History, Practice, and Archives

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The centrality of archival research is established in historical practice, and archives are used to produce knowledge/s about the past. As multiple perspectives have come to dismantle epistemological hegemonies, the power embedded within official archival constructions isquestioned. The erasures of the archives have been brought to focus; scholars have attempted to expand the meaning of the archives, locate alternate archives, combine archival research with ethnographic and literary/fictional methods, etc. The tension in the archive, between what is located in it, and how it may be read, to the questions that historians take to it, has been a generative one. This course studies the debates that constitute this archival turn.