National archives are influential technologies of the nation-state. They are sites which are constructed through exercises of power and act as vectors through which power can move, shaping narratives and histories through contents, organization, affordances and denials of access. Looking to the first half of the twentieth century, this project engages the history of records removal from across the United States’ colonial empire–including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and the US Virgin Islands–and consolidation at various US federal agencies, most notably the US National Archives. Treating archival records not purely as byproducts of the administrative state, but as powerful imperial technologies in their own right, this project builds a set of arguments about the role of archival infrastructures in US nation-building efforts and imperial expansion in the early twentieth century.
This project aims to build upon this foundation to further interrogate the ways that knowledge communities have engaged with the archival record to challenge the epistemological limits of the nation-state as an archival organizing principle. State repositories function as both inclusionary and exclusionary forces, establishing what–and who–is considered part of the nation, itself a shifting target in the face of colonial expansion. State archives delimit particular forms of affiliation and social networks, which almost always run along the lines of national borders. Where national archives often generate collective identities that are bounded by the limits of the national imaginary, communities may work within, and around, these repositories to create the space for new forms of organization to emerge, forms that can exist within, outside of, and across borders. This project attempts to identify the ways that knowledge communities have carried out this work, whether through taxonomic and organizational interventions with state records or through the construction of independent archives that more fully capture and represent their own identities and communities.