The year of 2017 marked the centennial of Denmark’s sale of the former Danish West Indies to the United States of America, today the US Virgin Islands (USVI). The colonial archives figured prominently during the year-long commemorations in Denmark, as the Danish National Archives digitized and publicly released the colonial records of the islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John. Drawing on cultural theories as well as debates in archival science, this article proposes the notion of ‘archival encounter’ to centre the ethical-epistemological challenges of digitization and to emphasize the intersected problematics raised by the encounter between the colonial, the archival and the digital. The article begins by revisiting the history of these archives in order to situate the digitization of these records within debates on provenance, custody and access. It then introduces some of the debates taking place within the field of Atlantic slavery, as well as feminist and critical race theories, to argue that the digitization of the USVI records recasts questions about the limitations and possibilities of colonial archives. Furthermore, the article contends that digitality and datafication are indebted to colonial histories of quantification that structure the technological encounter with the colonial archive. Finally, the article builds on these theorizations to amplify recent calls for a feminist ethics of care in archival praxis. Drawing on postcolonial critiques, the article problematizes and situates the notion of care within the colonial and non-innocent histories in which it is embedded, in order to align ethics of care with a critical reorientation of digital colonial archives. Marshalling a postcolonial feminist critique of care as a framework for thinking, the article suggests, can help us to realign archival encounters in ways that that more pointedly confront the colonial legacies of our present.

中文翻译：

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档案遭遇：重新思考数字殖民档案中的访问和护理

2017年是丹麦将前丹麦西印度群岛出售给美利坚合众国（今天是美属维尔京群岛（USVI））的百年纪念。在丹麦为期一年的纪念活动中，殖民档案占据了重要位置，丹麦国家档案馆将其数字化并公开发布了圣克鲁瓦，圣托马斯和圣约翰群岛的殖民记录。本文借鉴文化理论以及档案科学中的辩论，提出“档案遭遇”的概念，以集中数字化的伦理-流行病学挑战，并强调殖民地，档案和数字之间的遭遇引发的交叉问题。本文首先回顾了这些档案的历史，以便将这些档案的数字化置于关于出处的辩论中，保管和使用权。然后，它介绍了在大西洋奴隶制领域内发生的一些辩论，以及女权主义和批判种族理论，以争辩说USVI记录的数字化重塑了有关殖民档案的局限性和可能性的问题。此外，该文章认为，数字化和数据化应归因于量化的殖民历史，这些历史构成了与殖民档案之间的技术交流。最后，本文建立在这些理论基础之上，以扩大对档案实践中女权主义护理伦理的最新呼吁。该文章借鉴了后殖民时代的批评，对照顾的概念提出了质疑，并将其置于其中的殖民历史和非清白历史中，为了使护理伦理与数字殖民地档案馆的重新定位保持一致。文章认为，将后殖民主义的女性主义批评作为思想的框架进行编排，可以帮助我们以更加明确地直面当前殖民地遗产的方式重新调整档案的遭遇。