Unarchived Histories : The "mad" and the "trifling" in the colonial and postcolonial world

Traditional historians hold that there can be no history without an archive. But how is one to write a history of prejudice where the evidence that identifies or signifies its everyday forms and discriminatory behaviour is scrappy and ambiguous? The common sense of polarised race, caste, class or gender relations is articulated in rarely archived, historically unpretty and unacknowledged actions. Out of what archive is the history of these practices, which are not events, not datable or even nameable, to be written? This book investigates the extensive domain of such histories, unarchived in the process of archiving those aspects of the human past and present that have been deemed significant at various times, for various reasons, by states, ruling classes and disciplinary historians.

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 within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume.

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.