Welcome to the homepage for our collaborative project on colonized sexuality!
At the outset of this project, the three of us read and thought widely about the nature of archival histories, and especially about the ways that digital archives both interrupt and alter paradigmatic methodological questions about historical research. We worked through theories of traditional and digital archives alike, paying close attention to how existing literature could help us develop research projects that were both methodologically careful as well as politically and ethically sound. On our “Theories of the Archive Syllabus” page, you’ll find a complete bibliography for this blog post along with other resources for thinking alongside this literature.
Coming into the project, we had a sense that archives – which we understand to be organized repositories of evidence about the past – both represented and actively participated in the production of power. These impressionistic ideas were quickly confirmed by the literature. We spoke about theories of the archive, such as Derrida’s Archive Fever, which casts the archive as a conflictual site wherein “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (CITE), and Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge, which posits the archive as “the law of what can be said” (145). We discussed theories of history itself, such as Hayden White’s Metahistory, which suggests that historians are always “indentured to a choice among contending interpretive strategies in any effort to reflect on history-in-general” and that “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological” (xxxi-xxxii). And we discussed arguments about the structured patterns of silence in histories of race and colonization, such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” which argue, in Hartman’s words, that the “libidinal investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past” (5), and which contend that adequately confronting these silences requires, in Troulliout’s, “not so much…the production of new facts but…their transformation into a new narrative” (58).
What these forays into the work of engaging the past taught us were both critical, in the sense that they helped us to develop a critical theory of the historical endeavor, and methodological, in the sense that they asked us to consider how we encounter historical data and what those encounters might themselves be telling us about the nature of power generally, and about colonial power specifically. Equally, these engagements pointed us towards practices like Hartman’s “fabulation,” which takes seriously the notion that history-telling – especially when it comes to marginalized people whose appearances in the archive are one-sided, violent, and incomplete – is as much aesthetic, speculative, and ethical as it is verifiable, scientific, or objective.
Based on these conversations, over time, we developed a working theory of the archival history of colonized sexuality, which we summarize here in the following two points:
First, we hold that the documents, sources, and artifacts we encounter in the archive are irrevocably marked by colonial desires. In other words, the “residue” of the past that is available to us is determined, in large part, by what has been preserved in institutions governed by colonial administrators, academics, and professionals, whose selection criteria and preservation tactics were (and are) both reflective and productive of their colonial assumptions. And second, colonial subjects themselves
Second, despite colonial imprints that render harm, violence, and death the only traces of marginalized lives, we hold that the practice of telling these “impossible” histories can be an act of creativity and love. Such a practice, we argue, depends on our “productive attention to the scene of loss” (Lowe, 208); by “playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view,” such historical narratives “displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” (Hartman, 11).
Digital Archives
So, while all archives share in the activity of organizing and arranging knowledge about the past, often in ways that powerfully silence the marginalized, historians and theorists have long debated what it means to engage these organized repositories of information, what strategies can be used to disrupt and displace their intended narrative effects, and how their structure can be read “against the grain.”
We came to our conversations about digital archives from this framework. And one of the things we noticed right away is the extent to which digital archives seek to actively “rearrange” the ways that we encounter traces of the past, both in the sense that accessibility of these materials changes the mode in which we encounter them and in the sense that digital archives make it possible to reconsider the kinds of materials, the sequences of events, and the basic elements of the story that can be considered traces of the past.
Digital archives, in other words, can be more than replicas of their physical counterparts. In traditional archives, scholars are obligated to encounter pieces of the historical story in strictly organized ways: the arrangement of boxes, folders, and labels organize our imagination and therefore the kinds of stories we tell. Digital archives, however, disrupt and jumble these encounters by allowing researchers to encounter materials according to keyword searches and across collections. These functions of the digital archive “re-present the sequence of events” in in literal sense; Katja Müller, for example, argues that “Digitization not only yields a different format and interface for archival records, but changes modes of access and order” (26). By engaging in these “modes of access and order,” she argues, researchers “come to terms with ideas of what an archive is” (27).
We would suggest, then, that digital archives projects are important tools for emplotting or re-presenting history in explicitly decolonial ways. If, as we suggested above, archival work on marginalized groups is characterized by the need for speculative, aesthetic, and ethical approaches to historical residues, we want to suggest that the intentionality around the “modes of access and order” that digital archives offer are key sites in which “fabulation” can take place.
In our reading and exploration of archives, we discovered that these goals are, in fact, central to the missions of many digital archivists and the projects they create. Caswell, for example, writes that “the creation of community archives can be seen as a form of political protest in that it is an attempt to seize the means by which history is written and to correct or amend dominant stories about the past… In this way, community archives are responses not only to the omissions of history as the official story written by a guild of professional historians, but the omissions of memory institutions writ large, and can thus be read as a direct challenge to the failure of mainstream repositories to collect a more accurate and robust representation of society” (32).
Based on our encounters with this literature on digital archives, we developed a “Statement of Values” for decolonial archival research, which is premised on four methodological principles:
Because colonization/settler colonization functions by projecting one way of visualizing space (e.g. maps, two-dimensional representations of space) as neutral, an anti-colonial approach to representing sexuality will consider alternative ways to present geographies; it strives to visualize or represent race/gender/sexuality as constructed by and in space rather than as transparently available for representation in space.
An anti-colonial approach to representing sexualities will not presume that its tools are neutral: it contextualizes, and argues for, its methods for presenting and selecting artifacts, but it does not assume that these are inherently good or natural ways of presenting them.
An anti-colonial approach to sexuality will explore ways to “show the possible universe of missing data” (Posner 2016)). That is, it highlights the fact that all archives must make choices of selection that represent “the violence of the archive, as archive, as archival violence” (Derrida, 7), and calls attention to these violences as a matter of method and politics.
Finally, an anti-colonial approach to sexuality will present sexualities outside of a “straight/gay” or “hetero/homo” binary that naturalizes and reproduces conceptions of sexuality that were/are forged in Western contexts.
Caswell, Michelle. “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” The Public Historian 2014, 36(4): 26-37.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1995]).
Foucault, Michel. The Archealogy of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010 [1972]).
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, No. 26 Vol. 12(2): 2008.
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
Müller, Katja. Digital Archives and Collections (New York: Berghahn, 2021).
Posner, Miriam. “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Gold and Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press 2015 [1995]).
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 [1973]).