“What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification signal at specific times are the very substance of colonial politics.”
-Ann Stoler I go to bed dreaming of archives; of the multiple boxes of things, artifacts and papers that I am “allowed” to search through to find and create a semblance of history that has long since been forgotten. As a researcher, I have had the privilege of visiting many sites that have been officially titled and marked as archives, which house the horrors and joys of human history as they relate to a particular place or concept. Postcolonial feminist theorist, Anjali Arondekar argues that the labor that goes into using the archive as a site of retrieval “attempts to keep alive
the idea of an archive that is more fractious than cumulative, more a space of catachresis than catharsis” (2009: 171). The archive has the ability to preserve, but it does so at the expense of healing or rather in place of healing. The archive is thus infused with a need to maintain a collection of time and space, throughout time and space. The problem, however, is often that preservation comes with power, and power thus seeks to preserve a particular narrative in substitution for all others (Fisher 1997). The archive I am concerned with, the entire Boston Freedom Trail, travels from the colonial period to modern day without having to be attentive to the questions of racism, racial oppression, genocide, slavery and thus a denial of Black liberation (Young 2003). This archive is not just present in boxes of thing, but also within the maps that lead us to the archive, and the memory formed around the creation of the aforementioned sites as history. The colonial archive has been granted the right to be preserved in the format of the Boston Freedom Trail, and as such denies the possibility of any other history having the ability to lay claim to these geographical points.
The trail itself cannot be toured and talked about as if it is not a living thing because it is a site of memory that has infused within it whiteness as re-memory. In its preservation, the Boston Freedom Trail (and archives in general) tells us about how historical collective memory is formed and maintained through the state. Archives are thus, often seen as places for extraction;
archives store within them only that which is deemed to be worthy of saving (Stoler 2002: 90;
Arondekar 2009: 9). We the learn from archives, but only from the constructed history that has been preserved within them. I argue, in connection with Arondekar’s thesis, that the archive is a political subject – it is living, constantly changing and moving with political significance.
Indeed, because the archive does remain a contested site we find that it presents its own
historical project. The archive is gendered and racialized, it is contested because it only contains dominant (white and male) versions and visions of history.
Historical anthropologist Ann Stoler poses,
[t]here are a number of ways to frame the sort of challenge [she] has in mind, but at least one seems obvious: steeped as students of culture have been in treating ethnographies [or freedom trails] as texts, we are just now critically reflecting on the making of documents and how we choose to use them, on archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as sites of state ethnography (2002: 90).
The trail is not a fact, but instead as a particular narrative about the exercising of freedom as liberty and the preservation of what the state deems as appropriate sites of this type of freedom.
The trail must be treated as a source of knowledge production in and of itself. For me it is a source of denied and failed liberation because it only commemorates dominant visions of
freedom as liberty, which is necessarily about the how these visions and performances have been denied to non-white, non-male peoples. The picture the Boston Freedom Trail paints is of
Colonial America as a place where the practice of freedom as liberty was fought and won. But the tour simultaneously tells a great deal about modern Western society, particularly in modern society’s attachments to individualized liberty practiced/exercised by white bodies.
Colonial historiography and political theory have a similar practice of presentation and hiding; they each read whiteness as natural, neutral but simultaneously a necessity, while Blackness is denied access and acknowledgement (Vitalis 2000). The Boston Freedom Trail exhibits racialized, gendered and sexed embodiments of power, and as such this a Transnational Black Feminist intervention into the U.S.’ colonial archive. Blackness is not absent from the trail, but instead saturates the entire narrative. What is then exposed is not a process of finding or discovering what has been lost or hidden (McKittrick 2006). It is necessary to do work as active critical and feminist theory researchers to deny the state script, which posits that we are
unearthing something that has not been there all along. Such a narrative “imput[es] absence to its object precisely so that a different theory of recovery may appear” (Arondekar 2009: 11). I am not searching for something that is not there; instead, I am arguing that it has been there all along, and is present in all readings of the archival site.13