154 Research Article

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Archaeological Encounters:
The Role of the Speculative
in Decolonial Archaeology
n Uzma Z. Rizvi
Pratt Institute, New York
urizvi@pratt.edu

Abstract
This article reorients archaeology’s approach to things by acknowledging the moment
of the encounter with the past as one of speculation. Years of scientific claim, research
design and methodology place the agentive nature of research in the hands of the
archaeologist: we go to the site to find the past. However, if we acquiesce to the possibil-
ity that antiquity approaches the archaeologist (rather than vice versa), then that forces
us to contend with the contemporary nature of the encounter. This article considers the
efficacy, urgency, and poetics of decolonization.

Prologue
Not all soil/miti is the same.1
One of the first lessons in excavation and survey methods can be categorized as body
techniques, or technology of bodies (Mauss 1973). Seeing difference in the colors,
textures, and inclusions is a primary form of archaeological investigation. This is closely
followed by ways that touch and taste/ingestion provide more nuance to observations
about soil (Rizvi 2012). Descriptors include the use of a Munsell Chart, grain size, and
percentage of inclusions, etc. (Courty 1992; Ruck and Brown 2015). Our bodies, as
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1. Miti is used in this article as it would be in colloquial Urdu/Hindustani in North India and Pakistan. Miti
is a broad category of soil/dirt, sometimes extending to silt/sand.

Keywords: critical theory; decolonizing archaeology; epistemic critique; futurity;

race; soil studies; South Asia; speculative

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 Archaeological Encounters 155

archaeologists, are disciplined to activate a technology of vision that prioritizes descrip-

tion over affect. Archaeologists have critiqued this vision-forward approach to archaeol-
ogy, and have convincingly argued for a connection between such an approach and
the intertwined framework of modernity and coloniality (Thomas 2004). Despite these
critiques, archaeology as a discipline continues to prioritize coding information that
creates and maintains a distance between the archaeologist and the miti, in spite of
the obvious physical intimacy.
I came up against this paradox during an archaeological survey in 2003 in northeastern
Rajasthan, India. The Ganeshwar-Jodhpura Cultural Complex Survey (GJCC Survey)
was a participatory and collaborative survey that was undertaken with participating
villages and communities in the districts of Jaipur, Sikar, Jhunjhunu, Alwar, and Tonk in
Rajasthan (Rizvi 2006, 2008b). These collaborative spaces were often realized through
practices that documented the presence/absence of ancient artifacts on the surface
during survey, but also included after-school programs, panchayat (or village council)
meetings, and countless discussions with individuals of all ages who would join us on
our surveys, communities who chose to engage in discussions about copper mining,
and publics that formed around the discourse of tourism, heritage management, and
the use of archaeology in the contemporary world. Each new survey began with a visit
to the village sarpanch 2 to discuss the overall project. This would often result in a dis-
cussion with other panchayat members and interested community leaders, including
farmers and landowners. Such discussions made each of them stakeholders in the
overall project, each with a particular point of view and specific interests in collaboration
with the survey project. In most cases, history teachers would also join in the efforts and
their classes would join our surveys. In some instances, these students would actually
become part of after-school programs in which the GJCC Survey team would teach
the students survey techniques and lessons in the general archaeology of South Asia.
Recently, in reviewing my notes I was reminded of one of these participatory work-
shops in which the condition of miti came to the forefront. I was engaged in a heated
conversation with a peer over the ethics of participation that were being suggested
for the community workshop, and the sarpanch of that area walked over to us and
asked us to remove our shoes and step onto another patch of miti – one that was not
so deplete of resources, so as to help ease our conversation and energy flows. In that
moment, I considered this act to be akin to taking a breath and checking ourselves; we
did as we were told, and ended up talking about the act more than what our disagree-
ment was about, and how we might use such a pause-technique to allow for a more
participatory model.
I walked into this suddenly sepia-toned past, rearranged my own experience and
thought that had we not done that act, perhaps our community meeting would have
been organized differently, we might have interacted with our community partners in
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an emotionally exhausted manner, and/or this interaction might have left a trace on our
relationship – and rather than us looking back upon it in a wondrous manner, we might

2. Sarpanch is the head or chair of the panchayat (council of five villages) in India. This a position with
political power and responsibility.

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have let it negatively impact our working relationship. While in that speculative space
of reordering, replaying, re-membering, and reconstructing, I realized that the strength
of the speculative moment was not in any of those human-centered agentive possibili-
ties; rather, the methodology of encounter and the use of the speculative allows one
to shift back into those spaces, allowing for everything else to become more nuanced.
This was not about me or my peers: it was about the miti. That the statement about
moving from one patch of miti to another was said by a person of political stature (the
sarpanch) suggested there was an importance of soil in political consciousness, there
existed the idea that miti had an impact, that in some manner, the soil was part of the
public or political society. Including miti, or more generally, some nonhumans as agen-
tive in such a manner, has potential to inform epistemic decolonization in archaeology.

Archaeological Encounters
In a text published at e-flux in 2012 related to an exhibition on animism, Anselm Franke
states: “The future is now behind us, and the past approaches us from the front.” The
text, albeit related to animation/animism and aesthetics, made me consider the following
question: what does it mean to be approached by the deep past? In designing research
methodologies, a basic assumption is that we, as archaeologists, approach the past.
But what if, for a moment, we consider that it is not we who determine the outcome
of our research, but rather, it is a negotiation/mediation/collaboration/conversation
between many different human and nonhuman stakeholders/participants? What we
write up in our reports as caveats to our research, the various criteria that we cannot
control but that significantly alter the results of our work, like environmental conditions,
ground cover, etc., can be considered not only something we cannot control – but an
actor, a stakeholder, a participant in our discussion of research.
In some part, this realization has become unavoidable, because the earth is no longer
languidly communicating – rather, it is starting to raise its voice. In a time when the past
was still relegated to the past, the future seemed to be unknown. In a contemporary
moment, whether we consider the Anthropocene/Capitolcene/Plantationocene/Chthu-
lucene (Haraway 2015), the future seems quite certain in its possibilities, and the past,
speculative; or at least open to a moment of speculation. It is in this contemporary
moment that I am interested in capturing the sliver of possibility that the moment of
recovery of the past may be more speculative, and to consider this as a decolonizing
gesture on archaeology’s part.
Faye Harrison famously asked in Decolonizing Anthropology if we might imagine an
emancipatory, reconciliatory, and liberated field (Harrison 1991, 1). I believe that decoloni-
zation requires a conceptual rupture in order to be realized. And perhaps the discomfort
with a speculative moment is one form or aspect of the rupture archaeology requires.
In so far as decolonization aims at destabilizing and challenging the colonial episteme,
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questioning one of our deep assumptions seems appropriate. We know that as we are
engaged in a well-educated, highly-argued, expert-proof, theorized reconstruction of a
past based on multiple lines of evidence, there is yet still a bit of speculation at its core.
And rather than considering this to be something to be hidden, not talked about, or
considered just as a given, I would like to take that speculation and celebrate it, open it

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 Archaeological Encounters 157

up, and see if it allows for a different way of understanding the methods and materials
we work with to interpret the past.

The Speculative in Archaeology and the Real of Decolonization

Contemporary critical science opens itself up to experience, engaging with creative
forms of hypothesis and solution, and embraces the honesty of uncertainty.3 Provid-
ing space for the speculative in archaeology is an inherently temporary form, and in its
uncertainty, it feels unruly. It is constantly changing and moving, because it is openly
responding to critical modes of understanding itself in relation to the normative frame-
work, and in that manner, it is always self-reflexive. It is a strand within the archaeol-
ogy of the contemporary, one that looks towards plural ways of being and becoming.
Opening up the speculative is akin to an entry into a conversation, not an interpretive
framework. It is how we might reorganize our epistemologies to test our limits of how
and where our knowledge is produced, where it comes from, and then push just a bit
more to consider something else. It is beyond the romance of impending destruction
that the materiality of late capitalism evokes. Such a standpoint allows archaeology to
stutter, to provide openings for possible other forms of knowing and being that can
act as circuit breakers within quickly closed systems of theory building. A speculative
stance understands that we have to open our foundations if we require change and a
different future, not just a different theory.
Within North American archaeology, there is a category of time and archaeological
research deemed the speculative period. These 400 or so years, between c. 1400 and
1840, is a time of unscientific and unsystematic survey, as outlined by Gordon Willey
and Jeremey Sabloff in their History of American Archaeology (1993, 12–32). This was
before the time when the discipline of archaeology was disciplined into its own subjectiv-
ity. Needless to say, archaeology is practiced in various modes globally, each with their
own situated history, but colonial histories of archaeology tend to follow certain formats
that are constitutive of their becoming. As Alejandro Haber pointed out with acuity in
2010 at a TAG-US plenary,4 “The discipline represents its own history as a progres-
sive line from ignorance to knowledge, wiring in its own genealogy the reproduction of
colonial difference and epistemic violence, and at the same time naturalizing its own
understanding of history” (Haber 2012, 60).
But what of our time? A time which has marked archaeology as proudly uncertain
(Dawdy 2009), where everything is everything across disciplinary practices (Zambelli
2015), and in which we seek some ontological certainty to being an archaeologist (Holtorf
2015). It seems to be an odd time, in which every disciplinary future is entirely plausible,
and within normative frameworks a bleakness that requires countless exit strategies to
contend with uncertainty and insecurity (m1k3y 2015; Dowd 2017). In other frameworks,
such as Afrofuturism, indigenous studies, postcolonialism/decolonization, etc. (to name
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a few), there has been a continued demand for a recognition of epistemic inequality
within the academy (Dery 1994; Eshun 2003; Lawrence and Dua 2005; Atalay 2006;

3. Social Epistemology Review & Reply Collective: https://social-epistemology.com/.

4. See https://brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/events/tag2010/7819.html.

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Rizvi 2006; Medina 2013; Quinn 2013; Haber 2015; Carrington 2016). These demands,
built on generations of scholars writing, contesting, and resisting, now more explicitly
demonstrate a shift from resistance and talks of inequity to demands for accountability
(Garcia 1989; Franklin 1997; Tuck and Yang 2012; Bolles 2013). There is a recognition
of the double-facedness of decoloniality, in which there is a simultaneity to decolonizing
Western epistemologies while looking forward to utopic visions of a decolonized future
(Mignolo 2012). The simultaneity of both aspects creates a fissure within which the
speculative of archaeology finds a place. It is within that act of epistemic unraveling, a
purposeful and intentional act, one that aims to create different ways of knowing, that
the future becoming is at once utopic, unknowable, but necessary.
Decolonization is no longer only an act of resistance: it now encapsulates the require-
ment for normative praxis to address the critique and demonstrate change. Perhaps the
most difficult of these demands is how to move an understanding of decolonization from
being a metaphor to specific acts of social justice depending on context. Just as coloni-
zation has different histories and has occupied different lands, decolonization must also
be at once specific to address those settler histories. For indigenous peoples, the act of
decolonization is a real one that has very specific land rights associated with it. It is not just
another critical framework; it is a demand for sovereignty (Tuck and Yang 2012). For those
of us, as accomplices, who are committed to archaeology’s epistemic decolonization,
there is recognition that in decolonizing the episteme we decolonize internal understand-
ings of ourselves as practitioners (Fanon 1963). This epistemic decolonization is not a
new name for epistemic critique: decolonization is an active and purposeful undoing and
un-disciplining that we acknowledge as required (Haber 2012; Tuck and Yang 2012).
As the un-doing unravels, we depend on things that have always had a place, that
have had entangled relationships with knowledge production, and not only when in
crisis (Taçon 2004; Tapsell 2011). This sets up a different reliance upon an ontological
understanding that goes hand-in-hand with the epistemic. The boundaries between the
two are porous, and they inform each other. The ontological is not only an essence, but
an essence that has the capacity to shift into different materials. There is a shapeshifting
that maintains meaning at its core, but that also is full of contingent and shifting mani-
festations depending on context – for example, Indian popular cultural understandings
around the 10 avatars of Vishnu.5 Images of Vishnu are specifically related to the divine,
but it is important to understand that the divine is understood to exist in many things
(see Boivin 2000).
The ways of knowing and productions of meaning as being co-constructed by place
is also something well documented within indigenous communities of the Pacific. Paul
Tapsell recounts how he learned the traditional origin story and layers of meaning of
“marae”: “The first part of the world, ‘ma’ refers to the female element. […] The next
part ‘ra’, denotes the complementary male element. […] Finally ‘e’ indicates the idea of
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‘enabling’ something, and providing context. […] Marae, then, is about people and the
environment working together” (Tapsell 2014, 39).6 As such, marae can then be about

5. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/0400_0499/pantheon/avatars/avatars.
html.
6. Tapsell’s chapter describes the many layers of meaning of marae.

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people, as contextualized in oral tradition, or about place, as in archaeological contexts.

As one word/concept/thought, marae then is not just an entangled relationship between
people and places; it is simultaneous, it is all at once all of those things.
In witnessing and citing such epistemologies, there is recognition that within the
archaeological episteme – that is, since the discipline was disciplined – there is an
inability to contain such meanings. In part, the shift to transdisciplinary practices within
archaeology is a result of that acknowledgment. And yet, still, there is noise from
contemporary archaeology that demands some recognition that this time is unlike any
other, and that it is insecure and uncertain. And yet, in many communities, the focus is
on resilience and innovation; the future is not uncertain, insecure, nor apocalyptic – at
least no more than it always has had the potential to be (Todd 2016; Merata et al. 2017).
Cutcha Risling Baldy is one scholar who draws attention to this, as described recently
by Zoe Todd (2016):
Indigenous scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy discusses how she uses the
zombie television show The Walking Dead in her teaching to discuss what
it was like for Indigenous peoples in the United States to contend with the
end of worlds – the apocalypse – at the hands of Spanish, British, and
American empire. […] [I]t is pertinent here to point out that Indigenous
people have been dreaming of an otherwise since the incursion of
violent colonial ideologies, language, and laws into sovereign Indigenous
territories in the Americas. And crucially, as Cutcha Risling Baldy points out,
Indigenous peoples are still here. Still telling stories. Still insistent present,
self-determining, and strong.
It is through embracing the uncertainty of all futures that a focus on living, resilience,
and hope can emerge: these are the conversations emerging from within decolonizing
discourses (Imarisha and Brown 2015; Todd 2016).

On the Object of Race and Other Quiet Things

Implicit in the impetus to consider all things along the same philosophical plane is the
elevation of nonhumans into a categorical consideration equitable to that of humans
(Witmore 2007). Whereas on one level of discourse, this is precisely what all discourses
of new materialisms are attempting, on another level of practice, this claim is contingent,
controversial, and difficult to ascertain. The assumption underlying these discourses is
that humans are higher in some conceptual hierarchy. But that “human” is the norma-
tive (i.e. white/cis-male/heteronormative) human – certainly not an othered bodied, a
body whose history is a result of colonization, enslavement, or body pieces afloat in the
late-capital market place (Benavides, this issue). As one pushes the line of questioning
further, within the speculative space, it becomes imminently clear that not all human
bodies are considered as precious as materials or lands or other nonhuman elements,
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such as currency. And so this project of identifying the politics of things must shift into
some ontological anarchy which allows for a reordering on philosophical planes for all
intersectional subjects, be they human/nonhuman/anything else.

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The discipline of archaeology, as a western epistemic project, has demonstrated its

links to the many histories of coloniality, patriarchy, capitalism, and modernity (Lydon and
Rizvi 2010; Benavides, this issue). In addition to being an epistemic project, this process
of disciplining the discipline also has a deep ontological connection that informs the ways
in which we know archaeological things. There is a sense of a priori knowledge for the
types or categories of knowledge that may be constructed, or not, as the case may be.
Haber (2015, 131) argues that archaeology “pre-understands the thing not only in its
lack of linguistic capacity, but it even neglects any other non-linguistic meaning capacity”,
referring to this as a muteness of things within archaeological disciplines, emphasizing
the epistemic violence of such an act. I would argue that the violence of such an act is
understood when we shift the intentionality from one that is a characteristic of the thing
(such as being mute), to an act of silencing (Rizvi 2015). It is important to clarify that the
ontological claim of mute things is actually a result of epistemic violence, not something
constitutive of the thing itself (Olsen 2010; for a critique see Fowles 2016). Recogniz-
ing the silence of the archaeological object is an important step towards unraveling or
un-disciplining our epistemic frameworks, providing space for a decolonial reworking or
re-reading of these things.7
When confronted with the act of silencing, the subaltern-ness of things and the object-
ness of racialized bodies, what emerges is the recognition that discursive representations
of the archaeological artifact in the contemporary moment are still considered an act of
representation (Moten 2003; Berstein 2009). In such a way, the discussion refocuses
on how this is about all things othered through time – it is about the representation of
the artifact in contemporary archaeological scholarship – and thus the context of rep-
resentation becomes just as important as the context of the archaeological past. This
reframing of context provides a little more space for a listening to things to emerge. As
Tina Campt (2017, 4) has beautifully articulated, “quiet is not an absence of articulation
or utterance. Quiet is a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and
affect, which creates the possibility for it to register as meaningful.” Campt’s work allows
one to find meaning in the silence; it leads us to listen to silence as a form of quietness,
opening the space to consider quiet things as resistant, and thus full of a different form
of agency. The contemporary discursive and museological representation of the ancient
artifacts are then recognized as having a contemporary context of quietness, a sonic
form that one has to learn what to listen for or to in order to communicate.

The Muddiness of Collaborating with Soil/Miti

At the core of this project of decolonization is a necessity of the past to be specula-
tive. In order to change/reorder/reorient our epistemological bearings, there must be a
moment we capture that allows us to do just that. But this reorientation is not one that
we can yet author or control, and to begin to understand how we might try to recognize
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7. We may consider some aspect of ontography to relate to this, but in this case, it is precisely not
just about the listing and messiness of things abound in geographic sense, but rather a purposeful
silencing of artifacts by placing them into colonial orderings. One might think of the film Statues Also
Die (1953) by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Clouquet, and the ways in which it highlights
the coloniality of the museums and collections and how those are silencing mechanisms.

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it while it is happening, we must first recognize it in retrospect. In order to enter into these
spaces of speculation, it is important to contextualize our bearing with something we
as archaeologists know well, something we are most intimate with: miti (soil). Soil and
the minerals that make up the soil or the clay are in many contexts around the world
considered “animate, divine, powerful and/or sacred” (Boivin 2004, 4).
Archaeological encounters with miti acknowledge soil as communicative and col-
laborative, and as having space within political discourse. This recognition has the
capacity then to move such theory beyond the phenomenological as the only way to
experience materiality (see Van Dyke 2015). It is a fine line separating the soil as being
soil and a contextualization that would involve anthropomorphic characteristics. Part
of our limitations of being human is that we impose human traits on things because we
know them intimately. Nicole Boivin attributed this to a particularly Western sensibility by
articulating how “minerals in many societies are attributed with qualities and properties
that most people in Western societies accord only to humans, plants, animals, and/or
divine” (Boivin 2004, 4). My hope is that through an archaeological intimacy with soil,
we may begin to recognize our encounter and engagement with the miti as one that is
not only bound by human interactions, but to recognize the miti as its own thing, and
our relationships with it as impacting our decisions and actions at the site.8
But can we think of the soil as something more than something to excavate? Can we,
as archaeologists, simultaneously work with soil and acknowledge it as working with
us? Can we allow for metaphors of being from the soil, or having the soil define who we
are, move beyond the metaphor? Can the politics of the soil be understood as having
materiality? On page six of my US Passport is a quote by Daniel Webster that acts as a
header for the section on IMPORTANT INFORMATION: “The principle of free government
adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains.” In so far
as political documents might inform conceptual frameworks of soil morphology, there
is a possibility that a phenomenological approach to materiality studies need not be the
only way to conceive of this encounter with political soil. In considering the advice of the
sarpanch in Rajasthan, to take off our shoes and move to a different patch of miti in order
to offset negative energy, we not only acknowledged the political, but also the relationship
the miti could have in a participatory framework. Such participatory modes of interaction
are created to be more open to a potential future, and thus in this respect, speculative.

On the Politics of Things and Kin-Making

The move and call for a decolonized archaeology is fueled by a desire for multiple
ontologies, for anarchy to create something different, something speculative, something
emancipatory. In that space of recognition of intersectional subjects, as archaeologists
we might find ourselves deeply connected to miti. In so far as our relationships with miti
have informed our professional approach to the past, the entanglement disciplines us
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into our subjectivity as archaeologists. But it must maintain a fluid position with regards

8. See also Boivin (2000) for ethnoarchaeological examples of Lakshmi or pili miti from Rajasthan,
India, and Hamilakis (2013) for a discussion on knowledge of soil that comes from a combination
of listening, looking, feeling/smudging, and smelling – at the core of a good excavation is an under-
standing of the soil.

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to ours: miti does not exist only in the service of archaeology, but it could be argued that
archaeology’s existence is contingent upon miti. It belongs to a process of our becom-
ing. And so this process has the capacity to move beyond what (in a Lacanian sense)
involves autopoieis. Lacan’s most cited notion of future anterior as “becoming” involves
a recognition of both past and future as more fluid and speculative: “What is realized in
my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present
perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been
for what I am in the process of becoming” (Lacan 1981, 63). Although cognizant of a fluid
past, these anticipatory forms of becoming are within the self – not taking into account
the ways in which we continue to become in relation with things or each other. The ways
in which we become are contextual, social even. And so it stands to reason that the
history of blackness, as Fred Moten suggests, is anticipatory resistance (Moten 2003).
Such becoming are forms of sociality, forms of relationships that transcend becoming
as context internal to people but between all things. These are the relationships that
Donna Haraway (2015) has suggested can be considered kin-making.
Perhaps, if we approach kin-making with all things as making person or subject, not
human/people, nor genealogically linked, as Donna Haraway (2015) has suggested,
we may find some methodological tools for speculative archaeology. Maybe this sort of
assembling recognizes how we might be approached by our research materials: “I think
that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin
in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages
(not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word” (Haraway 2015, 162; see
also Harrison and Rose 2010). Within the possible methodology of a speculative archae-
ology, as kin we co-create our research and our project, and through that our pasts and
futures. This act recognizing the “multi-species-becoming-with, multi-species co-making,
making-together” is an act of sym-poiesis, rather than autopoiesis (Haraway and Kenney
2015, 260). Our becoming is constitutive of a generative and collective project, and as
such, our research acknowledges the many layers and connections that are involved. It
brings to the forefront the idea that indeed, it is never just the researcher who determines
the outcome of the research, but rather it is a negotiation, mediation, collaboration, and
conversation between many different human and nonhuman stakeholders/participants.
There is also a temporal simultaneity that sym-poiesis allows for; a becoming that moves
in/through/between various scales of time. As with Lacan’s future anterior, this takes into
account all past becomings; in contrast, though, this is not a motion of autopoiesis, but
rather potential future becomings as an act of sympoiesis.
If the solidarities form within these spaces of sociality, and researchers are honest about
their stakes and relationships, then perhaps the concerns of the environment (social or
geologic) are also concerns for the well-being and sovereignty of peoples, and are also
concerns about empire and decolonization. With no intention to flatten the complexity
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of such concerns or methodologies for decolonization, these relationships of solidarity

breed a certain hope. The future then is less uncertain, and an ethics related to social
justice can become a methodological issue and an impetus to understand decoloniza-
tion as care (Rizvi 2008a, 2016; Haber 2012, 2015).

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Final Thoughts: How We Write the Future

I have always been struck by the fact that the future participle as grammatical code
does not exist in the English language. Any sentence I construct in English can never
articulate the sense of something about to happen. The idea of the future is heavily
contested. For many theorists and archaeologists, the future is already over (Graves-
Brown 2015). And so, then, what are we looking to or toward? Perhaps embedded in
that very question is the linearity of such imagination: there is one way to look back and
on that same track, we look forward – it is somewhat of an imagined straight line. But
being and becoming, I would argue, is never linear, nor is it straight.
Having realized that English is somewhat limited in its ability to adequately account
for future happenings, I would like to turn our attention to another language, Arabic.
Perhaps one of the most colloquial words used in Arabic is inshallah, which links time,
some epistemic causality that is usually not orthodox, and the future. Those familiar
with its colloquial use will recognize the “God Willing” nature of the word as completely
ambiguous, somewhat unknowable, and potentially unreliable (Slackman 2008; see
also Clift and Helani 2010). Inshallah pops us out of linearity and pushes us into vague
ambiguities of space: there is a possible future happening – whether or not you intend
it to be. There is a speculative nature to the word that provides the possibility of new
worlds. Rebecca Clift and Fadi Helani (2010, 359–362) refer to this as the inshallah turn,
as it marks a change or shift in the conversation topic.
If we might exist in other languages without necessitating a linearity of time, then our
approach to archaeology changes and the plausibility of archaeology or the deep past
approaching us becomes possible. It reorders/realigns and challenges our understand-
ings of what the ontology of archaeology itself may be. The epistemic critique then is a
de-stabilizing and de-rooting form of decolonial anarchy. The episteme of archaeology,
however, is stronger than a simple turn of phrase. Inshallah, the field will be decolonized;
but it will take more than language to provide that possibility. Imagining a different future
is central in a post-turn moment. How might one imagine a different archaeology, one
that begins in a place of decolonized histories or roots?
This sort of a question moves the discussion, momentarily, into speculative fiction. It
creates a fluid, speculative, transhistorical framework of possible pasts/futures (Gaylard
2008). These utopic fantasies encapsulate the decolonizing aesthetic that Walter Mignolo
(2012) speaks of in the duality where in one moment there is an epistemic critique that
balances the futurist utopic vision. In that capacity, some of our futures have always
included parallel universes or utopic fantasies. For example, one of the earliest feminist
utopic texts in the English language was Sultana’s Dream, written in 1905 by Begum
Rokeya Sakhawat Hussian (2005 [1905]). The story was first published in the Chennai-
based English periodical, The Indian Ladies Magazine. In this text, the protagonist awak-
ens into a gender-role reversed world, and then takes a journey to understand how the
© 2019 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD

new political order makes sense to sovereign beings. Through the narrative, we follow
Sultana as the Queen introduces her to flying machines, ways in which to capture solar
energy, and other technological advances that clearly benefit society. Begum Hussain
was writing within a cohort of science-fiction writers in Bengal who had begun publish-
ing sci-fi in magazines as early as 1896 (Bhattacharya et al. 1989).

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 164 Research Article

Whereas science fiction was being published in the colonies early on, the metropole saw
the work of H. G. Wells emerge, such as his widely popular The War of the Worlds (1898).
His work is considered an iconic example of colonialism-inspired sci-fi (Rieder 2008). In this
story, Wells makes a direct comparison between the Martian invasion and British colonial
expansion in Tasmania; the anticolonial impetus emerged from the critique of colonial
technique and strategy, importantly, from the metropole. These critiques as stories were
constructed through an engagement with anthropology. As John Rieder (2008, 15) notes:
Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with
colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction
from the mid-nineteenth century on. They matter first of all as conceptual
material. Ideas about the nature of humankind are central to any body of
literature, but scientific accounts of humanity’s origins and its possible or
probable futures are especially basic to science fiction.
In a more contemporary moment, recognizing colonialism’s deep roots in science
fiction should give us some pause. As the writer and critic Noah Berlatsky (2014) cor-
rectly points out, “sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future
limits – the extent to which dreams of what we’ll do remain captive to the things we’ve
already done.” This is precisely why Afrofuturism and contemporary speculative fiction
are not only about possible and alternative futures, but importantly about reorganizing
pasts – allowing for the speculative to enter into how we understand and order that past.
In particular, my mind goes to musician/philosopher Sun Ra, who created an interga-
lactic past for a future alternative. “There was in Ra, and continues to be in his music,
the witness of alternatives to all of this and what it’s got going on” (Baraka 1995, 254).
Perhaps in order to imagine a decolonized archaeology, we have to rearrange the
stars of archaeologies past, utilizing the space of speculation as a place where differ-
ent futures can be imagined. Perhaps that space that inshallah opens up for us is the
space of a future happening that is articulated when we acknowledge that often it is
our research that choses us, and not vice versa.

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 Archaeological Encounters 167

Uzma Z. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at the Pratt Institute, Brook-
lyn, NY, and a Visiting Researcher at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Rizvi’s research interests
include decolonizing archaeology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, new materialism, and the
postcolonial critique. A primary focus of her work contends with archaeological epistemologies and
methodologies, and changed praxis based on decolonized principles and participatory ethics. Rizvi has
intentionally interwoven archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art and design.
Address for correspondence: Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, 301 Dekalb Hall, Pratt
Institute, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA.

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