Postcolonial Archives

Archives are sometimes physical, sometimes metaphorical repositories of knowledge. Official archives are often associated with inaccessibility, censorship and state authority, while informal or alternative archives seek to counter omissions and distortions in the dominant historiography. The aim of the seminar is to convey both archival concepts and approaches to concrete archival research. In the seminar we read key texts of postcolonial and queer archival theory, e.g. by Michel Foucault, Ann Stoler, Saidiya Hartman, and Anjali Arondekar. We discuss conventional forms of archival recording and preservation, transmission and retrieval as well as unsecured knowledges such as memory, speculation and fabulation. We also engage with archive-based literary and artistic works, e.g. by Rea Tajiri, M. Nourbese Philip and Lubaina Himid. The seminar includes various writing exercises and a field trip to a Berlin archive.