Description
Digitization has become both an imperative and a challenge across various fields of social life. This is the case of cultural institutions, such as archives, museums and libraries, which are increasingly digitising and making the records of European colonialism available in digital spaces. Underlying these projects is often a notion of access to information as inherently beneficial and socially desirable. While this imperative of openness is significantly transforming cultural heritage, it also generates cultural, political and aesthetic effects that have yet to be charted.When colonial records move into digital regimes of visibility and circulation, the violent symbolic and material effects enacted by colonial archives upon represented subjects can potentially be replicated. These digitisation processes thus pose new questions about the structure and possibilities of the archive that juxtapose cultural issues such as ethics of representation with technological problematics such as information infrastructures. At stake in these digitization processes is how race continues to be constituted in digital times, which demands a critical rethinking of digital archives premised on an ethics of care.
Questions of care have long been at the centre of feminist debates in science and technology studies that draw attention to the invisible, gendered and racialized work of care and maintenance of technological infrastructures that usually goes unnoticed (Sofia, 2000). Importantly, these debates have problematized the notion of care as something that is not inherently good, but also violent and fraught with structural inequality and social invisibility (Bellacasa, 2017). At the same time, discussions within the field of archival science and digital humanities have been calling for the need to take into consideration the ethical implications of digital access to historical archives (Moravec, 2017). This paper will bridge and expand these debates to explore the potential of an ethics of care to transform our relation to the colonial archive in times of digitization. This requires us to pay attention to the political effects of technological infrastructures, from servers that hold the digital files to the interfaces used to display them, as well as to the subjects implicated in and affected by the digital access and display to colonial records. Finally, the paper asks whether the notion of care can contribute to a “decolonial healing” of the archive. This reinterpretation of the etymological roots of curating (curating=caring=healing) will be explored in order to imagine a reparative relation to the archives that takes into account the digital afterlife of colonialism, at at a time when the turn to datafied processes of inscription creates new practices of racialized capture and control.
| Period | 19 Sept 2018 |
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| Held at | Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany |
| Degree of Recognition | International |