Up Against the Archive

“Audre Lorde’s assertion that the master's house cannot be dismantled with the master's tools presents a special challenge to the craft of writing history, with all its tight disciplinary constraints. As a leading historian of empire, Antoinette Burton has been grappling with that challenge for decades, and now, by inviting a wide range of scholars to join in the task, she has catalyzed a rich and stimulating collection of experimental approaches to forging new tools for narrating and remembering the past.” - Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies

“Up against the Archive offers an exhilarating set of experiments in unconventional modes of anti-colonial history writing. The collection explores literary form as a means of tussling with the archive, of mixing and remixing, of amplifying its possibilities and erasures. The result is a powerful collection of exquisitely crafted essays that explore speculative biography, poetry, letters, family biography, ancestral invocations – in all a book of treasures.” - Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

“As national histories continue to be rewritten in the service of political interests, the questions raised in Up Against the Archive cut like live wires — unsettling normative frames and showing us how to imagine and write the past otherwise.” - Susheila Nasta, Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures, Queen Mary College, University of London