Archives do more than preserve the past: they actively shape cultural memory. Bringing together perspectives from literary and media studies, memory studies, museum studies, and the history of natural history collections, the contributions examine how texts, objects, and images become sites of contested meaning. Across different cultural and historical contexts, they reveal omissions, challenge inherited interpretations, and recover marginalized voices. By exploring archival practices and their colonial legacies, the volume shows how archives produce dissonant narratives and counter-histories that reshape our understanding of the past.