Description
Is it possible to research the embodiment of violence in largely disembodied archives? In addition, how is the researcher themselves embodied in this act of researching violence? This paper tells an archive story, that of a researcher looking for the physical and emotional, in a largely disembodied corpus of texts on the violence of counter-terrorism in French colonial Indochina. Through asking a simple question – where are the bodies? – I trace the different ways in which bodies appear and disappear in the archives, both now and then. As a largely disembodied corpus, colonial archives first work to make bodies invisible: bodies are counted by nothing personal is mentioned, violence is euphemised or not recorded, and the bodies that appear are only those that serve a (colonial) purpose. Equally, the way colonial archives are available today serves to disembody violence: rationally organised as a library, the colonial archives itself disembody the researcher. In a second time, however, this paper also shows how bodies re-appear in various ways, both in the past and the present. The embodiment of violence appears in the interstices of documents, revealing glimpses of physicality. In the same way, the supposedly disembodied act of conducting archival research is in fact largely embodied, especially when it comes to violence. Overall, therefore, this article asks questions about trust, objectivity and the purpose of archival research, and extends the reflection on the way coloniality (dis)embodies, both in the past and present.
