ABSTRACT
The “archival turn” approaches archives as material, spatial and discursive orders that actively structure knowledge of the past. In dialogue with this critical approach, studies of the colonial Latin American archive have specified ways in which archives evolved together with the global empires of Spain and Portugal, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This chapter argues that colonial Latin American archives have emerged through three interrelated movements: dispossession, ruin, and reinvention. The result of the selective appropriation and destruction of indigenous and African artifacts, the colonial Latin American archive is a ruin that points toward a constitutionally inaccessible past. Archives built in the context of Iberian colonialism are inevitably reinventions that attempt to overcome this constitutional violence. Critical approaches to the colonial Latin American archive have exposed these structural continuities between the documentation of a colonial past and its political legacy in the present. They demand that the researcher adopt ethical and political stances toward this legacy and have inspired new forms of historiography that is both speculative and reparative.
