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

by Bibhushana Poudyal | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

In this section, I will provide one particular incident to introduce and contextualize myself and my project. It happened in my first semester in my PhD program and during my second month living in the United States. I was waiting for the campus shuttle to get back to my apartment. Just then, a guy came up to me and started talking. After some casual exchanges, he asked,

“Where are you from?”
“Nepal,” I said.
“Where is that?” He asked.

I felt like he had to know Nepal without any further references. Then, I remembered that there are countries I don’t know either. Because “no one” talks about them. [The question here is also who is/are “no one?”].

“It’s in South Asia.”
“You mean Philippines?” He asked.
“Isn’t that a different country? Maybe you wanna Google Nepal,” I told him.

At this point, I just wanted to be done with this conversation. “Yeah, you are right. I will,” he said.

I smiled and turned my head to the street, continuing to wait for the bus. And right then, something even more dreadful occurred to me. I remembered what Google might say about Nepal aside from providing some tourist guide kind of thing. Earthquake? Flood? Chhaupadi system? Discrimination against women? Some local “exotic” rituals? And so on.

Well, all of these statements are true. Who is denying that? But is that all that’s true about Nepal? What about other multiple narratives that are easily overshadowed by the dominant and much disseminated algorithmic exotic or damaging narratives? I feared that this person from the bus stop might Google Nepal and start feeling sorry for me the way I never felt.

I hastily turned towards the stranger and said, “Actually, I don’t recommend you googling. Google doesn’t tell you much about the places you don’t know and wanna know more about.” From then on, I knew that I would never again say to a stranger, “Why don’t you google Nepal?”

These questions and experiences—and the lack of significant number of digital archives about Nepal built by Nepali either on a personal, institutional, or semi-institutional level—prompted me to undertake this particular project. The first digital archives that I encountered while researching about already available digital archives about Nepal were built by westerners and archived in western institutional online locations. In these digital archives, the knowledge that is produced and disseminated about Nepal has a very simplistic dimension: exotic and/or damage-based. However unintentional and well-intentioned they are, these digital archives about Nepal are no different than what Edward Said (1978) aptly remarked vis-à-vis the “great collective appropriation of one country by another” (p. 84).

Overwhelmed by these experiences, I decided to study theories and praxes of digital archives and to build a critical digital archive about Nepal to problematize simplistic portrayals of Nepal, to demonstrate the situatedness of these epistemic performances, and to make it evident that every structure of meaning is already full of gaps and fissures. My desire to create this archive is stirred by my interest in understanding these questions as intimately as possible: Who produces knowledge and what kinds of knowledge are produced the most, specifically about Non-Western worlds? And what kinds of knowledge are disseminated far and wide?

These questions cannot be understood or answered through disciplinary hubris or constraints. They need folks from different non/academic locations and disciplines to come together, raise questions, problematize normative narratives about digitalism which is accessible only to powerful institutional locations, complicate simplistic representative portrayals about Others, and work together to transform the face of digital rhetoric and composition through/toward ethical epistemological performance.