Reading colonial records through an archival lens: The provenance of place, space and creation

Archival Science

Volumn 6, Issue 3-4, 2006, Pages 267-284

  Bastian, Jeannette Allis ^a  

^a SIMMONS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Archives; Collective memory; Colonial; Community; Post colonial; Provenance; Records

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547754030     PISSN: 13890166     EISSN: 15737519     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10502-006-9019-1     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. In searching for the origins of this phrase I found many references to the phrase but no firm attribution. One possibility: "History is written by the winners" may be a generalized adaptation of a quote that is only attributedto Napoleon: "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
2. For an excellent and exhaustive examination of the relationships between archives and memory see Michael Piggott, "Archives and Memory", in Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (eds.), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, Topics in Australian Library Studies No. 24 (Wagga Wagga, New South Wales: Centre for Information Studies, 2004), pp. 299-328.
3. Verne Harris, "The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory and Archives in South Africa", Archival Science2 (2002): 63-86.
4. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
5. The phrase 'community of records,' was introduced in Jeannette A. Bastian, Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History(Libraries Unlimited, 2003).
6. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive; Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire(London: Verso, 1993), p. 11.
7. Richards, 6.
8. Richards, 7. In the 1990s this is well illustrated by the deliberate destruction by the Serbian military of the personal records belonging to Kosavar refugees as they fled Yugoslavia in 1999. A NATO spokesperson described "a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people and a culture of the sense of past and the sense of community on which it depends", Jamie Shea on the "Online NewsHour: NATO Briefing - March 31, 1999", http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/nato_briefing_3-31.html, 3. Retrieved 4/1/99.
9. For examples see Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance", Archival Science2 (2002): 87-109,
10. and Tony Ballantyne, "Archives, Empires and the Histories of Colonialism", Archifacts(2004): 29.
11. Patrick Wolfe, "History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory from Marx to Postcolonialism", American Historical Review(April 1997): 388.
12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 1991), p. 185.
13. Wolfe, 395.
14. Edward W. Said, "Orientalism", an excerpt from Orientalism(New York: Random House, 1978), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 88.
15. Said, 90.
16. Said, 91.
17. Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History", American Historical Review(December 1994): 1526-1527.
18. Gyan Prakash, " Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism", American Historical Review(December 1994): 1477.
19. Prakash, 1479.
20. Trouillot, 53.
21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives", History and Theory24(3) (October 1985): 270.
22. Prakesh, 1486; Spivak, 271.
23. James S. Duncan, "Complicity and Resistance in the Colonial Archive: Some Issues of Method and Theory in Historical Geography", Historical Geography27 (1999): 121.
24. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History(Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 51-52.
25. Duncan, 122.
26. See his "Silencing the Past: Layers of Meaning in the Haitian Revolution", in which he presents an alternate history of San Souci, in Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith (eds.), Between History and Histories, The Making of Silences and Commemorations.
27. Ann Laura Stoler, "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance", Archival Science2(1-2) 2002:87.
28. Tony Ballantyne, "Archives, Empires and the Histories of Colonialism", Archifacts(2004): 29.
29. Brian Meeks, Narratives of Resistance, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean(Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), p. 23.
30. V.Y. Mudimbe, Parables and Fables, Exegisis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa(Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 89.
31. Diane Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas(Durham, North Caroline: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 21.
32. Whatarangi Winiata, "Survival of Maori as a People and Maori Archives", Archifacts(April 2005): 12.
33. Laurent Dubois, "Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean", unpublished paper, quoted by permission of the author.
34. Anthony Bogues, "Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections", Small Axe6(1) (2002): 10.
35. Bogues, 19.
36. Bogues, 25.
37. Some examples from the vast literature on postcolonialism of alternate archives can be found in Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Encounters)(Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002);
38. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest(New York: Routledge, 1995);
39. Krystyna von Henneberg, "Monuments, Public Space and the Memory of Empire", History and Memory16.1 (2004): 37-85;
40. "Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa", Journal of South African Studies29 (September 2003): 739-757.
41. Spivak quoting LaCapra, Rethinking250.
42. Bill Russell, "The White Man's Paper Burden: Aspects of Record Keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs, 1860-1914", in Tom Nesmith (ed.), Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance(Metuchen, New Jersey: Association of Canadian Archivists and SAA, 1993), p. 300.
43. See specifically Amy Cooper, "Issues in Native American Archives", Collection Management27(2) 2003:43-54,
44. also William Hagen, "Archival Captive - The American Indian", American Archivist41 (Spring 1978): 5-15.
45. A phrase coined by David Hanlon, "The Chill of History: The Experience, Emotion and Changing Politics of Archival Research in the Pacific", Archives and Manuscripts27 (May 1999): 8-21.
46. Peter Horsman, "The Last Dance of the Phoenix, or the De-discovery of the Archival Fonds", Archivaria54 (Fall 2002): 1-23.
47. Horsman, 7-9.
48. Tom Nesmith (ed.), Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance(Metuchen, NJ: SAA and ACA, 1993.
49. Horsman, 20-23. See also Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue".
50. "Societal and intellectual contexts shaping the actions of the people and institutions who made an maintained the records, the functions the records perform, the capacities of information technologies to capture and preserve information at a given time, and the custodial history of the records." Tom Nesmith, "Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives", American Archivist65 (Spring/Summer 2002): 35.
51. Eric Ketelaar, "Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives", Archival Science1 (2001): 134.
52. There are any number of articles on the records continuum in Archives and Manuscripts. Fir specific discussions of the 'third dimension' see Michael Piggott and Sue McKemmish, "Recordkeeping, Reconciliation and Political Reality", paper presented at the Australian Society of Archivists Inc. Annual Conference, 2002.
53. I am grateful to Joel Wurl for sharing his unpublished manuscript, "Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Immigrant Experience." See also Jeannette A. Bastian, "In a 'House of Memory': Discovering the Provenance of Place", Archival Issues28(1) 2003-2004: 9-20.
54. There are many definitions of 'community,' several of them can be found at http:// www.thefreedictionary.com/community
55. Anderson, 6.
56. Maurice Halbwacks, On Collective Memory(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): p. 43.
57. Halbwachs, 52.
58. Halbwachs, 22.
59. Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology(Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005).