Archival Science (2006) 6:267284 DOI 10.

1007/s10502-006-9019-1

Springer 2006

Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation
JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, MA, USA (E-mail: bastian@simmons.edu)

Abstract. Analyzes attitudes and use of archives by post-colonial scholars who nd that colonial records oer the voices of the master narrative but do not reect the voices of the oppressed and voiceless. Argues that framing records within social provenance and a community of records oers archival solutions to the dilemmas of locating all voices within the spaces of records. Keywords: archives, collective memory, colonial, community, post colonial, provenance, records As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestor held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to, me, what I became after I met you. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

Introduction , history is written by the winners,1 is nowhere betThat old cliche ter illustrated than in the accounts of former colonial societies, retold and renewed through history texts, fiction, poetry and film, in monuments, paintings and architecture. While history celebrates the exploits and conquest of the colonizers some form of subtle second class status generally seems to adhere to the histories of the colonized. Subaltern Studies, is one of several distinctly other phrases often applied to such alternate histories never the main event, always the sub. But for the common folk who toiled in this sub non-history zone, their lives were the main event. And for us in our enlightened post-colonial world, these lives should be, if not primary, then at least
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 attributed to Napoleon: History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

268

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

equal. It is a balance that history has found difficult to redress because the archival records were also created by the winners. Scholars of colonial and post-colonial societies seeking to confront this documentary imbalance have devised and employed a variety of strategies for nding, hearing and presenting the voices of the marginalized. Colonial records are central to this process, often as obstacles to be overcome, predicaments to be resolved and mazes to be negotiated rather than as the sources of enlightenment and memory2 that we like to think of when we archivists think of records. Reflections and theories by sociologists, historians and anthropologists on the role of recordkeeping in colonial societies as well as the stories that records themselves have to tell about those societies have shifted dramatically over the past several decades, keeping in tune (and even calling the tune) with social thinking as it has gradually shifted from privileging the powerful to celebrating the peripheries. Reading the records of colonialism in ways that truly illuminates all facets and all participants in colonial society speaks not merely to political correctness but, more to point, to the ability of records to reect, to mirror, to dene and to uncover the communities that create them. South African archivist Verne Harris confronts and challenges us with his image of the archival sliver a window refracting and reecting a narrow, mediated and specic societal space.3 But while colonial records fit all to well into this formulation, ways that scholars have approached these records in their efforts to engage with complete social constructs suggests other possibilities for analysis. Post-colonial scholarship while exposing so many of the weaknesses and problems posed by recordkeeping, also offers an opportunity to conceptualize and apply a wider, more generous and more inclusive archival lens to the relationships between communities and records. To begin this journey towards a conuence of scholarly and archival reading of colonial records, this paper brings together theories surrounding colonial recordkeeping and theories that archivists have and are developing about records and society. Colonial societies have been a particular concern of social historians ever since empire-building went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century precipitating a
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. 299328. 3 Verne Harris, The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory and Archives in South Africa, Archival Science 2 (2002): 6386.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

269

concerted eort to understand the process by which ethnic and social groups have been marginalized and to accord these groups full, if belated, citizen status. At the same time, colonialism also oers a way to examine extreme power structures in ruthlessly human terms and to analyze multi-class, multi-ethnic layered societies that were simultaneously co-dependent communities and rigid hierarchies. With their heavy reliance on records to preserve the tenuous fabric of imperialism, the relationships between colonial societies and records reveal many of the worst and best manifestations of records themselves; their tyranny as well as their power, their textual bias as well as their textual evidence, their appropriation as well as their authenticity, all of which speaks as much to the authority as to the malleability of written information, for in the end what else can explain how tightlywoven webs of records produced by minority bureaucracies held sway for so long over non-record producing majorities. As colonies became independent and as colonialism was discredited, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics began questioning the dominant narratives of the colonizers records and to search for the voices of the colonized. From the imperial archives to Subaltern Studies to post-colonial discourse, the records of colonialism have been deconstructed, reconstructed, parsed and diced in an eort to correct injustice, identify and vindicate the oppressed, demystify the winners, and confront colonialism in all its ugliness. This theoretical path from the narrow interpretation of colonial society through its traditional records towards a wider and more expansive reading both of records and of the complexities of community should resonate with archivists who, in many ways, are carving out their own theoretical path as they move from narrow and specic views of archives and provenance towards a post-custodial continuum of records and a more generous vision of social constructs. In this quest for the whole of the colonial community, academics are discovering the limitations of its records, but archivists are beginning to recognize that archival theory oers a way of placing records in a broader, more comprehensive context, of seeing them through a wider but nerground lens. This paper will suggest that the principle of provenance constitutes that lens and that the content, context and structure of record creation is inextricably bound together in a vision of provenance and community that seeks, weighs and accommodates all the voices of a society by re-imagining the many facets of its recordness as a synergistic and integral unit. As this paper addresses the reading of colonial records by archivists and non-archivists alike it is worth bearing in mind that, to

270

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

paraphrase Nathan Glazer,4 we are all colonials now, that is, we live in a global society that retains, maintains and promotes many colonial features. From the dominant voices to the silenced ones, the master narratives to the hidden stories, the marginalized to the main stream, each of us is co-opted and colonized by some (or several) social microstructures be they ideological, political, racial or ethnic. Therefore, this paper further suggests that the colonial turn and the archival turn have much to offer one another in our understanding of modern records and recordkeeping. Reading colonial records through an archival lens is only a worthwhile exercise if, in the application of archival theory to colonial societies we also illuminate our own. This paper will rst explore the colonial context by briey rehearsing the academic scholarship that has coalesced around post-colonial studies over the past several decades. It moves on to a discussion of archival provenance and how provenance both supports this scholarly perspective and adds new dimensions to it, nally proposing a slightly dierent reading of the colonial record by setting it within the context of a community of records.5 Colonial Records and Academic Scholarship Most scholars would agree that any search for theory in the colonial archives begins with an understanding of the synergy between imperialism and knowledge, identied and dened in Thomas Richards 1993 book, The Imperial Archives. Richards describes the imperial archive as, not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogenous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.6 Richards argues that the deliberate and comprehensive gathering and storing of data about their vast and far-flung Empire was key to the success of British imperialism. And he sees the power of information (the archive) as both a shaping and a controlling force in 19th-century imperialism. He defines the imperial archive as a
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.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

271

fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire.7 Through the critical examination of pivotal late 19th and 20th century literary texts such as Rudyard Kiplings Kim and James Hiltons Lost Horizon, Richards demonstrates his claim that the supplanting of power by the force of knowledge is one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century.8 Since this imperial belief in the power of knowledge included the belief that an intricate knowledge of the colonized was crucial to the ability to control, colonial records perversely also open a window on the possibility of knowing the colonized, a view that has resonated with many scholars for whom encountering the colonial archive is the first requisite to confronting colonial society.9 While Richards focused on colonialism from a literary and social view, it was economics that formed the bedrock justication for the imperial scrambles of the 17th and 18th centuries. Although the concept of imperialism has been located as far back as the 15th century, the term itself dates from the late 1800s and in its original sense referred to the use of state power to secure (or, at least, to attempt to secure) economic monopolies for national companies.10 Certainly economic exploitation lies at the heart of colonialism. Capitalism and knowledge was a heady and effective mix, as Benedict Anderson notes, For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this visibility was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving power of capitalism.11
Richards, 6. 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 Science 2 (2002): 87109, and Tony Ballantyne, Archives, Empires and the Histories of Colonialism, Archifacts (2004): 29. 10 Patrick Wolfe, History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory from Marx to Postcolonialism, American Historical Review (April 1997): 388. 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 185.
8 7

272

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

Early twentieth century thinking about imperialism centered on economic imperatives heavily inuenced and supported by a Eurocentric Marxist ideology and this evolved into a theory of dependency which maintained that development and underdevelopment were not two distinct states but a relationship... underdevelopment was not ... external to capitalism ... rather, it was the essence of capitalism, being both precondition to and collorary of the developed status of dominant countries.12 Colonials and their colonizers therefore existed in a chain of relationships moving downwards and one way from metropolitan center to satellite. Colonial relationships were recognized as intricate social structures whereby both colonizer and colonized existed in co-dependant, though not equal, status. Analysis of these relationships became the focus of post-colonial critical thinking as initially laid out in Edward Saids Orientalism published in 1978. Said articulated the essential post-colonial position when he defined Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.13 In defining the dynamic between West and East, Said proposed Orientalism as the overall term to describe a discourse for understanding the systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, idealogically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Said maintained that through this Western production, the Orient lost its freedom of thought and action while European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. Orientalism also defines the line between the oriental and the occidental the Western and the Other where the Orient is heathen, irrational, and exotic, the very antithesis of the Occidental which is rational, civilized and Christian. Said acknowledged the critical roles of texts, colonial records, museums and social institutions in establishing a Eurocentric locus of power and defining a Western concept of the Orient.14 Said relates the discourse of Orientalism to the discourse of modern global interactions when he asserts that Orientalism is not simply a Western imperial imposition but rather,
12 13

Wolfe, 395. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, an excerpt from Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The PostColonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 88. 14 Said, 90.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

273

A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction ... but also of a whole series of interests which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains... indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is and does not simply represent a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with our world.15 Orientalism posited a colonial relationship that assumed a social, cultural and political other, paving the way for the Subaltern Studies movement of the mid-1980s. Subaltern Studies proposed an interpretation of colonial history that rejected the master narratives of imperialism in favor of a history that emphasized more contextual examination of the modes of knowledge and representations among the local colonized populations. At the same time, it demonstrated how the establishment and assertion of the colonizers identity depended on the inscribing of otherness on non-European populations. In terms of archives this search for the local other manifested itself in the reading of ocial colonial records against the grain . Census records, for example might be read for their denitions of caste, medical records, for the ways in which medicine used race and culture to address disease, or colonial architecture, for their appropriation and re-conceptualizing of traditional culture.16 Subaltern referred to subordination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture and was used to signify the centrality of dominant/dominated relationships in history.17 On the one hand a movement by Indian intellectuals to restore the history of the invisible peasant in this former Asian colony, it was also an effort to snatch history away from the middle and upper-middle classes of former colonials everywhere and to rethink it from the perspective of the folk. Since Indian peasants left no written sources, subaltern history required a reading of colonial records that rejected the dominant story in favor of the sub-plots, the intersections between the records, a reading that deliberately sought the other.
15 16

Said, 91. Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History, American Historical Review (December 1994): 15261527. 17 Gyan Prakash, Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism, American Historical Review (December 1994): 1477.

274

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

As Subaltern Studies evolved, scholars also demonstrated how the creation of records themselves, as agents of the elite, contributed to the mis-reading of colonial history. A founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, oers an example of this through his analysis of colonial oce records in which a peasant insurgency is ocially represented as a counter-insurgency narrative, an account which ultimately becomes part of the ocial history. In this three-part paradigm, the immediate accounts of the insurgency, or the primary discourse produced by ocials, are then processed into the secondary discourse of ocial reports and memoirs which in turn are incorporated into a tertiary discourse when it is redistributed by historians who are farthest removed from the source. According to Guha, The code of pacication written into the raw data of primary texts and the narratives of secondary discourse, survives, and it shapes the tertiary discourse of historians when they fail to read in it the presence of the excluded other, the insurgent.18 A similar point is made by Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot who identifies sources of corruption in the entire chain of record making and keeping including selection of producers, selection of evidence, selection of themes, selection of procedures which means, at best the differential ranking and, at worst, the exclusion of some producers, some evidence, some themes, some procedures.19 This against the grain analysis of the archives, however, also led Subaltern Studies into its own academic cul-de-sac. In a seminal essay, The Rani of Simur: An Essay in Reading the Archives, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that because the archive is complicit with a particular point of view there is a limit to which other voices can ever be heard. Seeking to understand the outlawed custom of sati (widow-burning) from the viewpoint of the widow (the Rani in this instance), Spivak discovered that as the historical record is made up. . . the Rani emerges only when she is needed in the space of historical production.20 While on the one hand Spivak recognizes that Subaltern Studies attempted not to unmask dominant discourses but to explore their fault lines in order to provide different accounts to describe histories revealed in the cracks of the colonial archaeology of knowledge, she also points out that even these fault lines may not fully reveal extreme marginalized groups
18 19

Prakash, 1479. Trouillot, 53. 20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives, History and Theory 24(3) (October 1985): 270.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

275

such as the voices of women. Spivak concludes that, caught in the cracks between the production of the archives and indigenous patriarchy, today distanced by waves of hegemonic feminism, there is no real Rani to be found.21 Echoing Spivak, other scholars also questioned whether even reading records against the grain could be successful in seeking the voices of the oppressed because, as geographer 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. At the same time there is no alternative, there is no well-organized counterarchive because, as Duncan continues, the possibility of such a counter-archive was structured out in advance by illiteracy and the lack of a narrative form which records ordinary human voices.22 Similarly, Trouillot maintains that, silences are inherent in the creation of sources, the first moment of historical production. Unequal control over historical production obtains also in the second moment of historical production, the making of archives and documents.23 Nor do Duncan or Trouillot find these authentic voices in the so-called native elite whom they describe as voices suspended between pre- colonial and colonial worlds.24 Like Spivak, both question the ultimate knowability of the other. The current academic climate of post-colonial discourse continues to engender strong views on the reading of colonial records. Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler advocates a return to reading colonial records with the grain by focusing on the methods and strategies of the production of archives within the context of the institutions that produced them. Unlike Trouillot who believes that the counternarrative cannot be found in the archives and therefore seeks to construct his own,25 Stoler suggests considering archiving as a process ... as epistemological experiments rather than as sources, to colonial archives as cross-sections of contested knowledge ... as both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate
21 22

Prakesh, 1486; Spivak, 271. James S. Duncan, Complicity and Resistance in the Colonial Archive: Some Issues of Method and Theory in Historical Geography, Historical Geography 27 (1999): 121. 23 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 5152. 24 Duncan, 122. 25 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.

276

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

technologies of rule in themselves.26 Along similar lines New Zealand historian Tony Ballantyne writes that, we desperately need to appreciate how our colonial archives were constructed, we must catalogue what is absent in these collections as well as what is present, and we need to reconstruct the ideological work that they have done.27 Subalternism as a post-colonial manifestation and a terminology that encompasses dominated peoples everywhere continues to gain currency and while generally applied to the status of all former colonial non-elites has also taken on regional attributes. One Caribbean scholar identifying the Caribbean subaltern notes that while Caribbean intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s tended to see the people as a blank page for intellectuals to write on, this is being replaced by an approach that recognizes that people construct their own forms of resistance to adversity including their own philosophical universe, through which they interpret and work through this resistance.28 Discovering this alternate world with its alternative forms of expression and representation offers a new dimension to post-colonial expression, one that is fully absorbed in communicating counter-narratives. This communication centers around the recognition of what some scholars describe as memory texts, as critical documentation of the post-colonial continuum. A memory text has been defined by African philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe as a narrative combining history and myth, performance and reality a non-textual way of remembering, recording and communicating culture, history and identity. As an example he refers to a genesis narrative from East Africa which includes both social performance and customs as well as history. Mudimbe suggest that a memory text is a theoretical discourse which validates a human geography, its spatial configuration and the competing traditions of its various inhabitants, simultaneously cementing them via this retelling of the genesis of the nation and its social organization.29 A similar non-textual construct is advocated by performance scholar Diane Taylor who, in her recent book, The Archive and the Repertoire suggests that embodied and performed acts gener26

Ann Laura Stoler, Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance, Archival Science 2(12) 2002:87. 27 Tony Ballantyne, Archives, Empires and the Histories of Colonialism, Archifacts (2004): 29. 28 Brian Meeks, Narratives of Resistance, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), p. 23. 29 V.Y. Mudimbe, Parables and Fables, Exegisis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 89.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

277

ate, record and transmit knowledge,30 as well as by Maori scholars in New Zealand who point out that Maori collective remembering and forgetting has been, primarily, through the retentive minds of the pukenga/repositories of their people.31 Post-colonial scholars are now recognizing that traditional archives are only one path for discovering the voices of the colonized. Historian Laurent Dubois, for example, seeking to recover the history of maroon resistance in Guadaloupe nds part of the archive in a mural painted on the outer walls of the prison in Basse Terre (capital) and part of it in ctionalized, folk-based accounts of slave resistance. At the same time, he recognizes that a process of social change and struggle was also a documentary process that shaped the form of the archives in various ways.32 Following the first emancipation of slaves in 1794 ex-slaves immediately legitimized various relationships and property holdings that they had established during slavery through notorial records and other official documentation. In a similar vein, Jamaican historian Anthony Bogues suggests that the history of the Jamaican nation was invented by the Creole nationalist, who silenced the voices and archives of groups who articulated alternative versions of nationhood.33 He proposes reclaiming the voice of the subaltern through the memory texts, of alternate political discourse, performative actions, and practices in which the subaltern attempts to actualize itself both as subject and reality.34 Bogues conceptualizes a memory text, through the story of Claudius Henry a Jamaican nationalist rastafarian preacher who led an unsuccessful peoples rebellion in the 1960s against colonial power and the Jamaican middle class. In opposition to elite archival history, Bogues offers the memory texts of political performance as a way of discovering and uncovering the person of Henry and echoes Trouillot in concluding that the crisis of post-colonialism lies in the attempt to build the nation on the silences of the lived experiences of the AfroCaribbean.35
30

Diane Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, North Caroline: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 21. 31 Whatarangi Winiata, Survival of Maori as a People and Maori Archives, Archifacts (April 2005): 12. 32 Laurent Dubois, Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean, unpublished paper, quoted by permission of the author. 33 Anthony Bogues, Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections, Small Axe 6(1) (2002): 10. 34 Bogues, 19. 35 Bogues, 25.

278

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

This expanded notion of archive and record is increasingly recognized by post-colonial scholars as a legitimate way to get beyond the silences of traditional texts to nd, not the other, but a fully realized alternate community in its own right. In this way, as illustrated in DuBois references to murals as well other scholars uses of tattoos, architecture, monuments, commemorations, performances and other signiers of historical memory,36 post-colonial scholars are reinterpreting the structure as well as the substance of the archives. Provenance, the archivist and colonial records From Orientalism to Subaltern Studies to Memory Texts, post-colonial discourse has gradually questioned and reinterpreted the colonial archives, exposing its myths and out of necessity, refashioning the denition of record. The experiences of post-colonial scholars suggests not only that the traditional archives has little to oer researchers attempting to probe beyond the ocial narrative but that these records alone are not sucient to explicate the whole of a society. In the face of the elitism, complicity and narrowness of the colonial record, should archivists, as the custodians of these records, be concerned? Do they need to respond to the diminishing social relevancy of the records in their care? Do they need to address the challenges of historians such as Dominick LaCapra who warn that, the archive as fetish is a literal substitute for the reality of the past which is always already lost for the historian. ... Often the dimensions of the document that make it a text of a certain sort with its own historicity and its relations to sociopolitical processes ... [is] ltered out when it is used purely and simply as a quarry for facts in the reconstruction of the past.37 Archivists themselves are also fully aware of these fault lines in particular when considering the records of indigenous populations and in recent literature have been quick to examine the fallacies and weaknesses of official records as well and their strengths. Canadian Bill Russell, for example, in The White Mans Paper Burden,
36

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); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Krystyna von Henneberg, Monuments, Public Space and the Memory of Empire, History and Memory 16.1 (2004): 3785; Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa, Journal of South African Studies 29 (September 2003): 739757. 37 Spivak quoting LaCapra, Rethinking 250.

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

279

pointing out that the records of the Department of Indian Affairs were more than those of a government bureaucracy; to a large extent they formed the written history of a people, examines the problematic implications of that reality.38 Similar concerns, particularly as these relate to non-Indian perceptions about the legitimacy of written documentation as opposed to the reality of Native American oral history have been expressed by American archivists.39 The chill of history, that archives can impose upon non-western cultures has been fully recognized by archivists themselves.40 It has been some time since archivists have thought of themselves as the handmaidens of historians as archival science itself has grown into a theoretical profession in its own right over the past several decades. As a self-sustaining discipline, what do archivists bring to the table of social understanding? How do archivists contribute to the academic debate about their records and how can they oer an enlightened vision of the relationships between archives and communities that demonstrates the value of the archive in a social dynamic in which all voices are represented? I suggest that the answer lies in that most powerful archival tool, the principle of provenance. Conceived in Europe between the mid 18th and late 19th centuries, the development of the principle of provenance is too well known to need repeating here. Suce it to refer to an excellent historical analysis by Peter Horsman published inArchivaria several years ago.41 In his discussion of the fuzzy history of respect des fonds from its beginnings in 18th century France, to its codification in the Dutch Manual in 1898 and up to the present, Horsman makes the case that 19th century European archives typically contained few organically related fonds, rather, the archive in this sense represented a community ... in this historical context, it is not easy to make clear distinction between an archives as a repository and an archives as a fonds darchives ... a whole repository could be (and was) considered to be
38

Bill Russell, The White Mans Paper Burden: Aspects of Record Keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs, 18601914, in Tom Nesmith (ed.), Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance (Metuchen, New Jersey: Association of Canadian Archivists and SAA, 1993), p. 300. 39 See specifically Amy Cooper, Issues in Native American Archives, Collection Management 27(2) 2003: 4354, also William Hagen, Archival Captive The American Indian, American Archivist 41 (Spring 1978): 515. 40 A phrase coined by David Hanlon, The Chill of History: The Experience, Emotion and Changing Politics of Archival Research in the Pacific, Archives and Manuscripts 27 (May 1999): 821. 41 Peter Horsman, The Last Dance of the Phoenix, or the De-discovery of the Archival Fonds, Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002): 123.

280

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

one archive.42 This initial concept of an organic fonds as representing a whole community and containing multiple relationships between records became lost in more literal and narrow interpretations of creators and record groups in spite of the fact that, as Horsman points out, the surviving records in an archives represent only a remnant of the original records. In the 1990s, a rethinking of provenance by Terry Cook, Tom Nesmith43 and others has restored and enhanced this dynamic concept, re-imagining a virtual provenance as the whole of identifiable and multiple relationships surrounding a record. Horsman concludes If any principle should govern archival theory, it is not the fonds, but rather the visualization through description of functional structures, both internal and external: archival narratives about those multiple relationships of creation and use so that researchers may truly understand records from the past. A view he is willing to call the principle of (virtual) provenance.44 I would like to take this construct further to consider an even more expansive denition of context as community and community as context that accommodates a wide variety of cultural touchstones, traces and texts in addition to traditional records, and re-examines the role of the record creator in relationship to the context and content of the record. Many archival theorists are turning to a reinterpretation of provenance as a way of accommodating a more complete and complex view of societal memory. Terry Cook writes eloquently of societal provenance and of the dynamic relationships between institutions, communities and individuals, Tom Nesmith considers social and intellectual contexts, actions, functions and capacities,45 Eric Ketelaar, uncovering the tacit narratives in the postmodern archives notes that the reality we record and the way in which we record, are induced by socio-cultural factors. Each influences the other.46 Australian archivists continue to move the records
Horsman, 79. Tom Nesmith (ed.), Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance (Metuchen, NJ: SAA and ACA, 1993. 44 Horsman, 2023. See also Terry Cook, What is Past is Prologue. 45 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 Archivist 65 (Spring/Summer 2002): 35. 46 Eric Ketelaar, Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives, Archival Science 1 (2001): 134.
43 42

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

281

continuum into new dimensions.47 Archivists, as well as post-colonial scholars, have recognized the limitations of narrow interpretations and are testing the borders of provenance, looking beyond the physical record creator to discover context in place, in ethnicity and in collective memory in their efforts to fully embrace and interpret the record within a multi-cultural and boundaryless world.48 I have elsewhere reected about the concept of a community of records, in which the community as a record creating entity, and the community as a memory frame ... contextualizes the records it creates, and expresses the expansive and interactive relationships between a society and its records. Premised on the literal understanding of records as reections, representations and evidence of actions and transactions and considering actions and transactions to encompass a wide and complex range of human activities, from writing in a diary, to sending a memo, to cooking a local dish, to building a monument or celebrating a national holiday a community of records is not only multi-representational but also non-hierarchical in the sense that while it might present multi-tiered up and down layers within a provenance of the whole, each layer also has a parallel and horizontal dimension, that is, no expression of a community is privileged over another because each in some way relates and adds value to the whole. There are at least two critical denitions here, one being the denition of community, and the other, the denition of record. Standard denitions of community generally refer to a set of people with some shared element ... the substance of shared element varies widely, from situation to interest to lives and values.49 Although this group may be physical or virtual, there is also an element of recognition and interaction. I would also add and stretch Benedict Andersons concept of the imagined political community/nation in which members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives
47

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. 48 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 Issues 28(1) 20032004: 920. 49 There are many definitions of community, several of them can be found at http:// www.thefreedictionary.com/community

282

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

the image of their communion. [and where] ... communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.50 A community in the sense that I am thinking about then is a group of people who share common elements or identities and who think of themselves in terms of these common elements. They recognize that they are part of this common group while at the same time, each may belongs to many different groups. Collective memory, in the Halbwachsian sense is also a vital aspect of this community sharing.51 For Halbwachs, collective memory is part of a totality of thoughts common to a group, the group of people with whom we have a relation at this moment, or with whom we have had a relation on the preceding day or days.52 Although it is the individuals rather than the group or the institutions who remember, every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.53 In the most recent SAA Glossary record is dened as, data or information in a xed form that is created or received in the course of individual or institutional activity and set aside (preserved) as evidence of that activity, a note adds that records may be in any format, including text images or sound. However, the concept of record is ultimately independent of any specic carrier or format.54 Within this definition of record are an infinite range of possibilities, all of which must be applied if communities of records are to truly reflect the dynamic actions, transactions and interactions of the society. Certainly the disembodied concept of record, suggests that the non-textual documentation of memory texts and embodied performance could also find a place here. At the same time, as seems clear from the post-colonial scholarship cited above, in its eorts to extend provenance, the community of records, in addition to expanding its notions of what constitutes a record, must also include a revised role for the creators of records. Certain types of records, slave lists or censuses for example exist in particularly close connection to their content. To a large extent, the content denes the record. Without the enslaved, there would have been no need for slave lists, without a population, there would be no
Anderson, 6. Maurice Halbwacks, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): p. 43. 52 Halbwachs, 52. 53 Halbwachs, 22. 54 Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005).
51 50

READING COLONIAL RECORDS THROUGH ARCHIVAL LENS

283

need for a census. In these instances, the structure of the record is directly dependent on its content, more so perhaps than with other types of records such as diaries and letters (although in any event it is impossible to separate the inuence of structure on content and vice versa). At the same time, the ocial creator of the record does not fully represent its context. The actual record creator of the list or the census may be a ships captain or a government department whose jobs are to document a process and whose relationships with the records themselves are purely functionary and bureaucratic. In this interplay between content, structure and context where the content are the enslaved or the population, the structure is the list or the census form and the context may be a ship plying the slave trade between West Africa and the West Indies, or the rst ocial counting of a population in a newly independent nation, the bureaucratic record creator neither fully expresses all these relationships nor the implied contexts of African communities or the lives of citizens in a free society. Describing either of these records through the immediate context of the sea captain or the government department does not really tell the story and while a narrow interpretation of provenance may be served, provenance as a theoretical tool to express relationships and to express the whole of the records has not been exploited. What then is the provenance of the record and to what extent does the content of the record play a role in suggesting a wider context? How far should archivists go in establishing a context that will enable the full interpretation of the record? Without expanding the context of the record beyond its immediate provenance, the record and its meaning have not fully come together. The full story is not told unless the cargo has a voice and the population speaks. An egalitarian community of records recalls the idealized conceptualization of the fonds the whole of the records within the whole of the community. If one accepts the idea that records of all kinds and in all possible formats, embodiments and expressions including both traditional concepts of records as well as non-traditional memory texts truly reflect and mirror the actions and transactions of a community, then provenance must be wide enough to interpret this whole of a body of records within one overarching but tightly knit context. If records created by people about people reflect and represent the interaction between people, then context must offer ways to describe, interpret and encompass those interactions. Rather than reading the record, the text, the trace or the representation, in a community of records, archivists should read context, read the record as part of and contributing to that context and in addition offer descriptions and

284

JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN

notes that accommodate all voices and all records. In this way, archivists can counterbalance the official versions of the colonial archives with those other records of counter-narratives. The archives can be that space in which the whole of the community is truly represented.

Conclusion: the boundaries of provenance The nal section of this essay was to be an example of a community of records construct drawn from the colonial records of the Danish West Indies/United States Virgin Islands. Utilizing the proceedings of the St. Thomas Colonial Council (a local but generally middle class elite body) spanning from 1864 to 1920 it would illustrate how these ocial records when analyzed for content, contextualized and combined with non-traditional records could oer a wider insight into the colonized society than might be apparent on the surface. However, it became clear that beyond suggesting possibilities for analysis, the complexities of a community of records could not be fully developed within the connes of this particular essay. From preliminary analysis of these colonial records however, which essentially document the verbatim minutes of the frequent meetings of the Colonial Council the only ocially recognized local representation in this colonial society it also became clear that even under the best of circumstances Gayatri Spivak is correct, the traditional archives cannot give a three-dimensional, fully realized voice to the voiceless. A wider interpretation of colonial society and its records, however, one that admits parallel and co-equal colonial worlds, does oer the possibility of other voices. With sensitivity and a holistic view of the social and other elements that comprise records, the archives can at least hear the whispers and acknowledge those presences. Jamaican historian and novelist Sylvia Wynter wrote in the 1970s that history has mainly been about the European super structure of civilization. Yet in the interstices of history we see, in glimpses, evidences of a powerful and pervasive cultural process which has largely determined the unconscious springs of our being, It is these interstices that currently demand our attention. I suggest that these interstices, these fault lines, these contested social spaces must also command the attention of archivists, not only the archivists of colonial records, but more importantly, the archivists of contemporary society.