Dossier. Restitutive Archives: Disputes of the Past and Openings for the Future. Violence, Memories, and Archival Practices in Latin America
The so-called archival turn, between the 1980s and 1990s, not only involved a shift in the concept of the archive beyond the strictly historiographical/archival field, but also an expansion of its uses, meanings, and materialities into aesthetic, artistic, performative, anthropological, and ontological realms. The archive ceased to be conceived exclusively as a repository of documents from the past, becoming instead a practice, a device, and a field of epistemological, political, and emotional dispute.
In Latin America, this turn was profoundly shaped by post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts, as well as by the struggles for truth, justice, and memory. Archives—particularly those linked to state repression, political violence, and subaltern experiences—acquired unprecedented centrality as tools for breaking silences, challenging hegemonic narratives, and inscribing displaced temporalities, subjectivities, and memories. Simultaneously, community-based documentary and archival practices emerged from below, linked to the defense of rights, social struggle, and the production of collective memory. These practices endowed archives with restorative and critical powers, implanting a utopian vision within their own processes.
After a long journey through the struggles over archives, it is worth asking where we stand today in Latin America. Which theoretical and practical trajectories have proven productive, and which have shown their limitations? How have the contexts in which archives—especially subaltern, community, or dissident archives—emerge, circulate, and operate changed? What new demands are being placed on archives, and what demands are emerging from them?
In a time marked by the rise of the extreme right, the geopolitical reconfiguration of a neocolonial order, and the resurgence of multiple forms of violence, these questions acquire a particular urgency. Interrogating archives, then, involves analyzing how violence is inscribed in their classifications, nomenclatures, and taxonomies; what they reveal about historical and current processes of dispossession and dispossession; and how they articulate continuities and ruptures between recent pasts and contested presents.
At the same time, this dossier seeks to critically investigate the extent to which archives restore—or can restore—memories and rights, both for the communities directly involved and for the present in a broader sense, insofar as they activate demands from the past, postponed futures, and unrealized historical trajectories.
Likewise, it seeks to reflect on the ways in which archives articulate survivals, remembrances, and ghosts that have not only given meaning to past resistances but also continue to shape imaginaries of the future.
General Objective of the Dossier
To open a space for collective, critical, and situated discussion on the disputes surrounding archives in Latin America, considering the temporalities, juxtapositions, and anachronisms that permeate them; the modes of memory and imagination with which they are articulated; the materialities they evoke; and the configurations of sensitivity, affects, and experiences they mobilize.
Call for Submissions
We invite submissions that develop theoretical, methodological, or empirical discussions around one of the following areas:
Archival practices (including community, activist, artistic, forensic, and digital archives)
Histories from the archive and/or histories of the archive (that problematize its conditions of production, circulation, use, and dispute)
Critical conceptualizations of the archive (from historiographical, philosophical, anthropological, or political perspectives).
Scope of the Dossier
This dossier aims to contribute not only to academic reflection on archives, but also to connect them with latent possibilities and future potentialities. In this sense, the archive is conceived as a space where remnants, images, and emotions are inscribed, allowing us to map what has not yet occurred: interrupted futures, truncated possibilities, and still-open historical horizons.
Suggested Topics for Dossier Articles
1. Subaltern and activist practices of archival production, use, and contestation in the face of state, colonial, patriarchal, and extractivist violence. Documentation practices and archival experiences from below, driven by communities, victims' collectives, social movements, feminists, gender and sexual dissidents, and Indigenous peoples, as forms of self-defense, memory, and truth-making.
2. Archives of repression and disputes over the meaning of the recent past. Analysis of police, military, intelligence, and judicial archives in post-authoritarian contexts: silences, classifications, restricted access, and contemporary political uses.
3. Materialities of the archive: remnants, media, and economies of documentation. Material conditions of production, circulation, and use of archives; documents, objects, images, sounds, and bodies in contexts of violence and precarity. Post-custodial archives and organizational tactics in contexts of risk. Experiences with mobile, distributed, or ephemeral archives; practices of preservation, description, and classification in the face of threats of destruction or seizure.
4. Archive, restitution, and community: limits and possibilities of reparation. Critical debates on the archive as a form of community restitution, symbolic reparation, and the reopening of historical and political conflicts.
5. The archive as concept, metaphor, and horizon of the future. A critical assessment of the archival turn in Latin America; the archive as an operator of latencies, political imagination, activation of unresolved pasts, and projection of postponed futures.
