Ghosts of Archive

Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis

Verne Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032036229
• eBook ISBN: 9781000298659
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ghosts of Archive draws on the discourses of deconstruction, intersectionality and archetypal psychology to mount an argument that archive is fundamentally and structurally spectral and that the work of archive is justice.

Drawing on more than 20 years of the author's research on deconstruction and archive, the book posits archive as an essential resource for social justice activism and as a source, or location, of soul for individuals and communities. Through explorations of what Jacques Derrida termed 'hauntology', Harris invites a listening to the call for justice in conceptual spaces that are non-disciplinary. He argues that archive is both constructed in relation to and beset by ghosts – ghosts of the living, of the dead and of those not yet born – and that attention should be paid to them. Establishing a unique nexus between a deconstructive intersectionality and traditions of 'memory for justice' in struggles against oppression from South Africa and elsewhere, the book makes a case for a deconstructive praxis in today's archive.

Offering new ideas about spectrality, banditry and archival activism, Ghosts of Archive should appeal to those working in the disciplines of archival science, information studies and psychology. It should also be essential reading for those with an interest in social justice issues, transitional justice, history, philosophy, memory studies and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 1

The trouble with archive

The word ‘archive’ and its derivatives have been appropriated over centuries by Western archival experts, who have given them semantic coherence through association with notions of stability, durability and reliability. (Hamilton 2015: 112) The advent of ‘the digital age’ in the late twentieth century complicated, if not undermined, this association. The new technologies troubled assumptions rooted in the realities of hard copy and analogue representation. Some archival theorists embraced the opportunities provided by conceptual uncertainty. Others responded by holding more tightly to concepts and frameworks that seemed to offer certainty – from a Luciana Duranti and the long European tradition of diplomatics to a Frank Upward and his gospel of the records continuum; from a David Bearman constructing an orthodoxy around the notion of the record as evidence of transaction to a generation of self-styled ‘recordkeepers’ in Australia. Of course, it was not only technology that was troubling dominant archival discourses in this period; they faced epistemological challenges across a range of academic disciplines and political ones from social justice activists seeking to mobilise archive in support of their struggles. In 1994, at a colloquium in London, Derrida called it when he said: “nothing is … more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word ‘archive’” (Derrida 1996: 90). Two decades into the twenty-first century, this assertion feels as compelling to me as it did when I first encountered it. Whether I am engaging with archive as a concept or in relation to a specific ‘manifestation’ (Nelson Mandela’s prison archive, for instance) nothing seems certain. I am troubled. Not in a bad way. One of the etymological tributaries for the word ‘trouble’ comprises the grouping of ‘crowd,’ ‘throng’ and ‘disorder.’ To be troubled, then, is to be aware of crowdedness, of an overflowing of space, of a certain messiness. When I talk about archive, I feel crowded, if not haunted.

My crowdedness is provoked by five primary lines of disturbance – the throngs of ghosts I find in archive; what has been called an ‘archival turn’ in Western and other scholarship; a growing call for the decolonisation of that scholarship; my experience of work in the archive-dialogue nexus; and the blossoming of memory discourses (and the not-unrelated emergence of what Michael Piggott reading Kerwin Lee Klein calls “the memory industry,” Piggott 2005: 307). The former I have alluded to in the introduction and will explore at length in Chapter 3. The others I wish merely to outline here before attempting to define what I mean by archive. Through the 1990s, Ann Laura Stoler began naming what she saw as an archival turn in scholarship across a wide range of disciplines and jurisdictions (Stoler 2002: 83–87). The earliest indications she identified were Michel Foucault’s engagement with archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge (first published in French in 1969), and the thinking on archive by Derrida, which culminated in the 1994 colloquium mentioned above. By the end of the nineties, the turn had become a riptide reverberating globally, including in South Africa. In 1998, the University of the Witwatersrand hosted a series of seminars titled Refiguring the Archive, which attracted 22 speakers representing multiple disciplines and professions. This became an inspiration for the University’s transdisciplinary postgraduate course Reading the Trace, which was inaugurated the following year. And in 2002, the book Refiguring the Archive was published based on the seminar series and included contributions by Stoler and Derrida (Hamilton et al. 2002). The turn remains strong in South Africa. In 2016, for instance, Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer edited a groundbreaking two-volume collection of essays by researchers (mainly historians) and curators titled Tribing and Untribing the Archive. At one level, it is an extended enquiry into the histories of southern KwaZulu-Natal immediately before and after European colonisation. At another, it is a demonstration of what can happen when scholars are asked, in the words of the editors, “to shift from seeing archive as source to approaching it as a subject of critical enquiry in its own right” (Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016: 8). And as the editors elaborate: “for those – notably curators – for whom collections were the focus of attention, the challenge was to recognise them not as the aggregations of immutable objects they purported to be, but as involved in ongoing processes over time” (Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016: 8).

Archive, then, not as source for historiography, but as a form of historiography. Archive as a construction, always already in the process of being constructed. The trouble with the archival turn, in my reading, is that so often scholars (and novelists let it be said, and poets) play with archive as a metaphor, or a figure, or a figuration. Too seldom do they engage the literatures and the discourses of archivy.¹ I put this challenge to Derrida in 1998 when I found myself sharing a platform with him at the University of the Witwatersrand:

Unfortunately, Derrida’s lexicon is restricted to the Greeks and the Romans. He offers no analysis of developments over more than two millennia; he declines to acknowledge archives as a discipline, one with its own discourses and histories; and, while he describes the impact of the computer on archivisation as an ‘archival earthquake,’ he does not explore how virtual electronic records have dizzied the archons and transformed how we conceptualise the place of consignation.

(Harris 2002: 67)

Derrida demurred with a smile. More recently, Michelle Caswell has had not dissimilar experiences when trying to engage humanities scholars at this level (Caswell 2016). A close reading of Tribing and Untribing the Archive reveals that of its almost two dozen contributors, only Hamilton demonstrates facility with the concepts and other tools of archive as both discipline and profession. At the same time, it must be said, there is another dimension of troubledness in relation to the archival turn, which has to do with archivists and archival academics too often playing with ideas from other disciplines rather than exploring them deeply, dabbling with the work of scholars who have made the turn rather than engaging with a corpus of scholarship. I’ll return to this point later in the chapter.

A third line of disturbance for me is signalled by Mbongiseni Buthelezi in his powerful epilogue to Tribing and Untribing the Archive: “These volumes of essays offer a step along the long journey of decolonising knowledge in Africa and elsewhere” (Buthelezi 2016: 598). He goes on to name a host of terms in English that were part of the lexicon of colonisation and continue to obstruct understanding of those who were colonised – tribe, chiefdom, clan, kingdom, kraal and so on. He calls for scholarship in and on African languages, for more investigation of the longer pasts before European colonisation and for an opening to other ways of understanding archive:

‘Untribing’ … proposes one of the moves we need to make to get out of the paralysis. This requires that the inheritance of material culture – the material culture that Africanists sometimes mobilise as evidence of their timeless tribal pasts and that modern African curators … shun – be understood as archive, construed, rather than fixed, and open to renegotiation.

(Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016: 598)

While timely and apposite, Buthelezi’s injunctions are not new. All of them were woven into the fabric of the 1990s discourse of transformation in South African archivy and in wider “heritage” spaces, admittedly within the “wrapping” of “Indigenous Knowledge.”² The imperative then was to cast off the chains of dominant Western orthodoxies and to reimagine archive in ways that were rooted in the traditions and modes of knowledge construction that emerged and grew in southern Africa long before colonisation. Sadly, very little work has been done on this since the 1990s, and herein lies the primary significance of Tribing and Untribing the Archive – this work takes seriously a younger South African generation’s demand for the decolonisation of knowledge, argues for the importance of the region’s longer pasts to the project of making liberatory futures and insists that archive be understood in ways that are hospitable to those pasts. Archive as a concept must accommodate material culture and cultural practices, rock paintings and trance dances, geographical and other physical sites invested with meaning and significance, orality in its multiple forms and manifestations, human bodies carrying messages in the form of permanent markings, ancestral repertoires and so on. Such an accommodation would accept the shared narratives of a particular collectivity or polity as a form of archive, not as an expression of collective memory waiting to be, or needing to be, archived. Such an accommodation would regard as archive oral forms of ancestor invocation performed in domestic family or wider lineage rituals (Hamilton 2015: 108), if not accept the possibility that the ancestors, the ghosts of the past, intervene in the present.

The impulse to decolonise archive, I would argue, is not unrelated to the call of justice. And its rewards are multiple. An anecdote from the Nelson Mandela archive makes the point provisionally. For sixteen years, my work at the Nelson Mandela Foundation has required me to read every new book and watch every new film related to the life and work of Mandela. For the most part, the experience has been one of unspeakable boredom. Almost always the narrators and researchers are white; with few exceptions, they repeat a reductionist dominant narrative and reproduce a canon of standard images and metaphors, and always the default archive is the colonial archive and its various postcolonial iterations. I have not been surprised by a fresh line or mode of enquiry until now. In 2019, scholar Xolela Mangcu (Mangcu 2019) published the first piece of his research toward a new biography on Mandela, in which he positions Mandela within a lineage reaching back before colonisation and through generations of encounters with British imperial forces and with white settlers. By exploring the longer histories of the Thembu polity Mandela was born into, by engaging with the archive of that era³ and by reading the colonial archive accordingly, Mangcu offers a new perspective on Mandela’s formative years and an original interpretation of the longer roots to Mandela’s strategies of negotiation in later life. He unlocks the long trajectory of modernity in Thembuland and other parts of the Eastern Cape, describes what I would call a Thembu politics of accommodation developed over centuries and dismisses the simplistic accounts of the influence on Mandela of ‘tradition’ that characterise the dominant Mandela discourses.

In South Africa during and after the transition to democracy, the impulses to decolonise archive and to mobilise it in the work of transforming an apartheid-patterned society spurred a commitment to dialogical processes in the construction of archive, in its interpretation and in its use. A fourth line of disturbance for me. Exemplary in grappling with this have been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Commission for the Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) and the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF). The TRC, it could be argued, was quintessentially an archival intervention.⁴ Put in place to promote reconciliation by investigating gross human rights violations in the late apartheid era and to make determinations on reparation for victims and amnesty for perpetrators, it generated a massive archive that pivots on the testimonies and counter-testimonies of individuals, on the one hand, and, on the other, the engagements with those testimonies by TRC interlocutors. The centrepiece of the TRC process was the question-and-answer public hearing, convened in different parts of the country and broadcast live over a two-year period. A similar dialogical-archival frame was implemented by the CRLR and its sister institution, the Land Claims Court, in investigating and making determinations on cases of individuals and communities who were forcibly removed from their properties in the post-1913 period.⁵ Bringing the official and related records into ‘conversation’ with the testimony of the dispossessed has been central to the process. The narratives of dispossession passed on from one generation to another (in many instances, the only form of archive that claimants could bring to the process) presented an initial technical challenge, as in South African law they constituted hearsay evidence that could not be admitted by courts. This hurdle was overcome when legislators made the Land Claims Court the only court in the country authorised to admit such evidence.

The NMF was established by Mandela in 1999 as his post-presidential office. In 2004, he mandated the creation of an archive programme at the institution. Three years later, as he began stepping away from public life, he provided the Foundation with a completely new mission, namely to promote social justice through memory work and dialogue. In principle, these were understood not as parallel areas of endeavour but as elements of a nexus – memory work harnessed to the imperatives of justice has to be undertaken dialogically; and dialogue, to be transformational, must be rooted in memory. Over the years, the Foundation has u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Routledge Studies in Arch ives
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: A framing
• Chapter 1: The trouble with archive
• Chapter 2: Elements of haunting
• Chapter 3: Spectral archive
• Chapter 4: Reckoning with pasts
• Chapter 5: A Time to forget
• Chapter 6: Cixous insist(er)ing
• Chapter 7: Praxis
• Epilogue: Reframing
• References
• Index