“The archives are full of voices”: Decolonising the Archive in the English-Speaking World

deadline for submissions: 
September 10, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Université de Reims

Archives have become a site of contestation because of their status as “an imperial project of domination and affirmation” (Ištok 2016). It is specifically the case in the English-speaking world. The revelation in 2011 of the hiding and culling by British colonial authorities of “incriminating documents from former colonies in the months before each one became politically independent” (Diptée 2024) is a case in point. In this deliberate and pernicious meddling with archives, now known as “Operation Legacy”, the “mother country” aimed to tone down — if not silence — colonial violence and display a more humanist facet that was supposed to undergird the liberation of British territories from colonial shackles (Cobain 2016). Thousands of archival materials in other regions were similarly targeted, revealing the manipulation of history by the British Empire (Drayton 2012). Kenya is a riveting example as “historians [...] were only willing to believe the official colonial records though there were Kenyans alive who could give oral testimony” (Diptée 2024) about colonial atrocities that were committed years, months, days, and even hours before independence. 

To quote Nigerian writer Teju Cole in his novel Tremor (2023), “[t]he archives are full of voices”. These voices belong to human beings whose lives can be said to be “modest” (Le Blanc 2014), “vulnerable” (Ganteau 2015), “ungrievable” (Butler 2009) even (see Annina van Neel’s 2024 article about the “remains of the 325 people excavated in 2008 [in St Helena, whose] most prized possessions [were] gathered […] to be displayed in a museum exhibition in Liverpool”). It is these voices that Subaltern studies have been particularly interested in resurrecting, as the field has sought to “reclaim the document [the archive] for history” (Guha 1997). Indeed, archives have to be conceived as “sites of knowledge production and political resistance, interpretation and challenge to the ruling exclusive classifications” and there is a need to seek ways and means to “recover […] [the] political potential [of the archive] not only in relation to history but, more urgently, to the present” (Ištok 2016). Canada offers an interesting example of this with the “Archive / Counter-Archive” project “dedicated to activating and preserving audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories”. 

How do postcolonial and decolonial literatures written in English address, use, distort and deconstruct archives? In Measuring Time (2007) by Nigerian writer Helon Habila, Mamo, the protagonist, who embodies the figure of a historian, decides to carry out research about his people during colonial times. This endeavour is shared by numerous writers: in Venus (1996), African-American playwright Suzan Lori-Parks stages a character called “The Negro Resurrectionist”, who allows for a reflection on Georges Cuvier’s autopsy report of South African Sarah Baartman’s body, the latter having become a paradigm of the way the body of the Other was “archived” and stored by European scientists; in Crossing the River (1993), Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips “singles out” and “calls attention to” (Guignery 2018) John Newton’s authentic logbook, Journal of a Slave Trader (1750-54); in The Old Drift (2019), Zambian writer Namwali Serpell directly refers to colonialist Percy M. Clark’s The Autobiography of an Old Drifter (1936) so as to debunk its hegemonic (and racist) assumptions. All four writers offer what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulations” (Hartman 2008), whose aim is then to fill what Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe identified as a “gap in the bookshelf” (Achebe 2008). The very title of Habila’s novel, Measuring Time, brings to the fore the temporality of the archive. Mamo had “the idea of going to the local government secretariat the next day in the hope that the library there might have archives containing documents from colonial times—letters and memos and pictures. The library was situated at the back of the secretariat, far away from the offices, next to the parking lot and the toilets—the smell of urine wafted into the open door of the library on the strong midday breeze. He was sure no one had visited this room in a long time” (Habila 2007). Mamo’s visit to the library gestures to the “allure of the archives” (Farge 1989) even though they are relegated to the back of an official Nigerian government building, next to toilets, their value (and their fetishisation, to some extent) therefore being questioned, ridiculed even. The research Mamo the historian aims to carry out is “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” (Smith 1999): the displacement and marginalisation of the archives reveals that “research [is] a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other” (Smith 1999). Habila points to the possibility to reach “the end of the cognitive empire” (De Sousa Santos 2018) by bringing to the fore different types of “archives” or records — “letters and memos and pictures” — which seem to have in common their intimate, if not embodied, nature. The quotation above allows for a reflection on what can constitute an archive but stops short of proposing different, decolonized types of archives. For example, one way of achieving this, according to Rado Ištok, is through digitisation: “if understood as a creative chance, digitisation can become a true decolonial tool” (see also The Dúchas Project in Ireland, whose purpose is to digitize the “National Folklore Collection”, therefore raising the issue of the democratization of archives). 

In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that there is a need to analyse “the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized” and to come up with “counterstories [that] are powerful forms of resistance”. Many contemporary writers and visual artists offer such new visions and envisionings, drawing from a reassessment of archives and marking a paradigm shift towards archival and epistemological sovereignty. In Australia, the Indigenous archive is embedded in oral stories and in Country, the “wholistic” (Grieves 2009) Indigenous Australian worldview. The lead Indigenous curator of the international Songlines exhibition, Margo Ngawa Neale, suggests that “[w]hen British colonists arrived on the Australian continent […], they didn’t realise that every inch of the continent was already archived” (Neale 2017). In Neale’s definition of the “ur-archive”, “humans are documents, archived according to kin and ancestral relations” and “artists are archivists”. Neale further extrapolates the relationship between the archive and visual arts, theorizing what she calls the “indigenous invention of a third-archive” which “processes the Aboriginal archive through a Western archival system. The arts are a primary medium for this translation, as the idea that art itself is an archive is something that each archive shares”. Consequently, the “third archive” “reach[es] beyond the limits of objectifying systems that underpin the modern Western archive” and may provide the right conditions for the “repatriation of knowledge” (Neale 2017). 

The use of these terms is significant as processes of objectification and repatriation enfold and collide in museums. The acquiring and displaying of human bodies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inscribed the dissected body of the Other as an open archive, whose primary aims were to expand anthropological knowledge and to assert western hegemony over bodies and minds alike. The body as archive interrogates the different ways in which “embodied archives” inform epistemological concerns. In “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Saidiya Hartman explains that “[t]he archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” The archive takes on a corporeal dimension that also recalls the evolution of photography, from the first ethnographic photographs which compose an extensive visual archive constantly reassessed by contemporary artists — this is central, for example, in Zanele Muholi’s and Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s projects around LGBTQIA+ visibility in South Africa and Nigeria (see Azoulay, Ewald, Meiselas et al.’s concept of “co-archiving” in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, 2023). The question of the archive in visual arts and in museums is burdened with the concepts of commodification and fetishisation as much as it entails a critical reevaluation and the decolonizing of its visual and epistemological regimes. 

At stake therefore is the (ethical) need to decolonise the archives in the English-speaking world. Decolonising is here understood as a “gesture that de-normalizes the normative, problematizes default positions, debunks the a-perspectival, destabilizes the structure” (Gallien 2020). Among numerous threads that participants may want to follow, this international conference is interested in the poetics, aesthetics and/or politics of (counter-)archives and “repertoire” (Taylor 2003) as they trigger what French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls a “dissensus” (2010) and therefore contribute to a new “distribution of the sensible order” (2004). This conference will explore what French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc calls “the insurrection of minuscule lives” (2014, our translation) in the English-speaking world through the praxis of (subaltern) “new archivists” (Derrida 1996). In this “willful” (Ahmed 2014) endeavour to archive back to the colonial centre — typical of the postcolonial phenomenon suggested by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration (1990) — there lies the crucial interrogation, which participants in the conference might want to address, about what can constitute an archive so as to come up with a counterweight to official history, “towards a decolonial archival [radical] praxis” (Ghaddar and Caswell 2019), towards what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls “unlearning imperialism” and the ensuing emergence of “potential history” (2019), and a (re)consideration of “embodied archives” (Taylor 2003). Of utmost importance is what Michaël Foessel calls “historiographical consolation” (2015, our translation) and the ways and means to reach it: rethinking the materiality and temporality of the archive for a fairer history and social justice as a horizon to try and reach (see Wallace, Duff, Saucier et al., 2020), so as to “repair the world” (Gefen [2017] 2024). 

WORKS CITED 

ACHEBE, Chinua. “Interview. Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After Things Fall Apart.” PBS Newshour, 27 May 2008. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/achebe-discusses-africa-50-years-after...

AHMED, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 

ARCHIVE / COUNTER ARCHIVE. https://counterarchive.ca/welcome. 

AZOULAY, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019. 

AZOULAY, Ariella Aïsha, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, et al. Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. London: Thames and Hudson, 2023. 

BHABHA, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. 

BUTLER, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 

CLARK, Percy M. The Autobiography of an Old Drifter. London: G.G. Harrop, 1936. 

COBAIN, Ian. The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. London: Portobello Books Ltd, 2016. COLE, Teju. Tremor. London: Faber & Faber, 2023. 

DE SOUSA SANTOS, Boaventura. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 

DERRIDA, Jacques. 1995. Archival Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 

DIPTÉE, Audra. “Operation Legacy: How Britain Covered Up Its Colonial Crimes.” The Conversation, 2024. https://theconversation.com/operation-legacy-how-britain-covered-up-its-...

DRAYTON, Richard. “Britain’s Secret Archive of Decolonisation.” History Workshop, 2012. https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/britains-secret...

FARGE, Arlette. 1989. The Allure of the Archives. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 

FOESSEL, Michaël. Le Temps de la consolation. Paris: Seuil, 2015. GALLIEN, Claire. “A Decolonial Turn in the Humanities.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 40 (2020): 28-58. 

GANTEAU, Jean-Michel. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2015. 

GEFEN, Alexandre. 2017. Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Tegan Raleigh. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024. 

GHADDAR, J. J., and Michelle Caswell. “‘To go beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Practice.” Archival Science 19 (2019): 71-85. 

GRIEVES, Vicky. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, the Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing. Discussion Paper No. 9. Darwin: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. 

GUHA, Ranajit. 1997. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 

GUIGNERY, Vanessa. “Pastiche, Collage, and Bricolage: Caryl Phillips’ Hybrid Journal and Letters of a Slave Trader in Crossing the River.” Ariel 49.2-3 (2018): 119-148. 

HABILA, Helon. Measuring Time. London: Penguin Books, 2007. 

HARTMAN, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14. 

IŠTOK, Rado, ed. Decolonising Archives. Gothenburg: L’Internationale, 2016. https://e-artexte.ca/id/eprint/30628/1/03-decolonisingarchives_pdf-final...

LE BLANC, Guillaume. L’Insurrection des vies minuscules. Montrouge: Bayard, 2014. 

LORI-PARKS, Suzan. Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997. 

NEALE, Margo Ngawa. “The Third Archive and Artist as Archivist.” In Indigenous Archives, the Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art. Edited by Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2017, 269-294. 

NEWTON, John. The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton) 1750-1754, With Newton’s Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. Edited by Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrel. London: Epworth, 1962. 

PHILLIPS, Caryl. Crossing the River. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. 

RANCIÈRE, Jacques. 2008. “The Paradoxes of Political Art.” Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. 134-151. 

—. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. 

SERPELL, Namwali. The Old Drift. London: Vintage, 2019. 

SMITH, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London/Dunedin: Zed Books/University of Otago Press, 1999. 

TAYLOR, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 

THE DÚCHAS PROJECT. https://www.duchas.ie/en/info/about. 

VAN NEEL, Annina. “Scraping Away Generations of Forgetting: My Fight to Honour the Africans Buried on St Helena.” The Guardian, 27 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/27/scraping-away-generations-.... 5 

WALLACE, David A., Wendy M. Duff, Renée Saucier, et al. Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice. London: Routledge, 2020. 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 

We welcome the following types of contribution focusing on a historical, literary, visual or even transdisciplinary approach: academic papers, artistic contributions, live poetry/spoken word and theatrical performances.... The contributions are expected to address themes such as counter-archives, the silences of the archive, restitutions, institutional and archival brutalities, the places and spaces of the archive, the archive and Law, archives and digital humanities, among other possibilities. Please submit abstracts no longer than 300 words in English, with a short biographical note (no more than 150 words), to the conference conveners, Cédric Courtois (Université de Lille, cedric.courtois@univ-lille.fr) and Laura Singeot (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, laura.singeot@univ-reims.fr) by September 10, 2024. 

The conference is planned as an on-site event at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and will take place on January 30-31, 2025. 

CONFERENCE ADVISORY BOARD: 

Corinne BIGOT, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès; 

Estelle CASTRO-KOSHY, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, James Cook University; 

Bernard CROS, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis; 

Vanessa GUIGNERY, ENS de Lyon; 

Mélanie JOSEPH-VILAIN, Université de Bourgogne; 

Françoise KRÁL, Université Paris Nanterre; 

Anne-Sophie LETESSIER, Université Jean Monnet; 

Fiona McCANN, Université de Lille; 

Ahmed MULLA, Université de Guyane; 

Sandrine SOUKAÏ, Université Gustave Eiffel; 

Suhasini VINCENT, Université Paris Panthéon-Assas.