ABSTRACT
Archives should be considered an influential space in the production, circulation and exchange of affects. Archives become a field of intersecting affects – handling of records by archivists and archive staff members, reader/researcher receiving (or not), the touching of old yellowing documents and the realisation for the reader that they are one in a long line of readers who have held and read that document. Based on my personal experiences, memories of, and ethnographic notes at different archives/libraries of India in 2002, 2016 and 2017, this piece is about the co-formation of archives and affects. It is a history of the present, which focuses on something (affect) that is only recently being talked about in relation to archives and their afterlives.
