:Dwelling in the Archive: Women, Writing, House, Home and History in Late Colonial India

Abstract

At the outset of this book, Antoinette Burton asks: “What counts as an archive? Can private memories of home serve as evidence of political history? What do we make of the histories that domestic interiors, once concrete now perhaps crumbling or even disappeared, have the capacity to yield?” (p. 4). Her response challenges academic disciplinary regulations through a feminist Foucauldian critique of institutional knowledges and their mode of production as technologies of male social power. The definition of “archive” here is both expanded and contested, and the conventional deployment of the archive as an ideological endeavor is exposed. In this critique, officially designated archives turn out to be repositories of objectified knowledge characterizing mainstream/male stream history. The positivism or scientificism required by this archiving process removes all subjects, their memories, and their experiences from history. Burton attempts instead to return the subjects of history to the status of makers of history.