ABSTRACT
This article reflects on aspects of archival work undertaken for a project examining historical and current innovations in customary tenure associated with colonisation and the commodification of land.1 Land commissions and courts were important arenas for colonial attempts to control, govern, and transform colonial subjects and their land; they were and remain vital sites for the enactment, contestation, and legitimation of particular conceptions of land relations, as well as the simultaneous denial, de-legitimation, and erasure of others. I was therefore initially interested in the records of land commissions and courts for what they revealed about the arguments that have been mobilised in courts and by whom, as well as the kinds of performances that have been recognised and legitimated by the state as a particular kind of archive. As I describe further below, I was drawn to the archives and found them an irresistible academic resource, yet my engagement with the records was also marked by discomfort, anxiety, and even fear. Thus, in this article I turn my attention to the insights that might be gained from attending not only to the content of the records, nor even to their form, but to both their allure and the anxiety they induce. I demonstrate that paying attention to the affective aspects of the archive exposes the fact that the implications of the archive, and of scholarly practice relating to the archive, are particular to the time, place, and social relations in which they are situated. I suggest that consciously examining the affective aspects of the archive, including our own responses to and investments in the archive, facilitates a heightened reflexivity, and entails a deliberate effort to foreground the profound effects of the archive, and of reading and writing about the archive, on people’s lives in the present and into the future, as much as in the past.
