Social Anthropology

Wright, Shelley. 2014. Our ice is vanishing. Sikuvut Nunquliqtuq. A history of Inuit, newcomers, and climate change. Montreal: McGill‐Queens University Press. 398 pp. Hb.: US$28.48. ISBN‐13: 9780773544628.

Büscher, Bram. 2013. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. xviii + 290 pp. Pb: US$24.96. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5420-8.

Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation‐states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these archives in relation to decolonial futures? This essay introduces a collection of articles that explore the repertoires of action latent in archives and how colonial archives are being reconfigured to imagine decolonial futures.

The Italian shock documentary contains a sequence about massacres that occurred during the Zanzibar revolution of 1964. Perceived by some of its Zanzibari viewers as a container of factual evidence of the brutality of this epochal event, this sequence is contested by others who assert that it was staged or re‐enacted. One critical aspect of these oppositional views concerns the very status of this documentary and the trust that can be placed in it as an archival record. Whether is seen as authentic or fabricated, it provides Zanzibaris with a medium through which to revisit the past and rethink Zanzibari society in the present.

This paper addresses ways in which the aphasic nature of the colonial archive in postcolonial Britain causes a displacement in the archival imagination as ‘elsewhere’. I use the concept of the historical elsewhere to demonstrate the deep structural patterns in the denial of the relevance of the potentially dystopic colonial archive in public historical narratives. Looking especially at the photographic archive, I explore ways in which photographs cut across these mechanisms of disavowal, as the visual both challenges the aphasic through its insistent claims to presence, and through its ambiguous relationship to the time and space that constitute the elsewhere.

Dystopian realities and archival dreams in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

In 1895 the colonial administration of Senegal sentenced Sheikh Amadu Bamba to exile for stirring anti‐colonial disobedience. At his trial, Bamba allegedly recited a prayer in defiance of the French authorities. Although there is no archival record to prove that the prayer was recited, since the 1970s Bamba's disciples have flocked to the former seat of colonial power to commemorate his act of resistance; their testimony has displaced the authority of the colonial archive and imagines a decolonial utopia in archival absence. This article examines how their prayer subverts the colonial archive, while it remains entangled in its substrate.