“Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities”
by Bibhushana Poudyal | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019
What is (or why) Archiving and Digital Archiving?
Discussing the historical development of nineteenth and twentieth-century museum, galleries, and exhibitions, Tony Bennett (1995) writes that they “played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern state and are fundamental to its conception as, among other things, a set of educative and civilizing agencies” (p. 66). While reading this, we cannot overlook the close ties between colonialism-orientalism, the forceful beginning of corporate and institutional archival practices, and the ideology behind the necessity of cataloguing and archiving of Other people, cultures and places.
An English historian Vivian Hunter Galbraith in 1948 defined archives as “the secretions of an organism” (p. 3). This seemingly innocent definition also reveals a lot about the colonial/imperial rhetoric of archives. The definition tries to make archives appear natural, neutral, unbiased, and untainted by human intervention. Kate Theimer’s (2012) definition similarly emphasizes preservation of context: “Archivists select and preserve ‘archives’ . . . which is to say aggregates of materials with an organic relationship, rather than items that may be similar in some manner, but otherwise unrelated” (para. 14).
This assumed “organic” objectiveness of archives makes me want to bring up a quote of Hayden White that Gayatri Spivak includes in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: historians “buried in the archives hoping, by what they call a ‘sifting of the facts’ or ‘the manipulation of the data,’ to find the form of the reality that will serve as the object of representation in the account that they will write ‘when all the facts are known’ and they have finally ‘got the story straight'” (qtd. in Spivak, 1999, pp. 125-126).
Therefore, in terms of non-neutrality and non-objectiveness, physical archives and digital archives are no different from one another. Deciding to archive something already is a human, institutional, and/or organizational intervention. Jacques Derrida (1995) summarizes the connection between political power and archiving: one cannot assume political power without its control of the archive and “the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (p. 11). Michel Foucault (1972) writes that archiving “causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated” (p. 130). Robert Vosloo (2005) insists that “technical structure of the archive also determines the structure of the archivable content” (p. 384). There is nothing neutral about archives.
Hence, archives are not just a recording of data, but also a production of data as it “produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida, 1995, p. 17). Whatever appears on the surface as an archive is the interplay and the tussle among these multiple factors that is usually hidden underneath the surface as an underlying structure. In this context, Ellen Cushman (2013) advocates for the ethical way of performing digital archives for decolonial purposes. She argues for the potential of digital archives not despite but because of the same reason that they cannot (and rather should not) promise to preserve contexts as if context is an inert phenomenon. She insists upon contextualizing archives to battle against “the imperial archive’s penchant for collecting, classifying, and isolating” (p. 116). In this context, I offer critical digital archiving as a desideratum for decolonizing digital archives.