisting any simple opposition between institutional and grassroots forms. Together, these lenses reveal how archival power persists through circulation, and how grassroots and ephemeral practices generate anticolonial possibilities grounded in improvisation, coalition, and collective care. In doing so, it offers an original and critical framework for understanding how colonial legacies continue to shape the forms, ethics, and futures of archival practice across diverse global contexts. The volume interrogates archives as instruments of power, sites of memory and affect, and mechanisms of control – while also engaging with their potential as tools for resistance, reclamation, and transformation. The volume contributes to key theoretical and methodological debates across archival studies, postcolonial theory, colonial history, and memory studies and will be important reading for researchers and academics in these fields.