World Art

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At work in the archive: introduction to special

issue

Ferdinand de Jong

To cite this article: Ferdinand de Jong (2016) At work in the archive: introduction to special issue,
World Art, 6:1, 3-17, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2016.1176391

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World Art, 2016
Vol. 6, No. 1, 3–17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2016.1176391
Guest Editorial

At work in the archive: introduction to special issue

Ferdinand de Jong*

Department of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia,
Norwich, UK

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged

the spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our
postcolonial present. Interrupting established historical narratives of
colonial domination, artists have started to address the legacy of
imperialism by examining the colonial archive. At work in the
archive, these artists examine the possibilities of decolonialising
colonial subjectivities. Through the return, recuperation, and re-
enactment of archives, archival art points to the potential of
forgotten pasts and unanticipated futures lingering in the imperial
archive. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, such archival
interventions often serve an emancipatory agenda.
Keywords: art; archive; empire; decolonisation; futures; recuperation;
re-enactment

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the
spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial
present. In their work, the archive often figures as source or resource,
matter or metaphor, and presence or absence of our colonial past. Consid-
ering the intensity of this archival return, it is no exaggeration to state that
the archive has emerged as a paradigm through which artists pursue a
range of engagements with colonial histories. In their work the archive
enables them to confront the legacies of our colonial pasts and provides
them with possibilities to conceptualize the hidden histories and
counter-memories that have been suppressed by screen memories whose
traumatic contents need to be addressed in order to open up alternative
futures. Conventionally imagined as a technology for the storage of
traces of the past, in this context the archive may be thought of as a site
to rethink our past. In this volume of World Art, the contributors
explore how artists are at work in the archive to explore alternative
relations between past, present and future.

*Email: F.Jong@uea.ac.uk
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
4 F. de Jong

Interrupting established historical narratives of colonial domination,

artists and activists address the legacy of imperialism in order to decolonize
our subjectivities shaped by the colonial archive. Digging through strata of
imperial debris, artists excavate archaeologies of the colonial archive that
reject linear narratives. The artists thereby acknowledge the multiplicity
of temporalities that philosophers too have come to recognize. In his now
canonical text on the archive, Derrida (1996: 68) suggests that it is not
about the past: ‘it is the future that is at issue here, and the archive as an irre-
ducible experience of the future’. Taking Derrida’s view on the futurity of the
archive to the postcolony, the articles presented here examine why and how
contemporary artists and activists intervene in the colonial archive. Con-
ceived as technologies of memory, archives lend themselves to ‘the recog-
nition of past suffering and the creation of futures of hope’ (Rowlands and
de Jong 2007: 13). The articles collected in this volume of World Art
address the question of how the colonial archive may be used to produce
visions for decolonial futures. In our view, the return to the archive is
often informed by a quest for utopian futures inherent in the possibilities
afforded by the archive and the objects it holds (see also Basu and de Jong
2016). But before we explore these issues in more detail, let us first
examine a colonial archive in one former seat of imperial power, London.

Art and empire

Late in 2015, Tate Britain staged the exhibition Artist and Empire, a historical
survey of art produced by British artists in the context of the British Empire.
As curator Alison Smith (2015: 12) argues, considering the institution’s ‘pro-
blematic relationship with the subject’, an exhibition on this subject was
appropriately situated at Tate Britain. After all, the philanthropist Henry
Tate owed his wealth to the production of sugar in the West Indies and
Tate’s enterprise depended on slavery and the system of indentured labour
that followed its abolition (Smith 2015: 12). The site of the gallery itself,
too, was deeply connected to the history of the empire: it was from the Mill-
bank Penitentiary that, until 1867, convicts were sent to penal colonies in Aus-
tralia. The choice of Tate Britain as a location for an exhibition on art and
empire seems therefore well judged. In his foreword to the accompanying cat-
alogue, Paul Gilroy (2015: 8) welcomes the initiative, hoping that an exhibi-
tion on imperial art might counter Britain’s yearning for a ‘clean,
progressive national history’. However, this inability to acknowledge and
come to terms with the unwelcome legacies of empire is not restricted to
the United Kingdom. Certain European museums, although in possession
of interesting collections of colonial photography, opt not to exhibit these
for fear of discomforting the coveted visitor (Edwards 2016). European
nations have short memories and suffer from what historian Ann Laura
Stoler (2011: 125) has identified as ‘colonial aphasia’.
 World Art 5

In postcolonial nations that have faced immigration from their former

colonies, the legacy of empire needs to be confronted. Metropolitan
museums are appropriate sites for such an exercise of atonement, if only
because they were historically conceived for the collecting of art, antiqui-
ties, ethnographic specimens, photography and knowledge that today con-
stitute the imperial archive – that utopian site for the collection of the
world (Richards 1993). It was, indeed, a utopian aspiration to gather all
and everything for the production of an enlightened knowledge of the
world that undergirded the foundation of many learned societies and
museums in Victorian Britain. For this reason, Gilroy (2015: 8) suggests
that the exhibition Artist and Empire might help evaluate the legacies of
the imperial venture: ‘This gathering of objects and images is therefore
endowed with the capacity to transform Britain’s understanding of itself’.
But is a gathering of objects in itself sufficient to transform our under-
standing of ourselves? The exhibition Artist and Empire provided a largely
chronological survey of art produced and consumed in the context of the
Empire. In this exhibition reverential portraits of indigenous rulers some-
times confront racial hierarchies, cultural hybridities reframe assumptions
about cultural subjugation, and postcolonial interventions question the
imperial legacy. By and large, however, the arts of empire were commis-
sioned by the powers that be. It was an art that represented an ideal of ben-
eficial rule and that affirmed hierarchies, yet elided the violence of
oppression and silenced atrocities. The question is to what extent one can
rely on the art of empire to question the epistemologies of its making? In
her study of the archives of the Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler
(2009) has suggested that colonial empires relied on an archival production
of normalcy. Her study of documents reveals how such normalcy was pro-
duced in a context of considerable epistemic anxiety. Rather than pursuing
a postcolonial agenda of reading the archives against the grain, Stoler
reveals the inherent anxieties in colonial epistemologies by reading the
archive along the archival grain and demonstrating how pivotal the
archive was in producing acquiescence. Even ‘at home’, in the heart of
empire, the surveillance of national populations increasingly relied on the
production of archives that enabled the policing of unruly bodies (Sekula
1986). To revisit these techniques of surveillance certainly helps us under-
stand the mechanisms of biopolitics, but does it really enable us to ‘work
through’ the imperial legacies? The reassembling of imperial art cannot
establish this, Tate Britain’s curator admits (Smith 2015: 12), because the
art of empires fails to engage with the experience of its colonial subjects.

At work in the archive

To confront the colonial legacy of the archive, it is not sufficient simply to
restage it, as the exhibition Artist and Empire did. What is required
6 F. de Jong

instead is a re-enactment of the archive that questions the conditions of

possibility of its own making. Since the 1990s, many artists have embraced
this conceptual interest and brought it to fruition in their work (Enwezor
2008). By acknowledging the existence of imperial archives as a paradigm
that has contributed to the making of empire, they thereby move beyond an
earlier, postcolonial position. Frantz Fanon (2001: 31), in an oft-quoted
phrase on colonial violence, stated that ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean
world’. According to him, decolonization could only be achieved through a
violent revolution that would create a tabula rasa from which a new type of
human being would arise. However, since the 1970s we have come to
realize that colonialism relied on the production of a colonial knowledge
which in its turn depended on the collection of objects, art, and photo-
graphs in the museums and libraries of the imperial metropolis (Said
1978; Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). The knowledge produced by Orientalists,
anthropologists, and geographers was subsequently put on display in eth-
nographic museums and other educational institutions that constituted the
exhibitionary complex (Coombes 1994; Bennett 1995). However ineffective
and incommensurate with the landscape they sought to measure and map,
colonial archives produced truth-claims that have shaped colonial relations
(Arondekar 2009: 12).
It is this complex of knowledges with its multi-stranded discourses that
produced colonial subjectivities – as opposed to a Manichaean world of
binary dichotomies – that contemporary artists and activists have now
appropriated. Postcolonial authors have taken on the ‘epistemic violence’
of colonial forms of knowledge production (Mignolo 2011). Artists, for
their part, have taken it upon themselves to address colonial collections.
Subsequent to the claims for the repatriation of objects in imperial collec-
tions, the postcolonial subjects whose lives have historically been docu-
mented in imperial archives are now reclaiming the archive. Some of
these claims are for access to the historical truths hidden in those archives,
evidence of torture and maltreatment. This is the case for the ‘migrated
archives’ of the British Empire that have for decades been hidden from,
and made inaccessible to, their postcolonial claimants (Anderson 2011).
Other claims are not for specific data, but for a reappropriation of the
archive as a system of knowledge. Indeed, the current postcolonial claim
to the archive should be situated in a wider epistemological shift that com-
prehends the archive as an instrument for the production of knowledge.
Although the publication of Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida (1996)
has made a Freudian reading of the archive possible, the attention to
this institution in contemporary non-academic discourse is probably
more indebted to the publication of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of
Knowledge (1972). This study established that academic discourses are
not merely oppressive, but productive in generating the cultural
grammar that enables us to think ourselves. The archive, in Foucault’s
 World Art 7

understanding, should not be defined as an institution, but rather as ‘the

law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of state-
ments as unique events’ (Foucault 1972: 146). Rather than an institution
for filing objects, the archive is defined as the set of practices that deter-
mines what is filed. This epistemic shift in our understanding of the
archive has completely changed how we value its use. This has been use-
fully identified as a move from ‘archive-as-source’ to ‘archive-as-subject’
(Stoler 2009: 44).
Although the archive no longer authorizes us to narrate our past in
linear narratives, it still presents us with a site at which to face the spectres
that have come to haunt us (Demos 2013). Recognizing the irruptions of
the colonial past in our present, we have to acknowledge that we still live
amid the ruins of empire. In her reflections on imperial debris, Stoler
(2013) dwells on the powerful hold that empires continue to exercise
over the minds of the colonized. Rather than assume that empire is over,
she proposes that we study the ruins of empire and its process of ruination.
Associating its promissory notes with imperial deceit, Stoler (2013: 9)
directs our attention to what people are left with. Of course, as some
essays will demonstrate, genealogies of deceit can easily be found in the
ruins of empire. But this special issue also draws attention to other
‘origins’: returns to the archive unearth the conditions of possibility of
other stories. That archival work can contribute to telling stories of other
futures is one of the lessons to be learnt from Gary Wilder’s Freedom
Time (2015), an inspiring study of the politics of decolonization pursued
by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Their political projects in interwar
France were meant to achieve civilizational reconciliation and human self-
realization in a time when decolonization was not yet an option (Wilder
2015: 2). Although their political projects are no longer pursued,
Wilder’s suggestion is that we should re-examine such projects as ways
of developing alternative pasts and alternative futures. In our view, the
current return to the archive is informed by a quest for such utopian
pasts and futures.
Rather than provide us with linear meta-narratives, the archive’s found
objects enable artists to work in non-linear ways (Van Alphen 2014).
Indeed, in his trend-setting essay Foster (2004) suggested that the frag-
mentation characteristic of archival art rejects linear models and offers
construction sites for new narrations. This special issue examines how con-
temporary artists, activists, and postcolonial states have intervened in the
colonial archive. Unlike historians, the artists and activists we examine
here have not read the archive-as-text; they have intervened in the
archive-as-object. Whichever imperial legacies they have found, they
have appropriated them for re-significations unanticipated by the colonial
masters. Acknowledging such mutability of the colonial archive, we explore
8 F. de Jong

its multiple and unanticipated affordances in the present (see also Basu
and de Jong 2016: 5).
In this we acknowledge the multiplicity of uses that any archive can be
given, as demonstrated in Kirsten Weld’s (2014) study of the archives of
the military dictatorship in Guatemala. As agents in the country’s
counter-insurgency, the National Police had gathered information on its
alleged political opponents in an estimated 75 million documents. Weld
examines how these archives had constituted a panoptical vision of Guate-
malan society that had been used to track and pursue political opponents.
After democratization of the political system, the Guatemalan government
tried to keep the files secret from the post-conflict truth commission until
the archives were rediscovered in a derelict building in the national capital.
Weld’s study concerns the struggle of human rights activists to access the
documents and uncover their contents. With great sensitivity, she docu-
ments how the files are made available for the persecution of those respon-
sible for ‘the missing’ – and how the archive is appropriated for the struggle
against impunity. While the archives had in the first instance been used to
suppress political opponents, those subjected to its administrative gaze
have been able to wrest control of the panopticon and turn it into an instru-
ment of emancipation. For the activists, Weld (2014: 237) states, the
archives ‘are sites of hope and aspiration’. Postcolonial authors had
already signalled this emancipatory potential of archival activism (Appa-
durai 2003; Hall 2001). The articles in this volume of World Art explore
such emancipatory aspects of archival art in more detail.

Photographic returns
Photography played a critical role in the establishment of colonial forms of
domination. Landau (2002: 146) wryly observes that ‘photography became
a tool of empire by following the gun into Africa’. It is well documented that
photography was used in the production of knowledge about the indigen-
ous population of Africa by visualizing ethnographic ‘types’ (Edwards 1992;
Ryan 1997). The colonial gaze subordinated the colonized into ethno-
graphic objects of study by storing their stereotypical representations in
the ethnographic museum.
In more recent studies, this totalizing view of colonial photography has
been questioned (Garb 2015). Edwards (2015: 50) suggests that recogniz-
ing the tropes and ideological formations produced in colonial photogra-
phy is not the same as destabilizing them. Academic deconstruction did
not enable the same material to be read in other ways. And the colonial
archive is read not only by postcolonial scholars, but also by postcolonial
subjects who actually recognize themselves in the archival collections:
‘many indigenous researchers continue to discover images of their ances-
tors in such anonymous “ethnographic” images, redeeming an honorific
 World Art 9

dimension within the historical image that had hitherto been assumed to
be forever denied’ (Morton and Newbury 2015: 8–9). Thus the ‘ethno-
graphic’ is not the only register in which such photography can be read,
and alternative readings of colonial photographs have been facilitated by
their return from colonial archives to the descendants of the original sub-
jects. Thus the history of the function of photography cannot be disen-
tangled from the history of archiving. Aboriginal readings of historical
photography amount to an appropriation of the colonial archive.
In this issue, three essays address the appropriation of photographs
from the colonial archive. We open with Emma Doubt’s article on the
Native American photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. Historically, pho-
tography of Native Americans has played an important role in establishing
the trope of the ‘vanishing race’ by portraying Native Americans in anon-
ymous ways. Using the commercial internet archive of eBay, the artist
reclaims these anonymous images and makes them available for re-read-
ings by Native Americans. Imbuing these photographs with personal
stories enables the recuperation of such archival imagery through what
Tsinhnahjinnie has termed ‘photographic sovereignty’ (Doubt, this
volume). The photographs are thus reclaimed and rescued from anonymity
and, as Doubt demonstrates, are made to serve the work of postmemory.
In comparable ways, the visual essay by Jane Lydon presents a range of
photographic images of Indigenous people from the colonial archive in
Australia. Lydon pursues the argument that colonial photography has
not inevitably served as a tool of surveillance. In fact, the images are
now made available for new readings by Aborigines, who draw upon the
archive to re-establish family connections lost as a result of the Stolen Gen-
erations. Aboriginal communities have thus reworked the potential of the
photographic archive. But the archive is not only reclaimed; it is refigured
by Aboriginal artists, such as Christian Thompson, who draw upon it to
transcend the original purpose of essentializing identity.
The reuse of archival photographs has also helped with the process of
historical reclamation and reconciliation in East Africa. In her fascinating
contribution to this issue, Annie Coombes investigates representations of
the colonial State of Emergency (1952–1960) in Kenya. Looking at two
exhibitions, she examines their uses of colonial photographs. In the
National Museum the artist Miriam Syowia Kyambi has arranged an instal-
lation of images that enables viewers to come up with their own interpret-
ation of Kenya’s history. In the Lari Memorial Peace Museum, activists
have exhibited photographs of atrocities attributed to Mau Mau rebels,
yet because of a lack of captions this selection from the colonial archive
might also be read otherwise, in ways not predetermined by the
museum. The exhibition includes photographs of both sides of the antico-
lonial struggle and by commemorating both, Coombes suggests, unsettles
established national narratives. In both cases, the promiscuous recycling of
10 F. de Jong

the colonial archive enables the making of as-yet-undiscovered historical

‘truths’. Like the previous two articles, Coombes’s study suggests that the
work the archive can be made to do depends on particular techniques of
archival recuperation.

Archival recuperations
Artists use different strategies to rework the colonial archive, going beyond
appropriation to reflect upon their own positionality. One such strategy is
the collaging of disparate, found materials into new assemblages. Dadaist
proponents used collage as an artistic strategy for archival purposes:
Hannah Höch used it for her scrapbooks, assembling clippings from con-
temporary popular magazines and, in the process, creating an alternative
archive of images. Postcolonial artists too draw upon the possibilities of
collage in the ways they cut and paste archival fragments to create new
meaning. In her essay on the Anishinaabe artist Carl Beam, Stacy Ernst
examines his use of collage. By assembling different media (such as
stencil fonts, photography, painting), disparate fragments are brought
together into a reassemblage, suggesting that through collage existing
archives can be disrupted. This reminds one of the principle Derrida
(1996: 3) discerns as proper to the power of the archive: consignation,
or the bringing together of signs. Beam uses the full potential of consigna-
tion by bringing together different periods in one image, consigning past
and present. Such consignation enables the audience to read the work as
archive, rather than linear narrative (Van Alphen 2014). Collage is one of
the most effective strategies employed by postcolonial artists in decoloniz-
ing their histories. In Beam’s work it enables audiences to explore different
relationships between past and present, rather than letting them succumb
to a hegemonic settler meta-narrative.
Ernst demonstrates another aspect of archival art in the work by Greg
Curnoe, a settler-Canadian artist. In his Deeds/Abstracts: The History of
a London Lot, he brought together disparate sources into an archive of
sorts. This archive and the artworks that accompanied it illustrate the
power of collage as a strategy for decolonization. In their different ways,
each of the artists examined by Ernst has used archival collage as a way
of making historical information present, and presenting it in a way that
subverts non-Native epistemologies. The emergence of decolonial futures
through archival collage thus requires settler-Canadians to recognize
alternative ways of knowing.
In her article on contemporary artists in Angola and their strategies of
archival recuperation, Nadine Siegert also explores whether it is possible to
repair the past by working through its traumas. Adopting Aleida Ass-
mann’s model of the archive as a repository of cultural memory, Siegert’s
conceptualization of the archive is metaphorical, rather than literal, yet
 World Art 11

the artists she examines do explore material archives. For instance, in his
Hidden Pages, Stolen Bodies (2001) António Ole combines found objects
with documents retrieved from a police archive. The work offers a reflec-
tion on the forgotten history of forced labour under the colonial regime
and counters amnesia through the excavation of neglected strata of
Angolan history. Other artists whose work Siegert discusses intervene in
the archive by performing within its gaps. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work, for
instance, by performing on the empty pedestals of colonial monuments,
exemplifies an exploration of the possibilities of archival mimicry that
raises questions about archival performance, a subject examined in
several other articles in this issue.

Archival performances
When considering the function of the archive and its authority, we need to
remember its ‘inescapable materiality’. Mbembe (2002: 19) suggests that
the ‘status and power of the archive derive from this entanglement of build-
ing and documents’. But performance scholars have drawn our attention to
the fact that it would be all too easy to assume that the buildings and their
documents function as a perfect substitute for our memory. In the debate
about memory and modernity, the historian Pierre Nora (1989: 13)
assumes that modern societies erase memory and increasingly rely on
archival memory: ‘modern memory is, above all, archival [ … ] – hence
the obsession with the archive that marks our age’. Others have argued
that modernity produces traumatic memories through archival techniques
such as photography (Foster 1996). Scholars of unspeakable historical
trauma have demonstrated that experiences such as the slave trade have
not been recorded in writing, but may well be remembered in performance
(Argenti 2007).
At the risk of simplifying what is a very complex debate, we suggest that
the memories of modernity are not exclusively located in the archive.
Regarding this, performance scholar Diana Taylor (2003) has usefully
argued that embodied memory is stored in repertoires transmitted
outside the archive. Elsewhere, I have suggested that performances
derive their efficacy precisely from their location outside the colonial
archive and decolonize it by subverting its authority (de Jong 2016). The
materiality of the archive should be understood in relation to the perform-
ances enacted within and without it. To understand better the relationship
between the materiality and performativity of archives, we should explore
their productive entanglements (Basu and de Jong 2016: 13). This special
issue begins to explore some of these entangled histories in both historical
festivals and contemporary art.
In his fascinating article on the First World Festival of Negro Arts as it
was celebrated in 1966 in Senegal, David Murphy analyses the relationship
12 F. de Jong

between the performative arts, memory and the archive. Organized by

Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Festival of Negro
Arts was meant to be a showcase of African arts and culture, celebrating
African contributions to the history of humankind. The president-poet
imagined his festival as an archive of the embodied performances inherited
from Africa’s antiquity. This Pan-African archive of embodied perform-
ances was to be inscribed in a state-generated archive of publications on
the festival. Murphy’s article asks to what extent these publications
provide a reliable archive of the festival, considering that some of the effer-
vescence was much better recorded in personal, poetic accounts, rather
than in the documents of an unreliably maintained state archive. Interest-
ingly, the legacy of the 1966 festival was recuperated in another festival
(FESMAN) in 2010 that President Abdoulaye Wade staged in order to cele-
brate, once again, the renaissance of African civilization. In Murphy’s critical
but nuanced assessment this festival was not just a nostalgic restaging of
Pan-Africanism, but also helped to reignite some of its utopian potentials.
If the traces of the Festival of Negro Arts appear reduced in the material
archive (confirming that material archives are perhaps not well equipped
to preserve performances), such a reduction of the original is precisely
countered in the re-enactments of Carlos Motta discussed here by Stefanie
Kogler. The multidisciplinary artist works with a range of archives in order
to stage re-enactments. In his Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative
Justice (2010), actors and actresses reread six speeches by political
leaders, all assassinated, in public spaces in Colombia. During one of
these re-enactments, the public engaged with the film crew and started a
dialogue on the speech, resulting in the breakdown of the distinction
between art and politics and, one could argue, between the historical
archive and its reactualization in a contemporary political context. Such
public engagements are also encouraged in another work by Motta, The
Immigrant Files: Democracy Is Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny (2009).
In this work, video interviews about the experience of democracy are
deposited in online archives to present a platform for minority views.
These performances make documents available for contingent, subjective
engagements that require the participation of the audience; they are there-
fore, Kogler argues, a tool for democracy. The relationship between
archives and democracy is of course well established, as Derrida (1996:
4) himself clearly states that ‘effective democratization can always be
measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access
to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’.
In her contribution, Kerstin Pinther also pursues the theme of democ-
racy through participation and archival performance. The relationships
between archive, memory, and performative traces are here once more
encountered in another constellation of archival art. Pinther’s essay exam-
ines the production of alternative archives by artists in the context of the
 World Art 13

Arab Spring in North Africa. She follows Kamel Lazaar’s (2015: 9) lament
that states in the Middle East seem to fail their archives; they are under-
funded and in varying degrees of dilapidation. Such neglect raises the ques-
tion of whether the postcolonial states in the Middle East and the Maghreb
do not need archives to authorize themselves, or whether they are indeed
‘failed states’ as Allman (2013: 127) implies in her study of postcolonial
archives. Interestingly, where the postcolonial states of the Middle East
are neglecting their democratic duties, artists have taken it on themselves
to address the void. Pinther’s article examines works of art that are ‘archi-
val’ in the sense that they include visual documents of historical value. She
argues that female artists have taken responsibility for producing archives,
where states have failed to take their responsibilities. As contemporary
archival institutions did not document the revolutions as and when they
happened across the Arab world, artists actively archived in order to
counter state-sanctioned collective amnesia by setting up art infrastruc-
tures. These artists are aware of the political power of the archive and
acknowledge the potential of counter-archives to address the failures of
cultural memory in the present (cf. Foster 2004: 21–2).
The last three articles demonstrate that the process of archiving is
dependent on the contingencies of politics and can be used to engage
such contingencies. This supports our contention that archiving must be
seen as a mode of political action with the potential to contribute to a poli-
tics of emancipation. In the cases presented here, artists have assumed this
responsibility to contribute to emancipatory politics, following activists in
creating autonomous archives that support public counter-memories
(Moore and Pell 2010). It is clear, then, that artists do not merely revisit
the colonial archive. Rather than surveying the imperial archive as the
exhibition Artists and Empire at Tate Britain did, the artists discussed
here actually intervene in the imperial archive. In their interventions,
they follow a range of different strategies. The work of these artists often
relies on a return to the archive, making archived images and objects avail-
able for reappropriation in the present. In this process of reappropriation,
the predetermined meanings of imperial archival production are then
unmade through active rereadings by the descendants of the colonized.
In this process, the artists and activists recuperate the archival object
and enable the descendants of Native populations to reconstitute them-
selves through the objects that initially served their dislocation and disen-
franchisement, rendering archival objects as archival subjects. In several
instances we have seen how contemporary artists also re-enact historical
archives and thereby make archival documents available for contingent
reuses. This confirms our contention that archives can be sites for perfor-
mative reappropriations, animating the colonial archive (de Jong 2016) by
displacing the original logics of archival storage for the performance of
alternative futures. In short, for their projects of decolonization,
14 F. de Jong

contemporary artists have adopted the innovative strategies of return,

recuperation and re-enactment of the archive.
In these projects the archive appears as an open-ended, future-oriented
institution that has the potential to contribute to the creation of democratic
forms of self-representation well beyond the grasp of the state. Establish-
ing public recognition for claims to human rights, the essays demonstrate
that postcolonial artists explore colonial archives in order to produce an art
of emancipation. Through the return, recuperation, and reenactment of
archives, they point to the potential of forgotten pasts and unanticipated
futures lingering in the imperial archive.

Acknowledgements
This special issue is the result of reflections in a series of four workshops held at
University College London (UCL), the University of Stirling, and the University of
East Anglia (UEA). Funded by an AHRC Research Network on ‘Utopian Archives:
Excavating Pasts for Postcolonial Futures’ (2012–14), the workshops were con-
vened by Ferdinand de Jong (Principal Investigator, UEA) and Paul Basu (Co-
Investigator, UCL). Although not all papers presented at these workshops could
be published, a selection of them are presented in this publication, while others
have been published in special issues of Francosphères 3(1) (de Jong and
Murphy 2014) and Social Anthropology 24(1) (Basu and de Jong 2016). I would
like to express my gratitude to the AHRC for funding the network that has enabled
such a productive intellectual collaboration. I also thank Paul Basu for his collegial
collaboration, David Murphy (University of Stirling) for his help in organizing the
network, and all participants for their contributions to the discussions.

Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research
Networking Scheme [grant number AH/J006122/1].

Notes on contributor
Ferdinand de Jong is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East Anglia
where he teaches anthropology, art, and cultural heritage. His publications include the
monograph Masquerades of Modernity: Power and Secrecy in Casamance, Senegal
(2007) and the volume Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in
West Africa (co-edited with Michael Rowlands, 2007). More recently, he has co-edited
special issues on archives for African Arts, Social Anthropology, and Francosphères. He
is currently completing a study on decolonial heritage in Senegal and remains interested
in time, temporality and ruination of empire.

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