Refusal to be Archived: Unseeing as a Decolonial Practice

Description

This presentation is concerned with refusal as an ethical engagement with colonial archives in times of datafication and dispossession. Departing from the archives of Danish colonialism in the Caribbean, the paper conceptualizes refusal as a threefold mode of engagement with archives: refusal as a mode of reading that rejects colonial legibility and archival capture; refusal as a renunciation of the temporal logics of the archive; and refusal as a productive mode of research that acknowledges the limits of our terms of knowledge production. By discussing these three intersecting modalities of refusal, and how they are shaped by and respond to archival epistemes, the paper conceptualizes refusal as installing productive limits on intelligibility, limits that question our own complicity with modes of knowledge that extend the violence of archival registration. Drawing on Tina Campt’s suggestion that refusal is not a strategy of resistance, but a fundamental negation of the terms through which oppression is exercised upon black life (Campt, 2017), the article further asks what kinds of engagements with colonial archives are available if we wish to refuse the archive’s violent structuration of the present. Circling around a photographic album from the Danish colonial archives, the paper rehearses a mode of reading, or unseeing, that is not to be equated with looking away, but rather an attempt to engage in an ensemble of seeing, feeling, being affected and moved by the archive that is radically incommensurate with the terms of address laid out by modern archival registration.

Period	28 Sept 2018
Held at	University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International