“Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities”
by Bibhushana Poudyal | Xchanges 14.1, Spring 2019
Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts
I would like to begin the conversation vis-à-vis critical digital archiving by quoting Vosloo (1995): “to burn with a passion for the past, a passion for the archive, is to aim for faithful testimony. . . . It also implies that the attempt at faithful testimony is not to be separated from justice. . . . The faithfulness to the past, faithful testimony, is not without implications for the present (and the future)” (pp. 390-1).
This passion to know the past differently and to do archiving differently is an attempt to ethically intervene in the past, present, and hence, future from the otherwise centers, from the multidimensionality of the Other worlds that are pushed into oblivion. I call these theoretical interrogations and the methodological performance of archiving in digital spaces “digital archiving against the grain,” a recognition of complexities to reimagine possibilities. In the prototype of the digital archive I am building, I am training myself to remain faithful to the past, present, and future—not only by bringing in as many diverse pictures of Nepal as possible, but by admitting/confessing the precarities and negotiations involved even in the most faithful intentions of working toward a justice-oriented future.
For instance, while building a prototype of my archive, I faced a dilemma regarding which photography collection to start with. I wanted to start with Shivaratri, a Hindu festival celebrated every year in honor of the Hindu god Shiva. But one fear never left me: Am I exoticizing Nepal like most of those colonial texts? Am I producing yet another colonial text? Am I becoming a native informant?
The dilemma made me aware of the constraints created by my present geographical situatedness. If I am not starting with photographs of the Shivaratri festival—the collection I would have started with if I were building this archive in Nepal—it means I am already letting my situatedness in the US academic institution and the burden of colonialism make my decisions. I had to remind myself so many times of the reason behind this project. I am not offering a holistic picture of Nepal (and I doubt if such a picture exists), but offering the antenarratives of what happens while building decolonial digital archives to make it evident that every picture is already fragmented.
One of the next dilemmas I faced was related to the metadata spaces in my digital archive. Metadata is “the term applied to information that describes information, objects, content, or documents” (Drucker, 2013, para. 7). I am building my digital archive in Omeka, which uses the Dublin Core metadata standard, “comprised of 15 ‘core’ metadata elements” (UC Santa Cruz, n.d.).2
Raising questions relentlessly is extremely important in recognizing and foregrounding the impossibility of the existence of the final signified. This is even more important for the scholars who are engaging in the performance of studying the theory and praxis of (digital) archiving with decolonial orientations. Cushman (2013) emphasizes on asking certain questions: “Why archive in the first place? What types of mediation and information make collecting and displaying possible? What types of knowledge work do archives make possible and limit?” (p. 118). And after waiting quite a while before uploading photographs to my archive, finally I decided to start with the collection of Shivaratri. Paradoxically the limitations that I was fearful of started appearing before me as possibilities too.
These reflections also protect us from another complacency that writing in digital spaces and building digital archives achieves the end goal of justice. L’Internationale (2016) cautions against unreflective technoutopian archiving: “Digitisation and online sharing of vast amounts of archival documents can however, when they are done with no reflection, easily turn into a pseudo-democratic end in itself, resulting in an overload of the material available online” (Decolonial Archives, p. 6). The rupture of disciplinary boundaries and hack-yack binary—as advocated by Drucker, Bianco, and many other scholars—and a critical reflection and an exhaustive analysis are the first steps toward critical digital archiving.
[2] See also Dublin Core (2016).