Washing the Archive

“Washing the Archive” probes histories of colonial loss, focusing on the losses that accrued around a piece of paper, a papal bull (the Bula de la Santa Cruzada) printed in Madrid in 1578. Shipped to the Americas in the sixteenth century, this print found its way into an Indigenous community, a burial in what is today northern Chile, and a museum in New York City in the late nineteenth century. Attending to the print’s itinerary and material existence—including recent conservation practices, notably washing—this essay argues that loss, especially of the kinds that adhere to archival practice and museum collecting, is all too easy to lament. We refuse to give loss that pass, and instead suggest that it has a generative potential: the washing of this bull opens onto new thinking about how loss and paper, together, become the very stuff of colonial history.