The Archive in Leopold von Ranke, Ranajit Guha and Ann Laura Stoler
An Essay in Method
Keywords:
Leopold von Ranke, Ranajit Guha, Ann Laura Stoler, historiography, archives, colonialismAbstract
This brief essay makes a comparative intervention into the nature and praxis of historiography as found in Leopold von Ranke, Ranajit Guha, and Ann Laura Stoler. As I address it, one can find significant continuities and departures within interrelated questions of the historian’s objective in the archive and their engagement with archival material within the conceptual worlds of Ranke, Guha, and Stoler. By attending to the praxis of reading along and against the archival grain, the essay attempts to connect the theoretical positions of these thinkers and trace these transitions in historiographic practice.
References
Blouin, Francis X, and William G Rosenberg. Processing the Past. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Eskildsen, Kasper Risbjerg. “Leopold Ranke’s Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography.” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (November 2008): 425–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244308001753.
Guha, Ranajit. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” In Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 1–42. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. Edited and with an introduction by Georg G. Iggers. 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203839195.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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