The archival turn in scholarship preceded Derrida’s Archive Fever.

Evidence

If “the transformation of archival activity is the point of departure and the condition of a new history,” as De Certeau has argued, we are clearly in a new moment. The warning of E. E. Evans-Pritchard in 1951 that anthropologists tended to be “uncritical in their use of documentary sources” had little resonance then. So, too, did F. W. Maitland’s earlier dictum that anthropology had “the choice between being history or being nothing.” Both pronouncements read as fairly quaint today. Among historians, literary critics and anthropologists, archives have been elevated to new analytic status with distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny on their own. One might be tempted to see this as a Derridian effect of the last decade that followed on the publication of Archive Fever. But the archival turn has a wider arc and a longer durée. Archive Fever compellingly captured that impulse by giving it theoretical stature, but Jacques Derrida’s intervention came only after the “archival turn” was already being made. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 279

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated interest in colonial archival epistemology—this frames the shift from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject.
• QUESTION: What specific pre-Derrida work constitutes the archival turn’s earlier arc?