Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive

Abstract

The poor condition of a collection of colonial photographs currently housed in the National Archives of The Gambia is the subject of a variety of competing discourses and practices concerning the preservation of colonial visual culture. At issue is the question of who has the right to look after the artifacts of material culture as they inevitably expire. I suggest that the discourse surrounding decaying colonial photographs is a lover's discourse. The decay causes controversy because it reminds us of our feelings for, and intimacy with, colonial culture and asks that we imagine ways of finally letting go.

Between history and its trace: slavery and the Caribbean archive

“…Is the founding principle behind such enthusiasm the same as that which has given the primordial archival document its raison d'être ? Might the ‘archival impulse’ then be ‘the return of the same’, the fear of ‘archival decay’ examined by Liam Buckley, a fear into which we might read a form of ‘colonial nostalgia’, ‘the tumult of anxiety [that comes] from waiting and anticipating the final loss of the loved object’ (: 256)?…”

Animating the archive: the trial and testimony of a Sufi saint

“…If the archive is not a piece of data, but the authority that gives documents their credibility, then the crumbling ruins of colonial archives should have our attention. In his article on the archives of The Gambia, Buckley () signals the decay the colonial archive is subject to in the postcolony. At pains to point out that archival decay is not restricted to African countries, Buckley suggests that the ruination of archives is in fact a hallmark of modernity.…”

Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue

“…It need not surprise us, then, that the archives inherited by independent states have not been given the authority that imperial states originally granted them. Colonial archives have often been neglected by the nation‐states to which they were bequeathed at independence (Buckley ). What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations?…”