“Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities”

by Bibhushana Poudyal | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019

Methodological Overview of Critical Digital Archiving Project

In my critical digital archiving project, I study the space of digital archiving through postcolonial orientations by engaging in conversations with scholarship in the Digital Humanities, Literary/Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. While doing that, I venture into this digital space by engaging in a performance of creating a digital archive of my street photography in Kathmandu (non-West) from the physical location of US academia (West).¹ Methodologically, I relate my research project with what Gayatri Spivak said about deconstruction in one of her interviews: “That’s what de-construction is about, right? It’s not just destruction. It’s also construction. It’s critical intimacy, not critical distance. So you actually speak from inside. That’s deconstruction” (qtd. in Paulson, 2016). My attempt in my research project of building and studying critical digital archiving is to perform this critical intimacy.

Thus, in my critical digital archiving project, the critical intimacy and antenarrative are intimately intertwined with the constant reflection of my own situatedness in the project, which is largely shaped by my being-in-the-world and by post/de/colonial and de/patriarchal circumstances. I also work through a critical autobioethographic framework. While theorizing and building the prototype of my digital archive with post/decolonial and feminist orientations, I reflect upon my own situatedness/positionality in this project and other undeniable factors that are shaping my project simultaneously. This reflection will allow readers and researchers to recognize the situatedness of my project (or any project for that matter) in particular and the technology, digitalism, and design in general.

Regarding the significance of such reflection upon positionality, Natasha N. Jones (2016) writes, “narratives not only allow other voices and points of view to be heard and understood, but it pushes the researcher and scholar to examine his or her own positionality and enactment of power and agency in a reflexive manner” (p. 351). I propose this unrelenting critical reflexivity as one of the ways to decolonize the digital archive: performing critical examination of process, narrative, and positionality.

[1] The prototype of my digital archive is available at cassacda.com.