This issue of Roadsides is concerned with one particular relational aspect of infrastructure that so far has scarcely been explored: the links between infrastructure and archive. The point of departure for this issue is an awareness that the history of the infrastructure that now shapes our lives, as well as of infrastructure that has never been built, lies in particular bodies of texts – documents, images, letters, books, videos and so on. These archives are central to the imagining of infrastructure, to its planning as well to its construction. Yet the relations between concrete infrastructure and such bodies of text are seldom addressed.
As pertains to traditional humanities scholarship, archives have typically been state-run institutions holding historical, political, economic and social records from various strands of governance and society. For the purposes of this issue, however, archives are understood in the broadest sense as any collection of documents, stories, reports, notices, banners and placards, photographs, video recordings, sounds, posted bills or rumours – i.e. anything textual (in the term’s widest conception) that represents a writing and a reading of the social worlds created and mediated by infrastructure. Following on from the work of Barry (2013), which analyses official public oil industry documents to reveal their performative and institutional politics, we envision archives as consisting of both formal/official and local/vernacular material production, so as to show the multiple discourses and representations implicit in infrastructural processes.
This understanding of the archive is foregrounded by the work of several scholars who, particularly within anthropology, have recently troubled commonsensical understandings of the archive as a written and solid past (Stoler 2002; Mueggler 2011). This new scholarship addresses archives – and archival research – not just as sites of knowledge retrieval and extractive activity, but as places of engaged critical ethnographic research. As Ann Stoler succinctly puts it, scholars need to move “from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” (2002: 93).
