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Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to address what is ‘left out’ of the archive as a result of selections made by colonial agendas. It highlights the importance of locating and naming these (and other) absences, and explores some opportunities the digital archive affords us, for presenting and curating absence.

Paper long abstract:

Archival collections are inherently incomplete as they only comprise a selection of materials. Past and present processes of selection must therefore be in the forefront of our minds and remain a critical point of interrogation into the archive. The selection process is guided by specific individual, intellectual, epistemological, public, and political agendas regarding decisions about what to include or exclude from a collection. Archives that were produced through colonial projects, with collecting that was overwhelmingly conducted by colonial actors, often resulted in the othering and/or archival erasure of the (then) colonized. As these archives are preserved over time and used to substantiate the knowledge that has been produced from them, an ‘epistemic coloniality’ is sustained and entrenched. Things that were considered less important than others fell out of view and were therefore rendered invisible or absent. This paper seeks to address what is ‘left out’ as a consequence of colonial agendas and goes further to explore other absences in the archive as well. It brings these absences to the fore and highlights the importance of locating and naming these absences. It explores some of the opportunities the digital archive affords us, for presenting and curating absence. One of the things this paper will do is theorize the conceptual strategy of placeholding in relation to absence and demonstrates examples on the Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) exemplar, EMANDULO, where this can be seen in action.