Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Archival encounters: rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Archival Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Agostinho D (2018) Chroma key dreams: algorithmic visibility, fleshy images and scenes of recognition. Philos Photogr 9(2):131–156

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aljoe NN, Dillon EM, Doyle B, Hopwood E (2015) Obeah and the early caribbean digital archive. Atl Stud 12(2):258–266

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andersen AN (2014) Islands of regret. Restitution, connected memories and the politics of history in Denmark and the US Virgin Islands. Ph.D. Thesis, Aarhus University

  • Andersen AN (2018) The reparations movement in the US Virgin Islands. J Afr Am Hist 103(1–2):104–132

    Google Scholar 

  • Araújo AL (2017) Reparations for slavery and the slave trade: a transnational and comparative history. Bloomsbury, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Bastian JA (1999) Defining custody. Archival custody and its impact on the relationship between communities and historical records in the information age. A case study of the US Virgin Islands. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pittsburgh

  • Bastian JA (2001) A question of custody. The colonial archives of the US Virgin Islands. Am Arch 64(1):96–114

    Google Scholar 

  • Bastian JA (2002) Taking custody, giving access. A postcustodial role for a new century. Archivaria 53:76–93

    Google Scholar 

  • Bastian JA (2003) Owning memory. How a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history. Libraries Unlimited, Westport

    Google Scholar 

  • Belle LV (2018) I am Queen Mary. Artist talk and panel debate. National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, 1 Apr

  • Browne S (2015) Black matters. On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Caswell ML (2016) ‘The archive’ is not an archives. On acknowledging the intellectual contributions of archival studies. Reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture 16(1)

  • Caswell ML, Cifor M (2016) From human rights to feminist ethics. Radical empathy in the archives. Archivaria 81:23–43

    Google Scholar 

  • Caswell ML, Punzalan R, Sangwand TK (2017) Critical archival studies. An introduction. J Crit Libr Inf Stud 1(2) https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50

  • Collins PH (1995) Black women and motherhood. In: Held J (ed) Justice and care. Essential readings in feminist ethics. Westview Press, Boulder, pp 117–135

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Copeland H, Thompson K (2011) Perpetual returns. New World slavery and the matter of the visual. Representations 113:1–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Danbolt M, Wilson MK (2018) A monumental challenge to Danish history. Kunstkritik, 26 Apr. http://www.kunstkritikk.no/kommentar/a-monumental-challenge-to-danish-history/Accessed 25 Aug. 2018

  • Dirckinck-Holmfeld, K, Agostinho D, Søilen KLG (2019) Archives that matter. Digital infrastructures for sharing unshared histories. Nordic J Inf Stud Cult Commun 8(3)

  • Dize, N (2019) Feeling grief. On emotions in the archive of enslavement. Nursing Clio, 22 Jan. https://nursingclio.org/2019/01/22/feeling-grief-on-emotions-in-the-archive-of-enslavement/Accessed 17 Apr 2019

  • Edwards E (2016) The colonial archival imaginaire at home. Social Anthropol Anthropologie Soc 24(1):52–66

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault M (2004) The archaeology of knowledge. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Gikandi S (2015) Rethinking the archive of enslavement. Early Am Lit 50(1):81–102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Graham H (1991) The concept of caring in feminist research. Sociology 25(1):61–78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Graham M (2007) The ethics of care, black women and the social professions. Implications of a new analysis. Ethics Soc Welf 1(2):194–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496530701450372

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harney S, Rogoff I (2015) How not to be accessed thusly. Seminar at Bergen Assembly. http://bergenassembly.no/event/seminar-4-stefano-harney-and-irit-rogoff/Accessed 1 Sep. 2018

  • Hartman S (2008) Lose your mother. A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartman S (2011) Review of Delia’s tears: race, science, and photography in nineteenth-century America. J Am Hist 98(2):520–522

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hartman S (2019) Wayward lives, beautiful experiments. Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W. W. Norton & Company, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Helton L, Leroy J, Mishler MA, Seeley S, Sweeney S (2015) The question of recovery. An introduction. Soc Text 33(4) https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3315766

  • Hooks B (1991) Yearning. Race, gender, and cultural politics. Turnaround, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Jensen L (2018) Postcolonial Denmark. Nation narration in a crisis ridden Europe. Routledge, London

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson JM (2018) Markup bodies. Black [life] studies and slavery [death] studies at the digital crossroads. Text 36(4):57–79

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelleher C (2017) Archives without archives. (Re)locating and (re)defining the archive through post-custodial praxis. J Crit Libr Inf Stud 1(2) https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.29

  • Körber LA (2018) Gold Coast (2015) and Danish economies of colonial guilt. J Aesthet Cult 10(2):25–37

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lowe L (2015) The intimacies of four continents. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mattson R (2016) Can we center an ethics of care in audiovisual archival practice? XFR Collective, 2 Dec. https://xfrcollective.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/can-we-center-an-ethic-of-care-in-audiovisual-archival-practice/Accessed 18 Apr 2019

  • Moore N (2012) The politics and ethics of naming. Questioning anonymisation in (archival) research. Int J Soc Res Methodol 15(4):331–340

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mooten N (2015) Toward a postcolonial ethics of care. https://ethicsofcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Toward_a_Postcolonial_Ethics_of_Care.pdf Accessed 10 Apr. 2019

  • Murphy M (2015) Unsettling care. Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. Soc Stud Sci 45(5):717–737

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Narayan U (1995) Colonialism and its others. Considerations on rights and care discourses. Hypatia 10(2):133–140

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Navarro T (2017) From Danish west indies to American poorhouse. Small axe salon 26

  • Odumosu T (2019) The crying baby. On colonial archives, digitisation, and ethics of care in the cultural commons. Paper presented at Malmö University, 27 Feb

  • Rigsarkivet (n.d.) The Danish West-Indies. Sources of history. https://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/about/hvorfor-dette-website/ Accessed 12 Apr. 2019

  • Risam R (2018) New digital worlds. Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, Evanston

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rowell CJ, Cooksey T (2019) Archive of hate. Ethics of care in the preservation of ugly histories. Lady Science, 9 Jan. https://www.ladyscience.com/blog/archive-of-hate-ethics-of-care-in-the-preservation-of-ugly-histories Accessed 25 Feb 2019

  • Samudzi Z (2019) Bots are terrible at recognizing Black faces. Let’s keep it that way. Daily Beast, 2 Febr 2019. Accessed 17 Apr 2019

  • Silva DF (2009) No-bodies. Law, raciality and violence. Griffith Law Rev 18(2):212–236

  • Spillers H (1987) Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe. An American grammar book. Diacritics 17(2):64–81

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stoler AL (2002) Colonial archives and the arts of governance. Arch Sci 2:87–109

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sutherland T (2017) Making a killing. On race, ritual, and (re)membering in digital culture. Preserv Digit Technol Cult 46(1):32–40

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor D (2003) The archive and the repertoire. Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ticktin MI (2011) Casualties of care. Immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. University of California Press, Oakland

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Unsettling Minnesota (2009) Unsettling ourselves. Reflections and resources for deconstructing colonial mentality. Unsettling Minnesota, Minneapolis http://unsettlingminnesota.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/um_sourcebook_jan10_revision.pdf Accessed 17 Apr 2019

  • Wekker G (2016) White Innocence. Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wernimont J (2019) Numbered lives. Life and death in quantum media. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Zuboff S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism. The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs, New York

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This article is indebted to multiple and ongoing conversations about the legacies of colonialism in Denmark and the US Virgin Islands. I particularly thank Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro and the Uncertain Archives collective for inspiring collaborations and support. I would also like to express my gratitude to the editors of this special issue for their incredible intellectual input. Their generous and insightful comments have profoundly shaped the present version of this article. All remaining flaws can be attributed only to me.

Funding

The article is based on research funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixenvej 1, 2300, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Daniela Agostinho

Authors
  1. Daniela Agostinho
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniela Agostinho.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Agostinho, D. Archival encounters: rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives. Arch Sci 19, 141–165 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09312-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09312-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation