"Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities"

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About the Author

Bibhushana Poudyal is currently a doctoral student and Assistant Instructor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research areas are Critical Digital Humanities, Critical Digital Archiving, and Digital Humanities in Transnational Contexts. Presently, her inquiries are directed toward Theories and Praxes of Situating/Situatedness and Decolonizing-Depatriarchalizing of Epistemes, Epistemologies, Ontologies, Digitalism, and Digital Archives.

Contents

Introduction

Methodological overview of critical digital archiving project

Exigency for Critical Decolonial Digital Archiving Project

What is (or why) archiving and digital archiving?

Critical Digital Archiving: Terminological, Conceptual, and Methodological Shifts

Conclusion

References

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, “So you see this book"). My attempt in my research project of building and studying critical digital archiving is to perform this critical intimacy. Rather than studying the digital archives only from a distance, I interact with this process from within by building an archive there and documenting and theorizing the process and revealing how the meanings that are being constructed are already under erasure or already deconstructed. This method allows me to find out and exhibit the possible narratives that usually remain hidden under the surface and which are accessible to a certain extent only after that critical intimacy. I find Natasha N. Jones, Kristen R. Moore, and Rebecca Walton’s (2016) discussion of antenarrative quite apt here. Jones et al. delineate, “Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core (rather than marginal or optional) narrative” (p. 212). And this antenarrative of the act of critical decolonial digital archiving, as mentioned earlier, is radically nonlinear in nature because of its situatedness in the post/de/colonial and de/patriarchal circumstances. It is the constant interplay of complexities, precarities, negotiations, and affordances (and definitely not in this order).

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. Which is why, I also work through 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. As an initiation of that, in my next section, I briefly narrate one of the episodes I encountered after moving to the US to give context to my critical digital archiving project.