Archival Patchwork: Stitching Social Relationships in Colonial South Africa

Abstract The recovery of subaltern experiences in colonial contexts requires more than reading against the grain and interrogating silences. This paper describes “archival patchwork,” a way of working across diverse sources from multiple repositories, collecting small scraps of evidence about subordinated individuals, reconstructing social relationships, and stitching together patterns of daily life that aren’t visible otherwise. Archival patchwork accommodates present-day ways of working in neoliberal universities, acknowledges north-south disparities, and opens collaborative possibilities. The paper, pinned to South African history, enumerates digitization, transcription, and duplication projects that make archival sources for the colonial Cape more widely available. Although this paper’s evidence is focused in time and place, the methodology is broadly applicable.