"Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities"

by Bibhushana Poudyal | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019

📋 Contents

Introduction
Methodological Overview
Exigency for the Project
What is (or why) Archiving?
Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts
Conclusion
References
About the Author

Abstract: This article presents an overview of theoretical and practical methods and approaches of my ongoing critical decolonial digital archiving research project in a Rhetoric and Writing Studies PhD program. The article is written through the intersections and interstices of theory and praxis of Critical Digital Humanities, Literary Theory, and Cultural Studies and it introduces my research which is conducted on two levels: theorizing the performance of digital archiving and building a digital archive. The article insists upon making digital archiving practices and theories critically aware, contextually situated, and culturally responsive. By discussing challenges, negotiations, and strategies involved in the act of decolonial digital archiving, this article provides a framework for other researchers interested in building digital archives through post/decolonial orientations and invites them to recognize complexities and reimagine possibilities of digital archiving work.

Introduction

This article argues that the methodical practices of archiving and digital archiving began as powerful corporate, educational, or/and research entities. Therefore, archiving requires a careful, reflective, critical, and non-hierarchical inter/outerdisciplinary engagement among academics and non-academics to decolonize digital archives. This collaborative engagement allows researchers and practitioners of digital archiving to be aware of inquiries regarding an agency to access, study, produce, create, build, and disseminate information and knowledge about the cultures of non-mainstream Others through digital spaces in general and digital archives in particular. By discussing the complexities involved in this specific performance of digital archiving, my article aims to invite students, teachers, and researchers to create collaborative ways to reimagine and restrategize the humble and open-ended rhetorical praxes of decolonizing digital archives. I call such practices critical digital archiving.

The performance of critical digital archiving does not pretend to offer one final solution or approach to decolonize digital archives. Rather, critical digital archiving requires a performance of techne—which points to “a heterogeneous history of practices performed in the interstices between intention and subjection, choice and necessity, activity and passivity” (Beisecker, 1992, p. 156). Critical digital archiving encompasses a poststructuralist approach of looking into the history of decolonial digital archiving performed through the non/dominant non/mainstream spaces without hierarchical binaric monumentalizing of one over another. Because as we do not have access to the one final definite way of building an ethical decolonial digital archives, we have to train ourselves to learn from every effort made towards it, from a heterogeneous history of practices.

That is why, the critical digital archiving practice requires one to work through the intersections of inter/outerdisciplinary methodologies, theories, and praxes. And on that urgent needfulness of an inter/outerdisciplinary collaborative dialogue, Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) writes, “[N]ow, more than ever, we need experts in the social sciences and digital humanities to engage in dialogue with activists and organizers, engineers, designers, information technologists, and public-policy makers before blunt artificial-intelligence decision making trumps nuanced human decision making” (p. 8).

Digital archiving performed through historically marginalized and oppressed locations is radically non-linear, because it is not something that is performed entirely from outside of the oppressive system. Rather critical digital archiving uses the language, medium, platform, and tools of the system/institution to decenter the same system/institution. It critiques colonial/patriarchival (re)presentation via the act of archivization itself (Kurtz, 2006; L’Internationale, 2016). Matthew Kurtz (2006) writes, archiving is “a literal re-centring of material for the construction and contestation of knowledge, whereas postcolonialism often works toward a figurative decentring of that same material” (p. 25). My research project engages with such complex questions to exhibit the nonlinear journey of performing decolonial archives and to envision possible futures for digital archives as a location of resistance.

Thus, in this article, I present the synopsis of negotiations, challenges, and strategies involved in theorizing and building a decolonial digital archive. For that, I will first provide a conceptual and methodological overview of my research project and then present a brief autobiographic account. After that, I will engage in the critical inquiry of theory and praxis of archiving and digital archiving and explain why I am naming my methodology critical digital archiving by presenting my experiences while building the prototype of my digital archive.

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