In recent years, much scholarship has revealed how archives and archival artefacts mediate processes of knowledge extraction, production, and representation. Yet, there remains a certain assumption of the archive's transparent availability as a given location for disciplinary work. This essay asks how less visible forms of mediation organize the critical conceptualization and experience of archival inquiry. It examines these conceptual questions through a focus on the 1971 JVP (Janata Vimukti Peramuna—People's Liberation Front) insurgency, a pivotal but now neglected event in Sri Lanka's political history. I explore how an authoritative monograph on the insurrection and its archive have mediated its problematization and enabled its nationalist recuperation. I ascertain the political stakes of returning to the event by locating the supervening context for my own interest in the insurgency, a discursive archive of the disciplinary conceptualization of Sri Lankan political modernity, its characteristic preoccupations, and their effects. I suggest that the event of 1971 offers a locus from which to examine a normative narrative that this archive yields. Recounting how these stakes animated my experience of the liberal archive, the paper's final section asks how different forms of archive implicate distinctive ethical practices and subjects of reading. I pursue this question through the representation and reading of 1971 within what I term the JVP's own pedagogical “archive.” I conclude by reviving a postcolonial concern with the critical stakes of disciplinary investigation and suggest a different approach to the problem of “ethnicized” postcolonial modernities.

中文翻译：

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事件、档案、调解：斯里兰卡 1971 年的叛乱和实地考察的政治利害关系

近年来，许多学术研究揭示了档案和档案文物如何调节知识提取、生产和再现的过程。然而，仍然存在一定的假设，即档案作为纪律工作的特定地点的透明可用性。本文询问不太明显的调解形式如何组织档案调查的批判性概念化和体验。它通过关注 1971 年的 JVP（Janata Vimukti Peramuna——人民解放阵线）叛乱来检验这些概念性问题，这是斯里兰卡政治史上一个关键但现在被忽视的事件。我探讨了一本关于起义及其档案的权威专着如何调节其问题化并使其民族主义得以恢复。我通过定位我自己对叛乱感兴趣的后续背景、斯里兰卡政治现代性的学科概念化、其特征性关注及其影响的话语档案，来确定重返事件的政治利害关系。我认为 1971 年的事件提供了一个地点，可以从中检查该档案所产生的规范性叙述。讲述这些利害关系如何激发我对自由档案的体验，论文的最后一部分询问不同的档案形式如何影响独特的道德实践和阅读主题。我通过在我称之为 JVP 自己的教学“档案”中的 1971 年的再现和阅读来探究这个问题。