Provenance in Place: Archives, Settler Colonialism and the Making of a Global Order

Provenance in place: archives, settler colonialism & the making of a global order explores the synergy between imperialism, settler colonialism, archives and the professional and academic field known as archival studies. In the introduction, “A critical rethinking of the intellectual and professional history of archival studies”, I interrogate the eurocentric story we tell ourselves about the discipline’s history from the French Revolution and the Dutch Manual (1898) to the first International Congress of Archivists & Librarians in Brussels in 1910 and the globalization of nation state archives in the 20th century. Critiquing the erasure of the colonial and imperial foundations of the discipline, I revisit the crucial role of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and Algerian Revolution (1954- 1962) in the making of archival studies and western modernity. By extension, I outline the need to rethink provenance by centering place not creator, particularly in settler colonial contexts where there can be no decolonization without land reclamation. I explicate this provenance in place approach through two cases: One is focused on British North America and settler Canada, and another on Palestine and the broader Arab world. Part I, “‘Total archives’ for land, law and sovereignty in settler Canada”, traces the settler colonial foundations of Canada’s state archives and archival profession in the era of Confederation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It makes connection between this history and the recent court cases between the Truth & Reconciliation Commission and the Canadian government over archives and records. Part II, “‘that keening trajectory’: Nakba genealogies, archival representation and the Dr. Constantine Zurayk collection”, examines the politics of memorializing the Nakba and Arab anticolonial histories based on my experience archiving the collection at the American University of Beirut. It explores Zurayk’s theorizing of the 1948 Nakba (a term he is said to have coined) and the 1967 Naksa (Six Day War) in relation to Israeli archives and the Palestinian counter archive. Overall, I consider how a reconceptualized understanding of provenance in place can contribute to the decolonizing of archiving, archives and, therefore, of land and people in settler colonial contexts.