Paper Jams in Cuba; or, The Politics and Materiality of Documentation

This presentation will encourage an approach to archives that considers the material histories of documents themselves, as objects with prehistories, afterlives, and significance to the people who issued and held them. It focuses on Cuba and on two processes crucial to the consolidation of colonialism--migration and dispossession--to illuminate conflicts during the nineteenth century about where documents should be held and who should possess them. At mid-century, a booming sugar economy and an illegal transatlantic slave trade relied on access to land and forced migrant labor, but neither landholding nor migratory processes were well systematized. This presentation considers the opportunities and limitations of seeing battles over the legal status of Cuba's two remaining Indian pueblos and questions of travel papers as at least in part about struggles over the authority of documents. Doing so can help reframe historians' encounters with those very documents and with the fraught institutional and cultural politics that inform contemporary critiques of the archive.