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

Download PDF

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

What is (or why) archiving and digital archiving?

Discussing the historical development of nineteenth and twentieth-century “[m]useum, galleries, and, more intermittently exhibitions,” Tony Bennett (1995) writes:

[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. Since the late nineteenth century, they have been ranked highly in the funding priorities of all developed nation-states and have proved remarkably influential cultural technologies in the degree to which they have recruited the interest and participation of their citizenries. (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. I will continue this discussion by first bringing in a very interesting definition of archives offered by an English historian Vivian Hunter Galbraith in 1948. He writes that archives are “the secretions of an organism” (p. 3). This seemingly innocent definition also reveals a lot about the colonial/imperial rhetoric of archives. The definition of the archive offered by an English historian in 1948 tries to make archives appear natural, neutral, unbiased, and untainted by human intervention. So, what this metaphorical description of archives means is that what they portray as their own culture and Others’ culture is unmediated, objective, and organic.

A similar sort of philosophy regarding archives can be palpated in Kate Theimer’s (2012) definition. She says, “[W]hat constitutes an 'archives' is, consciously or not, a debate over the importance of authenticity… the preservation of context” (para. 21). And she also writes, “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). As it is evident in Theimer’s definition, one of the prominences archivists put on is not only the preservation of the materials or artifacts but also the context those artifacts belong in and become with. It assumes the maintenance of an organic inseparability of artifacts from their context via physical archives. This is the same reason why many archivists critique digital archives. One of such critiques can be witnessed in Theimer’s words. She argues that digital archives built by digital humanists are “a grouping of materials that had been purposefully selected in order to be studied and made accessible” (para. 7). And she adds that these digital archives are not the archives of the subject of study but of archivists themselves. Basically, they trouble digital archives for the latter’s lack of human non-intervention.

And that’s why, this assumed "organic" objectiveness of archives regarding the preservation of artifacts and their contexts makes me want to bring up the quote of Hayden White (1987) that Gayatri Spivak includes in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present:

That language . . . is the instrument of mediation between the consciousness and the world that consciousness inhabits [White writes with some derision] . . . will not be news to literary theorists, but it has not yet reached the 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. The moment one decides and selects to "preserve" something, there is an intervention. There is an interruption in the organic phenomenon by making something present at the cost of the absence of another. There are always interests in the work of archivists. To assume otherwise is naïve and dangerous. The act of archiving is not a disinterested act, rather it is a discursive practice (Derrida, 1995; Foucault, 1972; Vosloo, 2005). Jacques Derrida (1995) summarizes the connection between political or state power and its accessibility to perform with archiving. He 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). On archiving being a discursive activity, 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). This reading of archives puts emphasis on the point that archival activity cannot be viewed apart from the power, production, and dissemination of discourse. There is nothing neutral about archives. And this is voiced by Robert Vosloo (2005) in his article “Archiving Otherwise: Some Remarks on Memory and Historical Responsibility.” He claims the assumption that archiving can be neutral is “[f]alse” and “naïve” and “technical structure of the archive also determines the structure of the archivable content” (p. 384). The technology and discourse-knowledge-information are not two separate entities; rather they inform and shape one another. Vosloo insists upon recognizing the inseparability of form, medium, and content in the construction of what we understand as an archive.

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). Archiving is not only storing or preserving what is out there, but also a production of the out-there. It is about making the choices and decisions regarding, for instance, what cultural artifacts need to be stored and preserved; it is about affiliations and constraints involved in those decisions. 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. These conversations are necessary to expose that the archives, memories, past, history, and any kind of logocentrism are vulnerable and are in need of relentless interrogations. It gives way to weaving different antenarratives of historically, structurally, or/and strategically marginalized Others and defying simplistic single narratives woven by patriarchal-colonial-imperial forces to serve their interests.

Cushman (2013) exposes a connection between archivists’ (un/conscious and un/witting) rhetoric of preservation and an imperial rhetoric of Other cultures, which is as if Other cultures are static entities fixed in the past, which can be collected and preserved in their absoluteness like the secretions of an organism. Keeping the inevitable non-neutrality of archiving in consideration and problematizing archivists’ prideful insistence upon their practices’ potential for preserving artifacts and context, Cushman (2013) advocates for the ethical way of performing digital archives for decolonial purposes. In her article “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive,” Cushman argues for the potential of digital archives not despite of but because of the same reason that digital archives cannot (and rather should not) promise to preserve contexts as if context is an inert phenomenon that can be preserved. She writes, “one way to decolonize the archive [is] through historiography that seeks to re-place media in the languages, practices, and histories of the communities in which they are created” (p. 116). Her insistence is upon contextualizing archives to battle against “the imperial archive's penchant for collecting, classifying, and isolating” (p. 116) and to problematize “imperialist archives that establish Western tradition by collecting and preserving artifacts from othered tradition[s]” (p. 118). In this context, I offer critical digital archiving as a desideratum for decolonizing digital archives.