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- Convenors:
-
Sabra Thorner
(Mount Holyoke College)
Fran Edmonds (University of Melbourne)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Filologia Aula 4.1
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This roundtable considers the idea of a “Living Archive” from different perspectives. Recognizing that conventional archival collections expose the trauma of colonial histories, we are interested in radically reimagining archives in ways that can be healing and regenerative.
Long Abstract:
This in-person roundtable considers the idea of a “Living Archive” from different perspectives. Conventional archival collections document and reveal the trauma of colonial histories: generations of warfare, the dispossession of people off their lands, massacres, slave labor, the forcible removal of children from their families, and violence perpetrated against the practicing of culture and language. There is an urgent need for truth-telling, “setting the record straight,” and for the recognition of a “right of reply” to harmful records – especially as people sustain their ways of knowing. This archival/activism work can be healing and regenerative. Collectively, we seek to disrupt assumptions about (and experiences of) archives – as infrastructures (buildings, databases) or repositories of text (books, documents) where one might go to retrieve authorized knowledge – and forge a new kind of archive that can hold-safe and also reinforce dynamic processes of knowledge-making and -sharing.
What do individuals and communities want and need in and from archives? How can digital technologies support their goals (and where do they fall short)? How might institutions be held accountable for past (and present) injustices? How does this work interconnect with Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property(ICIP) protocols and a growing global movement in Data Sovereignty? How might we unlearn what archives are and have been, and instead radically reimagine them as sites of Indigenous sovereignty, community activism, and contemporary art- and culture-making, places and contexts that enable and support storytelling and relationality? These are some of the questions we seek to wrestle with together.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
How can Indigenous collections in overseas cultural institutions be reimagined as a living archive? I reflect on this question by drawing on long-term collaborative research with the Indigenous custodians of a historical collection kept at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum.
Contribution long abstract:
How can Indigenous collections in overseas cultural institutions be reimagined as a living archive? What “decolonial affordances” (Basu & de Jong 2016) arise from such transformative work? What representational possibilities and relational obligations does it imply for the institutions that care for globally distributed Indigenous heritage?
Addressing these questions, my contribution draws on long-term collaborative research with the Indigenous custodians of a historical collection held by the Ethnological Museum Berlin. Bearing witness to extensive colonial entanglements between Germany and Australia, this assemblage has gained additional significance through the work of Indigenous artists and cultural activists who, over the past 15 years, have asserted a continued connection to these internationally displaced “Ancestral belongings” (Moulton 2018).
My project combines provenance research in German-language archival records and collaborative methodologies of working with Indigenous scholars, artists, and Elders in seeking to recover the collection’s interconnectedness with Indigenous histories, ontologies, and present-day cultural lives. “Activating” this relational potential (Gilchrist & Skerritt 2016) can support formations of Indigenous memory and cultural revitalization, reconstituting Berlin’s colonial archive as a record of Indigenous family history and “survivance” (Vizenor 1999). As such, this work offers a productive place from which to critically examine ongoing efforts to decolonize museums in Europe, including the epistemic, institutional, and administrative challenges that new, relational approaches to collections care must grapple with.
Contribution short abstract:
In this presentation, I reflect on three diverse archives that record and represent carceral life and the politics of imprisonment in India through time. These “Living Archives” are prison museums, prison diaries/memoirs, and social media accounts in solidarity with political prisoners.
Contribution long abstract:
“Living Archives” of incarceration are crucial to understanding and engaging with oppression, whether by the colonial or the post-colonial Indian state. These three archives facilitate the creation of counter-narratives of colonialism, repression, and carceral violence. And yet, in producing or engaging with these well-intentioned “Living Archives” of incarceration, we must ask again, which voices and stories continue to remain subdued?
The first archive takes the form of former prison sites which are revived by the post-colonial Indian state as museums and monuments dedicated to India’s freedom struggle. These sites narrate stories of revolutionaries from the anti-colonial struggle of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The revival of these sites now comes at a time when the Indian state is frequently using the rhetoric of decolonisation, often even to justify its downward slide into populism and authoritarianism.
The second archive is the prison memoir/diary including letters and poetry written from and about life in prison. Prisons are opaque institutions and are infamous for extensive documentation albeit only from the perspective of the incarcerator. Writings from those imprisoned are courageous counter-narratives to the state's version, which voice stories and lived realities of those repressed and criminalised in prisons.
The third archive takes the form of social media accounts in solidarity with political prisoners presently incarcerated in Indian prisons. Often operated by families, friends, and political allies of those incarcerated but followed by diverse audiences, these accounts provide real-time updates and run campaigns for release. These accounts facilitate interaction, conversation, political mobilisation, and action.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper asks how an inaccessible archive could become a subject of healing, knowledge sharing and recognition by discussing the case of the French colonial archive concerning Haiti.
Contribution long abstract:
Haiti, the former French colony of Hispaniola, gained its hard enslaved-fought independence in 1804, leading to the formation of the world’s first black Republic. The French left shortly after, taking with them Haiti’s entire colonial archive. Ever since, Haitian and other researchers should consult or conduct research in the National archives de la France d’Outre-mer, which are located in France and host the colonial archives of French territories outside of France, including former and current colonies.
But how to learn from and reconcile with the past, when the past is still kept under tight lead by the former colonial power? How to heal and repair when the archives are located in another continent thousands of miles away? How to learn and heal when Haitian people do not have an easy access to the knowledge about their own past? How to come to terms with the past, when it is almost exclusively studied, written, and discussed from a colonial point of view?
In this paper, we would like to take a radical and decolonial stand and discuss the implications that the (in)accessibility of the archives have in learning, healing, and coming to terms with the past. This paper asks how an inaccessible archive could become a subject of healing, knowledge sharing and recognition by discussing the case of the French colonial archive concerning Haiti.
Contribution short abstract:
In this paper, I draw on excerpts and cases from my recently completed research project ‘Reframing History’ which investigates the continued influence and effects of the Danish colonial era on everyday life in three areas formerly colonized by Denmark.
Contribution long abstract:
In this paper, I draw on excerpts and cases from my recently completed research project ‘Reframing History’ which investigates the continued influence and effects of the Danish colonial era on everyday life in three areas formerly colonized by Denmark. The departure point is a comparative anthropological critique of historical archives in close collaboration with people living in former Danish colonies in St. Croix (the former Danish West Indies, now US Virgin Islands), Ikerasak (Greenland), and Tranquebar (India) as well as historians, archivists and other experts at universities, museums, research libraries, and archives. The project juxtaposes archives and new collaborative photographs, films, and oral history recordings to nuance and reframe dominant historical narratives.
I focus on my work on vernacular archives with people on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Together we devised a method for analysing, digitizing, and preserving fragile private archives such as photographs and written documents. Part of our collaborative work is exhibited at the CMCArts Museum in Frederiksted, St. Croix in the spring 2024, and I will speak about the debates this exhibition generated, how the public received the exhibition, and conclude by pointing ahead to my current research project ‘North Atlantic Everyday Histories’, which is a continuation of this project in which we device new protocols for the digitization and open-access dissemination of vernacular archives and oral histories from Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
For examples of the work see : https://christianvium.com/