Enlightened archi-textures: Founding colonial archives in the Hispanic eighteenth century

This study reads a series of trans-Atlantic historiographic and literary projects as representative of an archival mode of epistemology in the eighteenth-century Hispanic world through an examination of the founding of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in 1785. A central tenet of this project is the idea that archives were a key factor in the construction of narratives that contested history, politics, national identity and the production of knowledge. At the same time, those same narratives participated in the practice of textual archiving and helped to shape the material structure and administration of brick-and-mortar archives.; Chapter One proposes a model of the archive that reads theories of archival science, historiography and models of the "metaphoric archive" proposed by Foucault and Derrida. Chapter Two establishes the complex context of the AGI's founding by critiquing a series of debates about the Americas in the writings of Buffon, de Pauw, Raynal, Robertson and others. This chapter also considers how polemics within Spain played a role in shaping that nations response to the debates. Chapter Three presents the founding of the AGI as part of Spain's response to the trans-Atlantic polemics. As a means of reading the archive's own narrative, I examine letters, reports and the official published Ordenanzas of the AGI. Chapter Four extends the inquiry to the realm of published histories by reading the Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793), by founder of the AGI Juan Bautista Munoz, and the Historia antigua de Mexico (1780--81), by the exiled criollo Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavigero. In Chapter Five I turn to an archival project in New Spain initiated by the Viceroy Revillagigedo in the 1790s. This archive, which was never completely instituted, represents a significant contribution to the trans-Atlantic archival enterprise as a project that was inextricably bound to the metropolis even as it carved out new practices of Hispanic epistemology in the last decade of the eighteenth century.; I conclude with an epilogue that addresses the complexities of eighteenth-century collaborative projects, how the Hispanic eighteenth century engages the Enlightenment and the need to read similar cultural production beyond the trans-Atlantic context.