Colonial records are central to this process, often as obstacles
to be overcome, predicaments to be resolved and mazes to be negoti-
ated rather than as the sources of enlightenment and memory that
we like to think of when we archivists think of records.
[…]
Scholars of colonial and post-colonial societies seeking to confront
this documentary imbalance have devised and employed a variety of
strategies for finding, hearing and presenting the voices of the margin-
alized. Colonial records are central to this process, often as obstacles
to be overcome, predicaments to be resolved and mazes to be negoti-
ated rather than as the sources of enlightenment and memory2 that
we like to think of when we archivists think of records.
[…]
James Duncan points out,
‘‘to work critically in the archives is …not only to study in the
archive, but to acknowledge that the archive itself was part and parcel
of the machinery used to crush resistance to colonialism.’’
[…]
Along similar lines New Zea-
land historian Tony Ballantyne writes that, ‘‘we desperately need to
appreciate how our colonial archives were constructed, we must cat-
alogue what is absent in these collections as well as what is present,
and we need to reconstruct the ideological work that they have
done.’’
[…]
This expanded notion of ‘archive’ and ‘record ‘is increasingly rec-
ognized by post-colonial scholars as a legitimate way to get beyond
the silences of traditional texts to find, not the ‘other,’ but a fully
realized alternate community in its own right. In this way, as illus-
trated in DuBois’ references to murals as well other scholars uses of
tattoos, architecture, monuments, commemorations, performances
and other signifiers of historical memory,36 post-colonial scholars are
reinterpreting the structure as well as the substance of the archives.
