Archival heritage in the peripheries: sovereignty, nation and critique in the Argentine case

Abstract

This article examines archival heritage in peripheral contexts through the Argentine case in order to rethink the relationship between heritage, sovereignty and critique. Drawing on Critical Heritage Studies and Latin American social theory, it argues that recurrent archival discontinuity should not be understood simply as technical failure or institutional weakness. Rather, archival fragility is symptomatic of historically fractured processes of state formation, marked by truncated sovereignty and contested nationhood. In such contexts, archives do not mediate conflict within a consolidated national framework; they materialise the difficulty of constituting that framework in the first place. Through a historical analysis of Argentina’s National Archives, the article shows how archival practices register unresolved struggles over authority, inheritance and historical continuity. Engaging critically with CHS scholarship, it questions the implicit assumption that heritage can function as a unifying dispositif where state authority itself remains unstable. Finally, the article proposes an understanding of critique grounded in divided inheritance: the archive emerges not only as an object of heritage but as a condition of critical knowledge, demanding modes of reading attentive to instability, loss and institutional fracture. In this way, the article contributes to a more situated and reflexive theory of heritage in peripheral contexts.