Paper short abstract:

Digitising archives risks recapitulating the mechanisms of the colonial epistemological project which founded them. Digitising at ILAM might share the biases of past archival technologies if novelty and fidelity are privileged over localised and embodied forms of knowledge-making.

Paper long abstract:

The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is an ethnomusicology archive, founded in 1954 by Hugh Tracey, that aims to preserve and promote the music and oral arts of Southern Africa. The agenda of this paper is to interrogate the role of technology in the formation of ILAM, with the intent of emphasising how technologies shape the archive and are embedded in the colonial epistemological project of extraction and control. ILAM, in the production and preservation of objects, enacts a dislocation which is both topographic and temporal. Concurrent is the act of consignation which falls onto generalised notions of ‘Africa’, employs patriarchic titles such as “The Hugh Tracey Collection”, and uses metadata to render the contents of the collection ‘legible’. The archive fetishises technologies in a manner that figures an ‘uncivilised other’. This object-centred authentication of knowledge is found in tools such as photography, writing, and audio recording, which, in their aim to preserve, also invalidates tacit knowledge systems. Through object-making, the archive enables the extraction of cultural value. Digitising, within the internet’s neo-extractive colonialism, may further cultural extraction through an asymmetry in access that mirrors colonial development. Indeed, megacorporations have created sprawling open-access digital archives under the guise of 'global culture' which, functionally, provide uneven access to exploitable cultural repositories. If integrated into this framework, the cultural heritage invested in ILAM’s archives will become alienated. If the archive is to be decolonised, it needs to deprioritise novelty and fidelity in favour of intentional and localised education and dissemination.