Introduction: The Archival Turn in Political Theory

After its rise to prominence in the 1960s through 1980s, with its heyday in the “archive fever” (Derrida Reference Derrida and Prenowitz1996) of the 1990s, the discourse of the archive has again reached fever pitch. As Daston (Reference Daston and Daston2017, 1) observed, we find ourselves “in the midst of an archival moment, simultaneously overwhelmed by the sheer amount of available information (‘drowning in data’) and obsessed with its fragility (‘the page you are looking for no longer exists’).” Whereas archives across the natural and human sciences function as “the repository of what a discipline considers worth knowing and preserving,” their identification with historical research is so tight that “any other kind of archival research is assumed to be ipso facto historical in nature, and any archive to be of the sort protypically [sic] investigated by historians” (Daston Reference Daston and Daston2017, 2). Thus, archival practices outside of the discipline of history and beyond a concern with historical inquiry have largely been overlooked and undertheorized.