At work in the archive: introduction to special issue

Abstract

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. Interrupting established historical narratives of colonial domination, artists have started to address the legacy of imperialism by examining the colonial archive. At work in the archive, these artists examine the possibilities of decolonialising colonial subjectivities. Through the return, recuperation, and re-enactment of archives, archival art points to the potential of forgotten pasts and unanticipated futures lingering in the imperial archive. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, such archival interventions often serve an emancipatory agenda.

Keywords:

• art
• archive
• empire
• decolonisation
• futures
• recuperation
• re-enactment

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. In their work, the archive often figures as source or resource, matter or metaphor, and presence or absence of our colonial past. Considering the intensity of this archival return, it is no exaggeration to state that the archive has emerged as a paradigm through which artists pursue a range of engagements with colonial histories. In their work the archive enables them to confront the legacies of our colonial pasts and provides them with possibilities to conceptualize the hidden histories and counter-memories that have been suppressed by screen memories whose traumatic contents need to be addressed in order to open up alternative futures. Conventionally imagined as a technology for the storage of traces of the past, in this context the archive may be thought of as a site to rethink our past. In this volume of World Art, the contributors explore how artists are at work in the archive to explore alternative relations between past, present and future.

Interrupting established historical narratives of colonial domination, artists and activists address the legacy of imperialism in order to decolonize our subjectivities shaped by the colonial archive. Digging through strata of imperial debris, artists excavate archaeologies of the colonial archive that reject linear narratives. The artists thereby acknowledge the multiplicity of temporalities that philosophers too have come to recognize. In his now canonical text on the archive, Derrida (1996: 68) suggests that it is not about the past: ‘it is the future that is at issue here, and the archive as an irreducible experience of the future’. Taking Derrida’s view on the futurity of the archive to the postcolony, the articles presented here examine why and how contemporary artists and activists intervene in the colonial archive. Conceived as technologies of memory, archives lend themselves to ‘the recognition of past suffering and the creation of futures of hope’ (Rowlands and de Jong 2007: 13). The articles collected in this volume of World Art address the question of how the colonial archive may be used to produce visions for decolonial futures. In our view, the return to the archive is often informed by a quest for utopian futures inherent in the possibilities afforded by the archive and the objects it holds (see also Basu and de Jong 2016). But before we explore these issues in more detail, let us first examine a colonial archive in one former seat of imperial power, London.

Art and empire

Late in 2015, Tate Britain staged the exhibition Artist and Empire, a historical survey of art produced by British artists in the context of the British Empire. As curator Alison Smith (2015: 12) argues, considering the institution’s ‘problematic relationship with the subject’, an exhibition on this subject was appropriately situated at Tate Britain. After all, the philanthropist Henry Tate owed his wealth to the production of sugar in the West Indies and Tate’s enterprise depended on slavery and the system of indentured labour that followed its abolition (Smith 2015: 12). The site of the gallery itself, too, was deeply connected to the history of the empire: it was from the Millbank Penitentiary that, until 1867, convicts were sent to penal colonies in Australia. The choice of Tate Britain as a location for an exhibition on art and empire seems therefore well judged. In his foreword to the accompanying catalogue, Paul Gilroy (2015: 8) welcomes the initiative, hoping that an exhibition on imperial art might counter Britain’s yearning for a ‘clean, progressive national history’. However, this inability to acknowledge and come to terms with the unwelcome legacies of empire is not restricted to the United Kingdom. Certain European museums, although in possession of interesting collections of colonial photography, opt not to exhibit these for fear of discomforting the coveted visitor (Edwards 2016). European nations have short memories and suffer from what historian Ann Laura Stoler (2011: 125) has identified as ‘colonial aphasia’.

In postcolonial nations that have faced immigration from their former colonies, the legacy of empire needs to be confronted. Metropolitan museums are appropriate sites for such an exercise of atonement, if only because they were historically conceived for the collecting of art, antiquities, ethnographic specimens, photography and knowledge that today constitute the imperial archive – that utopian site for the collection of the world (Richards 1993). It was, indeed, a utopian aspiration to gather all and everything for the production of an enlightened knowledge of the world that undergirded the foundation of many learned societies and museums in Victorian Britain. For this reason, Gilroy (2015: 8) suggests that the exhibition Artist and Empire might help evaluate the legacies of the imperial venture: ‘This gathering of objects and images is therefore endowed with the capacity to transform Britain’s understanding of itself’.

But is a gathering of objects in itself sufficient to transform our understanding of ourselves? The exhibition Artist and Empire provided a largely chronological survey of art produced and consumed in the context of the Empire. In this exhibition reverential portraits of indigenous rulers sometimes confront racial hierarchies, cultural hybridities reframe assumptions about cultural subjugation, and postcolonial interventions question the imperial legacy. By and large, however, the arts of empire were commissioned by the powers that be. It was an art that represented an ideal of beneficial rule and that affirmed hierarchies, yet elided the violence of oppression and silenced atrocities. The question is to what extent one can rely on the art of empire to question the epistemologies of its making? In her study of the archives of the Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler (2009) has suggested that colonial empires relied on an archival production of normalcy. Her study of documents reveals how such normalcy was produced in a context of considerable epistemic anxiety. Rather than pursuing a postcolonial agenda of reading the archives against the grain, Stoler reveals the inherent anxieties in colonial epistemologies by reading the archive along the archival grain and demonstrating how pivotal the archive was in producing acquiescence. Even ‘at home’, in the heart of empire, the surveillance of national populations increasingly relied on the production of archives that enabled the policing of unruly bodies (Sekula 1986). To revisit these techniques of surveillance certainly helps us understand the mechanisms of biopolitics, but does it really enable us to ‘work through’ the imperial legacies? The reassembling of imperial art cannot establish this, Tate Britain’s curator admits (Smith 2015: 12), because the art of empires fails to engage with the experience of its colonial subjects.

At work in the archive

To confront the colonial legacy of the archive, it is not sufficient simply to restage it, as the exhibition Artist and Empire did. What is required instead is a re-enactment of the archive that questions the conditions of possibility of its own making. Since the 1990s, many artists have embraced this conceptual interest and brought it to fruition in their work (Enwezor 2008). By acknowledging the existence of imperial archives as a paradigm that has contributed to the making of empire, they thereby move beyond an earlier, postcolonial position. Frantz Fanon (2001: 31), in an oft-quoted phrase on colonial violence, stated that ‘the colonial world is a Manichaean world’. According to him, decolonization could only be achieved through a violent revolution that would create a tabula rasa from which a new type of human being would arise. However, since the 1970s we have come to realize that colonialism relied on the production of a colonial knowledge which in its turn depended on the collection of objects, art, and photographs in the museums and libraries of the imperial metropolis (Said 1978; Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). The knowledge produced by Orientalists, anthropologists, and geographers was subsequently put on display in ethnographic museums and other educational institutions that constituted the exhibitionary complex (Coombes 1994; Bennett 1995). However ineffective and incommensurate with the landscape they sought to measure and map, colonial archives produced truth-claims that have shaped colonial relations (Arondekar 2009: 12).

It is this complex of knowledges with its multi-stranded discourses that produced colonial subjectivities – as opposed to a Manichaean world of binary dichotomies – that contemporary artists and activists have now appropriated. Postcolonial authors have taken on the ‘epistemic violence’ of colonial forms of knowledge production (Mignolo 2011). Artists, for their part, have taken it upon themselves to address colonial collections. Subsequent to the claims for the repatriation of objects in imperial collections, the postcolonial subjects whose lives have historically been documented in imperial archives are now reclaiming the archive. Some of these claims are for access to the historical truths hidden in those archives, evidence of torture and maltreatment. This is the case for the ‘migrated archives’ of the British Empire that have for decades been hidden from, and made inaccessible to, their postcolonial claimants (Anderson 2011). Other claims are not for specific data, but for a reappropriation of the archive as a system of knowledge. Indeed, the current postcolonial claim to the archive should be situated in a wider epistemological shift that comprehends the archive as an instrument for the production of knowledge.

Although the publication of Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida (1996) has made a Freudian reading of the archive possible, the attention to this institution in contemporary non-academic discourse is probably more indebted to the publication of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). This study established that academic discourses are not merely oppressive, but productive in generating the cultural grammar that enables us to think ourselves. The archive, in Foucault’s understanding, should not be defined as an institution, but rather as ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault 1972: 146). Rather than an institution for filing objects, the archive is defined as the set of practices that determines what is filed. This epistemic shift in our understanding of the archive has completely changed how we value its use. This has been usefully identified as a move from ‘archive-as-source’ to ‘archive-as-subject’ (Stoler 2009: 44).

Although the archive no longer authorizes us to narrate our past in linear narratives, it still presents us with a site at which to face the spectres that have come to haunt us (Demos 2013). Recognizing the irruptions of the colonial past in our present, we have to acknowledge that we still live amid the ruins of empire. In her reflections on imperial debris, Stoler (2013) dwells on the powerful hold that empires continue to exercise over the minds of the colonized. Rather than assume that empire is over, she proposes that we study the ruins of empire and its process of ruination. Associating its promissory notes with imperial deceit, Stoler (2013: 9) directs our attention to what people are left with. Of course, as some essays will demonstrate, genealogies of deceit can easily be found in the ruins of empire. But this special issue also draws attention to other ‘origins’: returns to the archive unearth the conditions of possibility of other stories. That archival work can contribute to telling stories of other futures is one of the lessons to be learnt from Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time (2015), an inspiring study of the politics of decolonization pursued by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Their political projects in interwar France were meant to achieve civilizational reconciliation and human self-realization in a time when decolonization was not yet an option (Wilder 2015: 2). Although their political projects are no longer pursued, Wilder’s suggestion is that we should re-examine such projects as ways of developing alternative pasts and alternative futures. In our view, the current return to the archive is informed by a quest for such utopian pasts and futures.

Rather than provide us with linear meta-narratives, the archive’s found objects enable artists to work in non-linear ways (Van Alphen 2014). Indeed, in his trend-setting essay Foster (2004) suggested that the fragmentation characteristic of archival art rejects linear models and offers construction sites for new narrations. This special issue examines how contemporary artists, activists, and postcolonial states have intervened in the colonial archive. Unlike historians, the artists and activists we examine here have not read the archive-as-text; they have intervened in the archive-as-object. Whichever imperial legacies they have found, they have appropriated them for re-significations unanticipated by the colonial masters. Acknowledging such mutability of the colonial archive, we explore its multiple and unanticipated affordances in the present (see also Basu and de Jong 2016: 5).

In this we acknowledge the multiplicity of uses that any archive can be given, as demonstrated in Kirsten Weld’s (2014) study of the archives of the military dictatorship in Guatemala. As agents in the country’s counter-insurgency, the National Police had gathered information on its alleged political opponents in an estimated 75 million documents. Weld examines how these archives had constituted a panoptical vision of Guatemalan society that had been used to track and pursue political opponents. After democratization of the political system, the Guatemalan government tried to keep the files secret from the post-conflict truth commission until the archives were rediscovered in a derelict building in the national capital. Weld’s study concerns the struggle of human rights activists to access the documents and uncover their contents. With great sensitivity, she documents how the files are made available for the persecution of those responsible for ‘the missing’ – and how the archive is appropriated for the struggle against impunity. While the archives had in the first instance been used to suppress political opponents, those subjected to its administrative gaze have been able to wrest control of the panopticon and turn it into an instrument of emancipation. For the activists, Weld (2014: 237) states, the archives ‘are sites of hope and aspiration’. Postcolonial authors had already signalled this emancipatory potential of archival activism (Appadurai 2003; Hall 2001). The articles in this volume of World Art explore such emancipatory aspects of archival art in more detail.

Photographic returns

Photography played a critical role in the establishment of colonial forms of domination. Landau (2002: 146) wryly observes that ‘photography became a tool of empire by following the gun into Africa’. It is well documented that photography was used in the production of knowledge about the indigenous population of Africa by visualizing ethnographic ‘types’ (Edwards 1992; Ryan 1997). The colonial gaze subordinated the colonized into ethnographic objects of study by storing their stereotypical representations in the ethnographic museum.

In more recent studies, this totalizing view of colonial photography has been questioned (Garb 2015). Edwards (2015: 50) suggests that recognizing the tropes and ideological formations produced in colonial photography is not the same as destabilizing them. Academic deconstruction did not enable the same material to be read in other ways. And the colonial archive is read not only by postcolonial scholars, but also by postcolonial subjects who actually recognize themselves in the archival collections: ‘many indigenous researchers continue to discover images of their ancestors in such anonymous “ethnographic” images, redeeming an honorific dimension within the historical image that had hitherto been assumed to be forever denied’ (Morton and Newbury 2015: 8–9). Thus the ‘ethnographic’ is not the only register in which such photography can be read, and alternative readings of colonial photographs have been facilitated by their return from colonial archives to the descendants of the original subjects. Thus the history of the function of photography cannot be disentangled from the history of archiving. Aboriginal readings of historical photography amount to an appropriation of the colonial archive.

In this issue, three essays address the appropriation of photographs from the colonial archive. We open with Emma Doubt’s article on the Native American photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. Historically, photography of Native Americans has played an important role in establishing the trope of the ‘vanishing race’ by portraying Native Americans in anonymous ways. Using the commercial internet archive of eBay, the artist reclaims these anonymous images and makes them available for re-readings by Native Americans. Imbuing these photographs with personal stories enables the recuperation of such archival imagery through what Tsinhnahjinnie has termed ‘photographic sovereignty’ (Doubt, this volume). The photographs are thus reclaimed and rescued from anonymity and, as Doubt demonstrates, are made to serve the work of postmemory.

In comparable ways, the visual essay by Jane Lydon presents a range of photographic images of Indigenous people from the colonial archive in Australia. Lydon pursues the argument that colonial photography has not inevitably served as a tool of surveillance. In fact, the images are now made available for new readings by Aborigines, who draw upon the archive to re-establish family connections lost as a result of the Stolen Generations. Aboriginal communities have thus reworked the potential of the photographic archive. But the archive is not only reclaimed; it is refigured by Aboriginal artists, such as Christian Thompson, who draw upon it to transcend the original purpose of essentializing identity.

The reuse of archival photographs has also helped with the process of historical reclamation and reconciliation in East Africa. In her fascinating contribution to this issue, Annie Coombes investigates representations of the colonial State of Emergency (1952–1960) in Kenya. Looking at two exhibitions, she examines their uses of colonial photographs. In the National Museum the artist Miriam Syowia Kyambi has arranged an installation of images that enables viewers to come up with their own interpretation of Kenya’s history. In the Lari Memorial Peace Museum, activists have exhibited photographs of atrocities attributed to Mau Mau rebels, yet because of a lack of captions this selection from the colonial archive might also be read otherwise, in ways not predetermined by the museum. The exhibition includes photographs of both sides of the anticolonial struggle and by commemorating both, Coombes suggests, unsettles established national narratives. In both cases, the promiscuous recycling of the colonial archive enables the making of as-yet-undiscovered historical ‘truths’. Like the previous two articles, Coombes’s study suggests that the work the archive can be made to do depends on particular techniques of archival recuperation.

Archival recuperations

Artists use different strategies to rework the colonial archive, going beyond appropriation to reflect upon their own positionality. One such strategy is the collaging of disparate, found materials into new assemblages. Dadaist proponents used collage as an artistic strategy for archival purposes: Hannah Höch used it for her scrapbooks, assembling clippings from contemporary popular magazines and, in the process, creating an alternative archive of images. Postcolonial artists too draw upon the possibilities of collage in the ways they cut and paste archival fragments to create new meaning. In her essay on the Anishinaabe artist Carl Beam, Stacy Ernst examines his use of collage. By assembling different media (such as stencil fonts, photography, painting), disparate fragments are brought together into a reassemblage, suggesting that through collage existing archives can be disrupted. This reminds one of the principle Derrida (1996: 3) discerns as proper to the power of the archive: consignation, or the bringing together of signs. Beam uses the full potential of consignation by bringing together different periods in one image, consigning past and present. Such consignation enables the audience to read the work as archive, rather than linear narrative (Van Alphen 2014). Collage is one of the most effective strategies employed by postcolonial artists in decolonizing their histories. In Beam’s work it enables audiences to explore different relationships between past and present, rather than letting them succumb to a hegemonic settler meta-narrative.

Ernst demonstrates another aspect of archival art in the work by Greg Curnoe, a settler-Canadian artist. In his Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot, he brought together disparate sources into an archive of sorts. This archive and the artworks that accompanied it illustrate the power of collage as a strategy for decolonization. In their different ways, each of the artists examined by Ernst has used archival collage as a way of making historical information present, and presenting it in a way that subverts non-Native epistemologies. The emergence of decolonial futures through archival collage thus requires settler-Canadians to recognize alternative ways of knowing.

In her article on contemporary artists in Angola and their strategies of archival recuperation, Nadine Siegert also explores whether it is possible to repair the past by working through its traumas. Adopting Aleida Assmann’s model of the archive as a repository of cultural memory, Siegert’s conceptualization of the archive is metaphorical, rather than literal, yet the artists she examines do explore material archives. For instance, in his Hidden Pages, Stolen Bodies (2001) António Ole combines found objects with documents retrieved from a police archive. The work offers a reflection on the forgotten history of forced labour under the colonial regime and counters amnesia through the excavation of neglected strata of Angolan history. Other artists whose work Siegert discusses intervene in the archive by performing within its gaps. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work, for instance, by performing on the empty pedestals of colonial monuments, exemplifies an exploration of the possibilities of archival mimicry that raises questions about archival performance, a subject examined in several other articles in this issue.

Archival performances

When considering the function of the archive and its authority, we need to remember its ‘inescapable materiality’. Mbembe (2002: 19) suggests that the ‘status and power of the archive derive from this entanglement of building and documents’. But performance scholars have drawn our attention to the fact that it would be all too easy to assume that the buildings and their documents function as a perfect substitute for our memory. In the debate about memory and modernity, the historian Pierre Nora (1989: 13) assumes that modern societies erase memory and increasingly rely on archival memory: ‘modern memory is, above all, archival [ … ] – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age’. Others have argued that modernity produces traumatic memories through archival techniques such as photography (Foster 1996). Scholars of unspeakable historical trauma have demonstrated that experiences such as the slave trade have not been recorded in writing, but may well be remembered in performance (Argenti 2007).

At the risk of simplifying what is a very complex debate, we suggest that the memories of modernity are not exclusively located in the archive. Regarding this, performance scholar Diana Taylor (2003) has usefully argued that embodied memory is stored in repertoires transmitted outside the archive. Elsewhere, I have suggested that performances derive their efficacy precisely from their location outside the colonial archive and decolonize it by subverting its authority (de Jong 2016). The materiality of the archive should be understood in relation to the performances enacted within and without it. To understand better the relationship between the materiality and performativity of archives, we should explore their productive entanglements (Basu and de Jong 2016: 13). This special issue begins to explore some of these entangled histories in both historical festivals and contemporary art.

In his fascinating article on the First World Festival of Negro Arts as it was celebrated in 1966 in Senegal, David Murphy analyses the relationship between the performative arts, memory and the archive. Organized by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Festival of Negro Arts was meant to be a showcase of African arts and culture, celebrating African contributions to the history of humankind. The president-poet imagined his festival as an archive of the embodied performances inherited from Africa’s antiquity. This Pan-African archive of embodied performances was to be inscribed in a state-generated archive of publications on the festival. Murphy’s article asks to what extent these publications provide a reliable archive of the festival, considering that some of the effervescence was much better recorded in personal, poetic accounts, rather than in the documents of an unreliably maintained state archive. Interestingly, the legacy of the 1966 festival was recuperated in another festival (FESMAN) in 2010 that President Abdoulaye Wade staged in order to celebrate, once again, the renaissance of African civilization. In Murphy’s critical but nuanced assessment this festival was not just a nostalgic restaging of Pan-Africanism, but also helped to reignite some of its utopian potentials.

If the traces of the Festival of Negro Arts appear reduced in the material archive (confirming that material archives are perhaps not well equipped to preserve performances), such a reduction of the original is precisely countered in the re-enactments of Carlos Motta discussed here by Stefanie Kogler. The multidisciplinary artist works with a range of archives in order to stage re-enactments. In his Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice (2010), actors and actresses reread six speeches by political leaders, all assassinated, in public spaces in Colombia. During one of these re-enactments, the public engaged with the film crew and started a dialogue on the speech, resulting in the breakdown of the distinction between art and politics and, one could argue, between the historical archive and its reactualization in a contemporary political context. Such public engagements are also encouraged in another work by Motta, The Immigrant Files: Democracy Is Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny (2009). In this work, video interviews about the experience of democracy are deposited in online archives to present a platform for minority views. These performances make documents available for contingent, subjective engagements that require the participation of the audience; they are therefore, Kogler argues, a tool for democracy. The relationship between archives and democracy is of course well established, as Derrida (1996: 4) himself clearly states that ‘effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’.

In her contribution, Kerstin Pinther also pursues the theme of democracy through participation and archival performance. The relationships between archive, memory, and performative traces are here once more encountered in another constellation of archival art. Pinther’s essay examines the production of alternative archives by artists in the context of the Arab Spring in North Africa. She follows Kamel Lazaar’s (2015: 9) lament that states in the Middle East seem to fail their archives; they are underfunded and in varying degrees of dilapidation. Such neglect raises the question of whether the postcolonial states in the Middle East and the Maghreb do not need archives to authorize themselves, or whether they are indeed ‘failed states’ as Allman (2013: 127) implies in her study of postcolonial archives. Interestingly, where the postcolonial states of the Middle East are neglecting their democratic duties, artists have taken it on themselves to address the void. Pinther’s article examines works of art that are ‘archival’ in the sense that they include visual documents of historical value. She argues that female artists have taken responsibility for producing archives, where states have failed to take their responsibilities. As contemporary archival institutions did not document the revolutions as and when they happened across the Arab world, artists actively archived in order to counter state-sanctioned collective amnesia by setting up art infrastructures. These artists are aware of the political power of the archive and acknowledge the potential of counter-archives to address the failures of cultural memory in the present (cf. Foster 2004: 21–2).

The last three articles demonstrate that the process of archiving is dependent on the contingencies of politics and can be used to engage such contingencies. This supports our contention that archiving must be seen as a mode of political action with the potential to contribute to a politics of emancipation. In the cases presented here, artists have assumed this responsibility to contribute to emancipatory politics, following activists in creating autonomous archives that support public counter-memories (Moore and Pell 2010). It is clear, then, that artists do not merely revisit the colonial archive. Rather than surveying the imperial archive as the exhibition Artists and Empire at Tate Britain did, the artists discussed here actually intervene in the imperial archive. In their interventions, they follow a range of different strategies. The work of these artists often relies on a return to the archive, making archived images and objects available for reappropriation in the present. In this process of reappropriation, the predetermined meanings of imperial archival production are then unmade through active rereadings by the descendants of the colonized. In this process, the artists and activists recuperate the archival object and enable the descendants of Native populations to reconstitute themselves through the objects that initially served their dislocation and disenfranchisement, rendering archival objects as archival subjects. In several instances we have seen how contemporary artists also re-enact historical archives and thereby make archival documents available for contingent reuses. This confirms our contention that archives can be sites for performative reappropriations, animating the colonial archive (de Jong 2016) by displacing the original logics of archival storage for the performance of alternative futures. In short, for their projects of decolonization, contemporary artists have adopted the innovative strategies of return, recuperation and re-enactment of the archive.

In these projects the archive appears as an open-ended, future-oriented institution that has the potential to contribute to the creation of democratic forms of self-representation well beyond the grasp of the state. Establishing public recognition for claims to human rights, the essays demonstrate that postcolonial artists explore colonial archives in order to produce an art of emancipation. Through the return, recuperation, and reenactment of archives, they point to the potential of forgotten pasts and unanticipated futures lingering in the imperial archive.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is the result of reflections in a series of four workshops held at University College London (UCL), the University of Stirling, and the University of East Anglia (UEA). Funded by an AHRC Research Network on ‘Utopian Archives: Excavating Pasts for Postcolonial Futures’ (2012–14), the workshops were convened by Ferdinand de Jong (Principal Investigator, UEA) and Paul Basu (Co-Investigator, UCL). Although not all papers presented at these workshops could be published, a selection of them are presented in this publication, while others have been published in special issues of Francosphères 3(1) (de Jong and Murphy 2014) and Social Anthropology 24(1) (Basu and de Jong 2016). I would like to express my gratitude to the AHRC for funding the network that has enabled such a productive intellectual collaboration. I also thank Paul Basu for his collegial collaboration, David Murphy (University of Stirling) for his help in organizing the network, and all participants for their contributions to the discussions.

Notes on contributor

Ferdinand de Jong is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East Anglia where he teaches anthropology, art, and cultural heritage. His publications include the monograph Masquerades of Modernity: Power and Secrecy in Casamance, Senegal (2007) and the volume Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa (co-edited with Michael Rowlands, 2007). More recently, he has co-edited special issues on archives for African Arts, Social Anthropology, and Francosphères. He is currently completing a study on decolonial heritage in Senegal and remains interested in time, temporality and ruination of empire.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Networking Scheme [grant number AH/J006122/1].