Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives

Abstract

As the European powers appeared to withdraw from their colonies, they often took with them records that were subsequently claimed by the governments of the newly independent countries. These records are post-colonial examples of displaced archives. In recent history, the problem of displaced archives has been approached as a legal problem, and this has produced relatively few resolutions to archival claims. This article approaches displaced archives from a new perspective, applying theories and concepts recently introduced into archival theory by Michelle Caswell, Anne Gilliland and Marika Cifor: affect, imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries, and radical empathy. This article will show that these concepts, which have been deployed to decolonise diverse aspects of archival work, could also help resolve a persistent international problem, which is both technical and geopolitical/ diplomatic. This article will argue that archival theory, as recently influenced by Caswell, Gilliland and Cifor, demands a significantly changed approach to archival displacement, even as it sometimes arrives at established positions on repatriation and access. This change involves opening up dialogues about displaced archives to considerations beyond the juridical or geopolitical, to form richer understandings of archival displacement and its effects on individuals and communities. The article challenges individual archivists to apply the concepts of affect, imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries, and radical empathy in their work with colonial records as a component of decolonial archival praxis, and finally proposes a critical theorisation of displaced archives.

“Humans and records are entangled”: empathic engagement and emotional response in archivists

“…This qualitative research project confirms and elaborates on scholarship of others (Sloan et al 2019 ; Lowry 2019 ; Douglas et al 2019 ; Aton et al in review; Wright and Laurent 2021 ) regarding the potential impact on archivists of working with records involving human suffering and with donors and community researchers who are themselves a party to that suffering. What has been described as “emotional disturbances” caused by being placed within “landscapes of human suffering” (Gregory et al 1997 , pp297,300).…”

“…As a consequence of interacting with individuals who have experienced loss or trauma, archivists in this study described a sense of responsibility to the community researcher, what Lowry has previously described as an “affective responsibility” (Lowry 2019 ). One archivist described the impact of working with researchers: I would say 95% of the time that I was working with a researcher, they were disclosing abuses that happened to them, different traumas, addictions that they were working through, precarious housing, abuse that they were leaving, and I didn't have the tools to help them.…”

“…Archival scholars, Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell have described this as “the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger, and traumatize” (Gilliland and Caswell 2016 , pp55–56). Recently, there has been a surge of academic and professional interest in the affective potential of archives (Cifor and Gillil 2016 ), in which as James Lowry notes, “the personal, embodied and emotional is given space and serious treatment”(Lowry 2019 , p190). This has included a growing awareness of the impact of working with records with traumatic potentialities (Sexton 2019 ) on archivists themselves (Nathan et al 2015 ; Sexton 2019 ; Sloan et al 2019 ; Aton et al in review).…”

“Displaced archives”: proposing a research agenda

“…The application of genre studies in archives (Oliver and Duff 2012;Foscarini 2015;MacNeil 2015;Foscarini and Ilerbaig 2017), Geoffrey Yeo's (2010Yeo's ( , 2017 work on speech act theory, Oliver and Foscarini's (2014) work on information culture, the "rights in records" concept at the heart of the Refugee Rights in Records (UCLA Center for Information as Evidence 2018) and Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child (Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child Initiative 2017) projects, the new models proposed in Archives in Liquid Times (Smit et al 2017) and any of the methods and concepts put forward in Research in the Archival Multiverse might illuminate archival displacement and, in return, their applications to archival displacement might enrich or extend the concepts and tools being developed or introduced into archival studies. These interventions could stand alone or, as suggested previously (Lowry 2019), they could contribute to a new critical theory of displaced archives.…”

Arquivos deslocados

“…Para Karabinos, esta variação pode ter relação com o facto de o tema ter sido tratado academicamente por "non-archivists in non-archival terms" (Karabinos, 2018). Além disto, Lowry (2017bLowry ( , 2019 e Karabinos (Karabinos, 2018) reconhecem que a comunidade arquivística tem sido particularmente silente na abordagem deste problema, apesar dos estudos e recomendações do Conselho Internacional de Arquivos (1995,2005).…”