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Paper short abstract:

Discussion of a collaboration with West African story-tellers to ‘presence’ absent voices in the colonial anthropological archive. What are the decolonial ethics of such speculative approaches? Is such ‘archival ventriloquism’ appropriate? Should absences remain absent?

Paper long abstract:

I discuss an audio-visual installation, which involved collaboration with West African story-tellers to ‘presence’ absent voices in the archives of Northcote Thomas’s early 20th-century anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The installation, which was part of the [Re:]Entanglements project and exhibition (https://re-entanglements.net), provides an opportunity to reflect on the fragmentary nature of the archive and the use of speculative methodologies as a decolonial strategy for addressing its silences. The initiative forces us to address different ‘regimes of historicity’ represented by the archival document and storytelling, recalling that storytelling has a much longer genealogy in the history of history-making. In the Eurocentric tradition, they continue to have very different evidentiary status. If we accept the legitimacy of storytelling as a technique for ‘giving voice’ to those silenced in the colonial archive, however, whose speculative fictions are legitimate and whose are not? What are the ethics of such ‘archival ventriloquism’? Should absences remain absent?

In my presentation, I will show excerpts from ‘Unspoken stories: Five archival monologues’. The full series on monologues and a description of our methodology are available at https://re-entanglements.net/unspoken-stories/, including an interview with Usifu Jalloh, the Sierra Leonean storyteller with whom we collaborated closely on the project.