Racial Archive

what it is and why it matters

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2026/93908

In this article, I explore the notion of the racial archive as an analytical operator. First, I show how studies on violence, crime, and justice have been shaped by a long-standing neglect of racial debate, which makes the scientific field itself a privileged object for analyzing the racial archive in Brazil. I then propose the continuous racialization of the ethnography of documents: following police incident reports, “resistance” reports, forensic reports, and court rulings makes it possible to understand the archive as a discursive formation and technology of governance that administers killability and constitutes anti-Black racism. The aim is to crisscross levels of analysis, from the sociological to the ontological, in dialogue with different authors. Finally, I discuss ways of writing against and outside the archive, bringing arguments closer and putting them in tension to indicate ethnographic strategies already put into practice. I conclude by suggesting that the racial archive is made in the continuous oscillation between Black life and Black death.