Archives of Colonial Dis/Possession

Colonial wealth, generated by remunerated, serf or slave labor, was a major factor of early modern societal transformations, exploiting or boosting regions and affecting global economies, but also nudging literary and cultural developments, and shaping discourses, collective memories and power relations. In this context, non-European knowledges informed and subverted the imperial production of capital and its transcontinental flows of precious stones, raw materials, agricultural goods, or other objects and commodities. Accordingly, hegemonic records, accounts of Natives and the (former) enslaved, culturally “hybrid” formats, artifacts, corporeal performances, or living spaces are depositories of marginalized, displaced and racialized perspectives on riches.Through the lens of the archive as form of assembly and access to the past, this volume traces American Native, African, or Asian agencies which reinforce or transform early modern comprehensions of profit, and the modes of storage and retrieval grasping them. The authors investigate the dynamics of owning, not owning and disowning which accompanied the accumulation of fortune, and the literary and cultural relations tied to it, identifying archives of colonial dis/possession.