Critical history reconceived archives from passive source to active subject.

Evidence

This move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject gained its currency across the richly undisciplined space of critical history and in a range of fields energized by that reformulation. The sheer number of volumes devoted to “the archive” is staggering: in film and literary studies, in analyses of truth commissions or the human genome project, 78 De Certeau (1988), 75. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 280