Up Against the Archive: Experiments in Writing British Empire History Otherwise

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.