Archives as Sites of Participatory Research and Epistemological Rejuvenation

In his seminal text, Archive Fever, Derrida (1998) suggests that our feverish preoccupation with archives has generated an intriguing set of possibilities and a simultaneous set of unsettling propositions. Why are archives of all sorts such crucial sites of interrogation, especially in the context of a resurgent impulse towards decoloniality across the contemporary globe? Perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that archives have a valence in the symbolic economy in relation to the construction of a politics of memory, experience, knowledge and being—that is to say, they are critical to the construction of our social worlds and the subjects within them—and therefore are sites of deep contestation between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic groups and forces. Archives are indeed places to which we compulsively return precisely because they are elusive in their definitiveness, yet never fully foreclosed, and therefore filled with possibilities.

Historically, and in the narrowest technical sense, archives are conceived of as collections of primary, “unmediated” sources pertaining to processes, events or phenomena (e.g. procedural documents, personal journals, photographs, objects of inquiry, etc.). Sometimes they are also imagined as specific institutional or organisational sites (e.g. the national archives of any country). Such a descriptive account of archives is somewhat sterile and objectivist in orientation as it presupposes collections of factual primary sources that are viewed as neutral and apolitical. This conception of archives also locates them predominantly within the purview of historians, who mine these sources to interpret and gain understandings of the past.

In contrast, Derrida (1998) makes the compelling argument that all archives and their related processes are deeply immersed within a political context, often managed by hegemonic elites for explicit or inadvertent political and ideological ends. They are a key social and political resource, given that they tend to truncate the totality of human experience by generating official histories and crafting collective memories, that in turn shape grand narratives and public discourses that frequently elide and negate the nuances of human experience. In the Derrida (1998) sense, this reflects the fact that the archive is both a place of commencement and order, that is, the archive provides a record and simultaneously determines what it is that is to be included or muted in such a record (Laubscher, 2013). Treanor (2009) similarly notes that “the nature of the ‘archive’ affects not only what is archived, but also how we relate to and access it. The archive also conditions the process of archiving itself and, indeed, the very nature of what is archivable … The archive is thus a filter of sorts” (pp. 289–290). This speaks directly to the sociopolitical processes surrounding any archive that come to privilege, include and exclude certain social subjects and ways of knowing in a manner that is partial, perspectival and incomplete. Historical revisionism is always associated with certain elisions in the archive, and because official histories tend to be more publicly available and overtly ideologically loaded, there is sometimes a slippage between what we understand to be the archive and official histories—a conflation of the two that requires some unpacking and disentanglement which may offer different ways of not only expanding, challenging and creating histories, but also of understanding the impact of these histories on our present and future (Mbembe, 2002; Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013).

For some, the contents in the archive are in some ways static—dead—but it is in the engagement with this archive that its contents take on a spectral or ghost-like quality, always haunting the present and thereby enlivening the archive as we witness its contents and (re)interpret them (Laubscher, 2013; Mbembe, 2002). Through this process, we of course can also determine the absences within the archive, but simultaneously recognise that every engagement with the archive is itself a contribution to that archive. Thus, the boundaries of the archive are less rigid in this conceptualisation, more permeable, and open to multiple insertions and interpretations. As such, archival research is not only about mining historical primary sources, but also about potentially contributing new sources to that archive, thereby expanding it. In addition, interpreting historical material within archives allows for research into the past, but also into the present moment of interpretation, thereby opening up a space for a liminal analytics to occur (Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013). This dynamic view of archives also suggests that they are not bound by location, they may be virtual, multiple, intersecting, and complementary in nature. Similarly, they may not be specific to particular types of collections, but can expand into multiple forms of collections (Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid, & Saleh, 2002).

In this formulation of the archive and archival research, interdisciplinarity again is encouraged as desirable, given that the same corpus of materials could be analysed in a myriad of ways and through a variety of lenses (see for example, Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013b). In addition, methods that extend beyond historical mining of primary sources and genealogical analyses become possible through forms of inclusion and participation, thereby enhancing the idea of methodological pluralism. Here, writers such as Feyerabend (1975) have suggested that multiple and more complex approaches to exploring the social world are indeed necessary, and that methodological reification should be avoided both philosophically and in practice. Both interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism and innovation help to generate new relationships to knowledge, thereby raising the possibilities for epistemological rupture and rejuvenation as we come to experience different ways of analysing and therefore of knowing, being and doing in the world. Expanding and potentially contributing to alternative readings and accounts of our histories, is a situation where we avoid reproducing knowledge that is already circumscribed and thereby revive Biko’s (2004) injunction to “write what [we] like”.

Psychosocial and Psychopolitical Transformation Through a Decolonial Lens

Beyond methodological pluralism and innovation, the present historical juncture has also called for deeper historical analyses of the pernicious social conditions of modernity. Certainly, the twenty-first century can be characterised as the contemporary social apex in which marginality, based on alterity, has surfaced in unsurpassed ways. Despite the homogenising influence of globalisation, distinctions between Northern and Southern contexts remain, racism continues to mutate, levels of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment are on the increase, Islamophobia has returned as a mode of Othering and marginalisation, fundamentalisms of various forms have gained greater traction, and levels of proto-fascism, inequality, exploitation, violence, war and suffering are at staggering levels (Derrida, 2006). Central to an analysis of these conditions, decoloniality has emerged as a contemporary theoretical resource. While the decolonial turn epistemically is frequently cited as only emerging in the literature in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with key writings by Walter Mignolo, Ramon Grosfoguel, Sylvia Wynter, Enrique Dussel, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Anibal Quijano and Nelson Maldonado-Torres amongst others, decoloniality as a terrain of intellectual engagement has existed for a much lengthier period of time. An impressive lineage of intellectuals have contributed to this epistemic tradition, including Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah—all providing a significant impetus to the development of the decolonial episteme.

For Maldonado-Torres (2011), decoloniality is essentially a critique of Western modernist thought and its associated practices, that include colonisation, capitalism, racism and the modern gender system. He suggests that this entire system is embedded in violence, emerging out of European expansionism, slavery and colonialism, and constituted a colonial matrix of power that continues to shape relations of power, knowledge and being. In its sheer scale, this modernist project allowed for the emergence of global configurations of subjectivity, based on violence, alterity and exploitation (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Taussig, 1986). As such, decoloniality is fundamentally about adopting a sceptical epistemic attitude towards Western modernity and its associated forms of knowledge, power, being and praxis.

Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (2013) and Sonn, Stevens and Duncan (2013) note that there is already a considerable body of knowledge devoted to operationalising decolonial theory into a mode of psychosocial and psychopolitical praxis (Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013a)—combining theory and method to transformatively address the psychological, social and political impacts of the legacies of colonialism (see for example, Biko, 2004; Bulhan, 1985; Fanon, 1967; Memmi, 1984).

The first terrain that they identify as being impacted upon is that of history (Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013). They draw on the work of Smith (1999), who argues that the impact of imperialism and colonialism on indigenous communities implicates academic knowledge and knowledge production in the destruction of indigenous histories, and therefore motivates for projects directed at the deconstruction and reclamation of history. These alternative histories constitute alternative knowledges and open up new possibilities for knowing, being and acting in the world. Recognising this history in its totality is critical, as the consequences of colonialism imprint themselves constantly on contemporary postcolonial social formations, often in uneven material conditions, as well as within uneven social relations in the sociocultural fabric of these societies (Bhabha, 1994; Fanon, 1967; Said, 1978). Smith (1999) goes on to argue that:

This in turn requires a theory or approach which helps us to engage with, understand and then act upon history. [ … ]. Telling our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the past are all strategies which are commonly employed by indigenous peoples, struggling for justice … [and is] a powerful form of resistance (pp. 34–35).

The second terrain that they identify is the decimation of cultural resources amongst marginalised groups in the context of colonialism (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013). Beyond the violence and systemised mechanisms of oppression and economic exploitation, colonialism also involved covert processes and mechanisms of control over spirituality, sexuality and culture, resulting in social relations that are fundamentally fragmented between and within both colonising and colonised populations (Bhabha, 1994; Fanon, 1967; Glover, Dudgeon & Huygens, 2005; Moane, 2003, 2009). The decolonial project must of necessity therefore be profoundly invested in the recovery of these cultural resources if the alienation of colonialism and coloniality is to be overcome, to the extent that such a recovery is indeed possible.

The third terrain of impact that Sonn, Stevens and Duncan (2013) identify is the creation and maintenance of alterity. As a fundamental mode of Othering that was a foundational element of colonialism, alterity took the primary form of racial difference through the system of racism. Quijano (2000) maintains that the shifting meanings of race must be understood in relation to the histories of empires, and this remains relevant within the context of globalisation today, where xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of Islamophobia are as pernicious as the more recrudescent forms of racism directed at black populations. These forms of alterity remain important to surface as they have an enduring effect on uneven resource distribution and access at a material level in political and psychosocial life.

For decolonial researchers, practitioners and activists, moving from the broad conceptual domain to specific modes of practice are central to the operationalisation of a decolonial ethics and praxis. This includes the articulation of subaltern voices, the recovery of histories and knowledges, a deeply reflexive praxis, the translation of theoretical and philosophical work into forms of activism, and the utilisation of forms of theory that speak to the experiential and contextual dimensions of subalterns (thus potentially expanding the archive beyond the Western canon) (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013; Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013). Martín-Baró (1994) argued that it was imperative for psychology to work alongside the oppressed in processes of deconstruction, including the recovery of historical memory, de-ideologising everyday experience (i.e. unmasking everyday realities by exposing the ways in which the status quo is justified), and building on the positive experiences of people to reconstruct community (see also Freire, 2000; Montero, 2007). With regard to reflexive praxis, Smith (1999) and Swadener and Mutua (2008) suggest that decolonising research is more about motives, concerns and knowledge brought to the research process, and is likely to be performative and enmeshed in activism, rather than being purely located within the theoretical domain (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013). Finally, decolonising research works within the frame of other-than-Western forms of knowing that have been excluded and silenced by dominant Western modes of knowing and doing (Dudgeon & Fielder, 2006; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Smith, 1999), thereby supporting standpoint methods, and highlighting that there are no value-free positions from which to engage with knowledge construction and social transformation. In addition, Reyes Cruz and Sonn (2011) suggest that the different theoretical frames within decoloniality, which include critical race studies, whiteness studies and the more general study of the social reproduction of inequality, are key to developing ways of knowing and doing that can contribute to decolonisation and liberation . Given the levels of marginalisation, exploitation, alterity, and hierarchies in relations of power that characterise the contemporary globe, a decolonial lens appears to offer much in the way of an analytics and a corpus of methods to respond to these challenges.

The Apartheid Archive Project

Writing from the specific location of South Africa, there are recent historical exemplars of the shifting nature of archives during the transition from apartheid to democracy—an apartheid archive that was initially managed and controlled to justify the racist segregation and exploitative nature of apartheid, to an archive that revealed the many horrors of the apartheid system. Here, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the primary mode of rewriting and refiguring this archive. While the TRC made a critical contribution to this process of dealing with the past (Cassin, Cayla, & Salazar, 2004; Villa-Vicencio, 2004), its focus on apartheid’s gross human rights violations and atrocities meant that it effectively foreclosed the possibility of a more comprehensive exploration of the everyday manifestations of apartheid life. As a consequence, much of the commonplace details of apartheid racism have not been meaningfully assessed or publicly acknowledged (Apartheid Archive Project, 2010). Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (2013) note that it is however important to concede that the TRC played a significant role in augmenting the official record—“one that had been systematically sanitised and deliberately destroyed in some instances, between 1990 and 1994 in particular, in an attempt to conceal the machinations of the apartheid State prior to the transition to a non-racial democracy and a change in government” (p. 28). They go on to suggest that beyond extending and elaborating the apartheid archive, the TRC was however also a public national process, which advertently and inadvertently implicated itself in complex practices of memorialisation and neo-liberal nation-building. Certain events and experiences were consequently either included or excluded from the archival record, and this unfinished business of social transformation can be seen in the history of apartheid racism that continues to resonate in the present in forms of inequality, ongoing racialisation , and in its potentially pernicious future role.

The Apartheid Archive Project was initiated precisely in response to many of the above limitations, challenges and decolonising imperatives. While accepting that postcolonial contexts themselves may dynamically involve the emergence of alternative modes of subjectivity such as those articulated in concepts such as hybridity (Bhabha, 1994), creolisation (Erasmus, 2001) or entanglement (Nuttall, 2009), decoloniality is fundamentally premised upon confronting a racialised history that prevails within the contemporary material and sociocultural milieu. Central to the Apartheid Archive Project is the idea that accessing everyday stories of experiences of apartheid that have been excluded, silenced or neglected may offer us an analytic portal into how this racist history remains integral to individual and collective psyches, shapes contemporary social relations and material inequality, and is therefore critical to processes of psychosocial and psychopolitical transformation and social cohesion (Sonn, Stevens, & Duncan, 2013).

In various post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies there have been formal mechanisms and processes such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, symbolic acts such as formal apologies, and other types of macro- and micro-level interventions that are aimed at redressing past oppression, and laying the ground for intergroup relations based on equality and social justice (Contassel & Holder, 2008; James & van der Vijver, 2000; Rigney, 2012; Stevens, 2006). As mentioned previously, several researchers (see Contassel & Holder, 2008; Stevens, 2006) have commented on both the successes and limitations of such initiatives in different contexts to promote reconciliation and decolonisation. Furthermore, writers such as Gilroy (2010) and Goldberg (2008) also illustrate how the legacies of slavery, racism, the associated negative constructions of the black Other and even the resistances to this, continue to be appropriated into new modes of production and capital accumulation (e.g. the commoditisation of black anti-racist and aspirational values into market economies). Clearly then, a transformative praxis has to be premised on a decolonial imperative that addresses how the history of the colonial project continues to manifest in the present in overt, covert and other forms of racism, material marginalisation, intergroup conflict, constrained forms of subjectivity, and personal and collective forms of sociocultural alienation.

Stevens, Duncan and Hook (2013a), drawing on the original documents that birthed the project, note the aims of the Apartheid Archive Project as follows:

Sixteen years ago the curtain was finally drawn on the system of institutionalised racism that the world knew as apartheid, and the memorial signifiers of its demise are writ large on South Africa’s public landscape. Yet, its pernicious effects on our inner-worlds; on memory, identity and subjectivity, continue to constrain the promises of a truly post-apartheid South Africa. Trapped by a national desire to look forward rather than to the past, the everyday personal accounts of the scourge of apartheid are rapidly fading into a forgotten past … Given South Africa’s apparent self-imposed, and in certain respects, carefully managed, amnesia about the apartheid era … as well as its blindness to the ongoing impact today of institutionalised apartheid racism … on inter-group and inter-personal relationships, we believe that it is important to re-open the doors to the past … [This project] will attempt to foreground narratives of the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ South Africans during the apartheid era, rather than simply focusing on the ‘grand’ narratives of the past or the privileged narratives of academic, political and social elites … Based, in part, on the assumption that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present if they are not acknowledged and dealt with, this project aims to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of (particularly ‘ordinary’) South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa (pp. 6-7).

Stated in the simplest terms, the Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans , about their experiences of racism during apartheid. Initiated in 2008 by two psychologists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, the project continues to be housed at, and primarily funded by, this institution. The collected narratives, stories and related project materials are all currently stored in the Historical Papers section of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, and are also electronically available to the broader public (http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AG3275/R/9023). While the Apartheid Archive Project has begun to generate its own archive of narratives and stories, it has already begun to extend its analytic gaze to existing and related archives as well (see for example, Ratele & Laubscher, 2013).

One of the primary aims of this initiative is to provide an opportunity or platform to different sectors of South African society (but particularly the politically, socially and economically marginalised, whose life stories are rarely incorporated into dominant historical accounts of the past) to reflect on and share their past experiences. These narratives, it is hoped, will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. As Nora (1989) observes, narratives such as these serve as an important antidote to the “deforming, … petrifying” (p. 12) effects of dominant (homogenising) formalised histories—histories from below as opposed to histories from above, so to speak (Bonner & Nieftagodien, 2008; Thompson, 1966).

Another vital part of the initiative is to consider the ongoing effects and attributable meanings of the experiences related in the collected stories and narratives, in present-day South Africa. In this way the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering, and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives in their current temporal context of narrational production, rather than simply accepting them at face-value (Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013).

The Apartheid Archive Project has brought together more than 30 South African and international researchers (i.e. from Australia, the UK, the USA, etc.) from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds in the social sciences, humanities, arts and education. Using virtual information and communication technologies, conferences, symposia, as well as public-intellectual activities, the project has been sustained as a loose association of scholars and practitioners with converging intellectual interests. This core team of researchers has pursued sub-projects of personal and collective interest (e.g. gender/sexuality and race; diasporic studies; memory studies; liberation and decolonising approaches to race and racism; and the psychoanalytics of race and racism), inducted graduate students into these research processes, and collected stories pertaining to the experiences of specifically defined cohorts (e.g. domestic workers, women, men, whites, blacks, academics, ex-combatants, etc.). The project therefore offers a richness, both in terms of who has contributed to the collection of stories and narratives, and in terms of the heterogeneity of researchers writing about the archive (Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013b).

All working from the same narratives, the collaborating researchers have offered a range of analyses aimed at understanding apartheid history and its sometimes enacted and denied resonances in the present. The layering effect of scholars approaching the same corpus of texts through different conceptual lenses has produced an extraordinary depth of engagement about the past and the present (Duncan, Stevens, & Sonn, 2012; Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013b).

It is also worth noting the broad range of the collected stories and narratives. In the initial stages of data collection, members of the core research team were tasked with writing their own stories, then utilising their existing networks and through a broad snowballing strategy, to recruit potential contributors to the archive. In addition, the project website also incorporates an Internet portal through which any member of the public can submit his/her narrative directly to the lead researchers of the project (www.apartheidarchive.org). Contributors were initially asked to write down their earliest significant experience of racism, with some broad reference to the temporal location of the event(s), as well as some consideration of the impact of the event(s) on their lives. This was opted for as it allowed for some degree of homogeneity in terms of the storied form which we hoped would facilitate narrative analyses, but simultaneously allowed for more personalised accounts to emerge. As the project has evolved, it has also developed more specialised sub-projects, and has been augmented with specific research questions that are of relevance to the participants being engaged with (e.g. domestic workers may very well have specific questions pertaining to their experiences of intimacy and alienation within familial spaces; and white ex-combatants are often dealing with questions of perpetration, shame, guilt and aggression at the loss of privilege). The narratives are also being generated through additional modes, such as the narrative-interview method. The task is relatively open-ended and different researchers and narrators have approached it in different ways—demonstrating the multidimensional complexity of methods of collecting storied accounts and analysing them (Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013a).

Psychosocial Mnemonics , Stories, Narratives and the Politics of Memory

An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics (Stevens, Duncan, & Hook, 2013b). Sonn, Stevens and Duncan (2013) define this as referring:

specifically to the manner in which storytelling facilitates memory recall and its articulation, comes to restructure and shape such memories and their articulation, and indeed dialectically serves to reinforce and “create” such memories. Furthermore, the stories that are generated within such contexts may surface how subjectivities and identities are constructed, can reveal not only personal and collective social experiences of the past, but can also illuminate how the interpretation of past events within stories may be analysed to formulate certain hypotheses and attributions about the social world in the present (p. 296).

Located within the broad field of memory studies, critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering (e.g. storytelling); how these memories intersect with lived experiences and histories; what they can reveal to us about the past, the present and in the future; how they reflect a convergence of the past and a changing present; how they reflect and construct the psychological and social subject, intersubjectivity and intergroup relations; and how they may allow us to make critical analytic commentaries about the social world and its psychological referents (Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013). Most importantly, critical psychosocial mnemonics is concerned with deploying such analyses in the service of questioning and subverting relations of power through deconstructing and de-ideologising them (Martín-Baró, 1994). Storytelling and narrative measures are a crucial means of transformative psychosocial practice, particularly so in the context of critical sociopolitical memory-work and in situations characterised by radical asymmetries of power.

The initial choice to focus on stories and narratives as the primary data source when the Apartheid Archive Project was launched, was premised on ensuring a goodness-of-fit between the political values underpinning the project and the analytic methods utilised. Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber (1998) note that narratives can either “be the object of research or a means for the study of another question” (p. 2). Within the context of the Apartheid Archive Project, stories and narratives are analysed both in relation to their form as well as their content, and thus serve as both objects and vehicles of study, allowing for a diverse range of analytic outcomes to be pursued.

Smith (1999) suggests that storytelling is a key method within the decolonisation project. Feminist authors (e.g. hooks, 1990b) have also highlighted storytelling as a powerful method that allows for deeper, nuanced understandings of phenomena as well as a means for disrupting the power relationship inherent in traditional modes of knowledge construction and production. Watkins and Schulman (2008) also write about the aims of decolonising research as:

claiming resources; testimonies, storytelling, and remembering to claim and speak about extremely painful events and histories; and research that celebrates survival and resilience and that revitalizes language, arts, and cultural practices. Communities beset by various forms of oppression, whose members have suffered from diminished senses of themselves by virtue of racism and classism, can use research to not only nurture community understanding, but to help preserve community and cultural practices (p. 276).

Similarly, writers in the areas of critical race studies (Biko, 2004; Fanon, 1967; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Nielsen, 2011; Ross, 2000) and feminism (e.g. Bond, Belenky, & Weinstock, 2000; Mulvey, Torenzio, Hill, Bond, Huygens, Hamerton & Cahill, 2000) suggest that storied accounts promote voice and social change, as history often excludes the voices and perspectives of minority groups, and through this process of silencing and exclusion, power is justified and legitimised (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 2003).

Extending on Scott’s (1990) references to “public transcripts” and “hidden transcripts”, Bell (2010) highlights four types of stories: stock stories (i.e. stories told from the perspective of the dominant group), concealed stories (i.e. stories told from the perspective of the dominated group), resistance stories (i.e. stories telling of resistance to the societal status quo and the fight for more equal and inclusive social arrangements) and emerging/transforming stories (i.e. stories to build on and amplify concealed and resistance stories and create new stories to disrupt the status quo in the service of social change). As articulated by Bell (2010, p. 18), “as we create new narratives we situate ourselves as responsive moral agents, enabling new ways of behaving in line with social justice goals”.

Of course stories and narrativesFootnote 1 are never “truthful” reflections of deeds, behaviours and events. They are always sites in which the investments of speakers, listeners, the invisible interlocutors who may apprehend such stories, and the influence of the social context on our interpretations of the world, converge to give rise to a constructed version of the event (Jones, 1996; Sands, 2004). Josselson and Lieblich (1995) note that the role of the researcher is in the interest of reaching a new interpretation of the raw data of the experience, not as a frozen temporal construction of the past, but as a moment of co-construction and co-interpretation within the present (Addison, 1992; Josselson & Lieblich, 1995). We can therefore learn about the social constructedness of historical experiences, social knowledges, subjectivities and identities by studying social actors’ stories and narratives of their experiences.

This constructedness of stories and narratives also however highlight a range of cautions and potential limitations in relation to sociopolitical memory-work. Worby and Ally (2013) remind us of the pitfalls of establishing the retrieval of memory in binaried opposition to forgetting and thereby conflating memory with an authentic recovery of the past; Truscott (2011) highlights how this kind of retrieval in memory-work can serve as a politically reactionary mode of reproducing and ossifying the past for those who experience their decline in privilege as an insurmountable loss; Hook (2013) illustrates how memory can appear as legitimate forms of recognition about past complicities but in fact acts as a defensive mechanism precisely not to address the past; Straker (2013) points to how particular forms of articulated memory such as shame can indeed recentre former oppressors’ experiences through “promiscuous” disclosures of complicity; and Eagle and Bowman (2013) stress the importance of recognising that all memory-work based on biographical accounts are also simultaneously crafted acts of self-representation with particular interlocutors and audiences in mind and are therefore always performative. These are of course all important cautions to be cognisant of, especially if the nature of the memory-work is narrowly defined as an attempt to provide a coherent “truth” about the past. However, the Apartheid Archive Project has always been premised on the idea of surfacing a range of alternative views of history, is engaged in a constantly reflexive process of self-interrogation, and views this work as constantly iterative and generative of new analytic questions. Furthermore, we developed the project with the understanding that it would constitute an open process, one that does not constitute an “end to the past” (Peterson, 2012) or an attempt to fossilise these accounts as factual. Indeed, each account that will be captured in the archive may be seen to constitute another beginning to engaging with the past , the present and the future, thereby capitalising on the liminal, non-foreclosed and provisional nature of narratives as a form of expression (see Turner, 2008)—constantly asking why these forms of memory emerge at particular moments in time, and also what the ideological underpinnings and political functions of these modes of memory-work are in moments of narrational production.

Archival Research as a Decolonial Mode of Praxis

Reclaiming the Archive

What should be apparent from the above is not a conception of the archive as an entity or record that is neutral, objective and reflective of an absolute truth. Rather, Derrida's (1998) broad conception of the archive appears more appropriate, in so far as the contents that are held within the archive are never completely transparent, unambiguous and value-free, and that “[a]n archive is rarely, if ever, black or white, true or false” (Treanor, 2009, p. 291). Instead, an archive, and especially the apartheid archive, is fundamentally related to relations of power in psychosocial and sociopolitical ways, as the archive regulates the nature of information, the formats of information, the access to information, and the hierarchies of information and knowledge in any given society. Reclaiming the archive is fundamentally about recognising these constraints imposed on the archive, that should be challenged through pushing the boundaries of the creation, maintenance, utilisation, management and control of the archive. Of course, such a task cannot be claimed as the domain of any single individual or group, nor can it be limited to a specific moment or event, but is potentially a collective process that requires hyper-reflexivity and an ongoing openness to critique, reiteration and generativity.

Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (2013) refer to this process as the “liberation of the archive”. Firstly, this relates to the possibility to cast a different gaze onto the archive, so that what is sometimes concealed becomes illuminated, and what is absent becomes present through histories from below. Casting such a different sociopolitical light onto the archive opens up possibilities for detaching it from its current sociopolitical foreclosure, and for rethinking its contents historically and in the present. Secondly, it speaks to the possibility of seizing a social resource from hegemonic control, through expanding the boundaries of who may contribute to the creation of an archive, who can have access to it, and who can interpret it. Here, inclusion, democratisation and appropriation of the archive are critical elements of a decolonial praxis. Thirdly, given the probabilities of those working with the archive to re-inscribe a different set of relations of power onto the archive through determining the inclusion and exclusion of material, there is a need to encourage reflexive liberatory praxis within work in and on the archive, so as to avoid the usurping of the voices of others that so frequently occurs when archives are re-examined (hooks, 1990a).

Refiguring the Archive

Which figures and how they are reflected within an archive are as important as what is contained within the archive, as they highlight the historical and prevailing strategic relations and hierarchies of power between various subjects within a social formation (Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid, & Saleh, 2002). Within the Apartheid Archive Project, there has been an attempt to populate the apartheid archive with the figure of the ordinary South African (i.e. whites, blacks, academics, domestic workers, military veterans, etc.). The primary source of data from which analyses are conducted is in the form of the personal memories of citizens who have elected to submit their narratives—emphasising the everyday, the quotidian and their accounts of the commonplace. In this way, refiguring the archive is also about placing at the centre of the project those who have been historically excluded—the general populace and their routine experiences. In this way, the archive is not only populated by the grand figures of history, but by those who lived, reproduced and contested the nature of apartheid in the everydayness of their realities. Indeed, the invitation to participate speaks directly to this form of data when potential participants are requested to submit “stories of their earliest and/or most significant experiences of race and racism in apartheid South Africa” (see www.apartheidarchive.org)—personal accounts of ordinary individuals that epitomise a history from below, that writers such as Thompson (1966) refer to.

Nieftagodien (cited in Sullivan & Stevens, 2010) notes that:

Personal accounts … can become an important space in which to undermine ‘grand’ narratives that seem to cohere histories in neat, linear and inevitably predictable ways … personal accounts at various points within … narratives … [provide] points of rupture, of discontinuity, and of possibility in expanding histories to be more inclusive of multiple voices (p. 426).

Personal memories must therefore at times be privileged, as their functions are not only related to historical expansion and inclusivity, but also to providing alternative readings of histories themselves. Similarly, Hamilton (2002), in her reflections on oral histories (as forms of personal and collective memory) in the politics of archiving, highlights the fluidity of oral histories as the precise strength of this mode of data collection. She argues that oral histories allow for a perspective that encourages us to think about history as that which can also be written by those on the outside of the formal knowledge production process, and contribute to memorialisation, reconciliation and social justice, especially in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies (see for example, Gobodo-Madikizela & Van Der Merwe, 2009; Hamber & Palmary, 2009).

While noting the limitations of the inclusion of subaltern voices (see for example, Spivak, 1988; Vahabzadeh, 2008) that can become ideologically appropriated and re-subordinated, Bhabha’s (1996) agentic view of the subaltern as one that may subvert dominant relations of power is a foundational element of the Apartheid Archive Project. Through forging and taking ownership of, and reinserting the personal memories that have been silenced, distorted, and/or eroded because of domination and colonisation (see for example, Dlamini, 2009, 2014; Duncan, Stevens, & Sonn, 2012) social experiences and categories come to be redefined and the possibilities are opened up for reimagining the nature of subject positions, identities and actions for the present and future in a refigured archive.

Generating Inter-Communal Spaces

Rappaport (1995) notes that storytelling and narratives have transformative power in building communities, and Williams, Labonte and O’Brien (2003, p. 36) argue that narratives as a form of “storytelling within group and community development work allows people to reveal and strengthen new communal narratives that challenge dominant narratives, and to (re)construct communities as empowered rather than disempowered collectives”.

Within the Apartheid Archive Project, the actual processes involved in the construction of the project and its related activities have involved creating spaces within which academics and activists can promote broader public engagement with the recovery of historical memory. For those involved in the project as researchers, the project has meant the construction of an inter-communal space where people who have been and continue to be positioned differently because of apartheid and the related history of colonialism can converge to participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of symbolic resources (Stevens, Duncan, & Sonn, 2013; Watkins & Schulman, 2008).

Thus, actual settings such as broad-based, public conferences that have become integral to the Apartheid Archive Project may be viewed as an inter-communal space. It is in this space where academics, artists, activists and members of the broader populace are afforded the opportunity to critically reflect upon their own positioning and identities and construct new ways of mobilising for social change. This is a significant opportunity because, as critical theorists have highlighted, it is imperative for those involved in the production of knowledge and cultural products to engage a range of subjectivities in order to cross boundaries and to “move toward an empathic, ethical and moral scholarship” (Ladson-Billings & Donnor, 2005, p. 298) that avoids scholarly insularity as far as possible. Such a relational approach to understanding the development and utility of intercommunal spaces foregrounds the dialectical relationship between formal knowledge production processes within the academy and the organic intellectual processes that Gramsci (1971) refers to, thereby becoming a space for decolonial praxis itself.

Fostering Public Mobilisation

Beyond the dialogical and reflexive elements referred to above, writers such as Reyes Cruz and Sonn (2011), and Sonn, Stevens and Duncan (2013) have argued that the deployment of decolonial methods must of necessity include transformative approaches to research and action with a range of potential publics—that is to say, that it has to be activating and mobilising in some way or another. The commitment to social change within the Apartheid Archive Project has meant deploying methodologies that allow for the translation of an academic project into mediums that are differently accessible to a variety of publics. This translational element has been a central component of the Apartheid Archive Project, in an attempt to breach to the boundary walls of the formal academy and to allow for much wider public mobilisation around the continued impact of our racialised past on contemporary social relations. We have already seen theatrical productions, photographic exhibitions, and literary readings, as different modes of representation within the Apartheid Archive Project, which signal the possibilities for more inclusive ways of knowing and doing as well as modes of social action (Gergen & Gergen, 2010). The mere accumulation of scientific and expert knowledge is not given primacy under these circumstances (Duncan & Bowman, 2009).

At each of the different Apartheid Archive Project conferences held in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2014, there have been artistic performances, including photographic exhibitions, creative writing and poetry readings, dramatic enactments, as well as public discussions involving artists examining the relationships between memory and creativity. These have been significant features of the broader Apartheid Archive Project that have allowed for wider engagement in the public-intellectual space, awareness-raising about the project, and have fostered opportunities for dialogue and reflection on matters of race, identity and the connections between the past and the present. In addition, the use of social media and digital technologies have opened up different means for gathering stories, thereby expanding the potential reach of the project into various publics. These technologies can also function as tools for dissemination, and thus serve educational and emancipatory functions as well (Miller-Day, 2008).

This engagement with expressive and creative media in the project can be conceptualised as being aligned with performative social science (Gergen & Gergen, 2010) and as reflecting the possibilities this holds for what Miller-Day (2008) names as translational performances. For Gergen and Gergen (2010), performance as communication is based on the proposal that it will make research accessible to different audiences; opens up modes of representation and action; and opens up new ways of knowing and doing.

Within the Apartheid Archive Project, it has also been vital to translate the stories into resources that can be used for pedagogical purposes, both in formal educational settings and informal everyday settings such as:

museums, the media, community organisations, advocacy groups, shadow ministries and government departments. Pedagogy in these sites is also, then, not solely a matter of explicit teaching, or of organising and imparting information. It is also something that takes place without conscious agency or engagement, through countless banal and unexamined means, words, images and practices (Hattam & Atkinson, 2006, p. 685).

Towards an Insurgent Citizenry

In the final analysis, a decolonial praxis also invariably involves a politics of contestation on which its social justice outcomes are premised. Rather than simply contributing to the active reduction of political and social instability and violence, a decolonial praxis must extend beyond dialogue, reflexivity and public mobilisation and may indeed also involve the promotion of an insurgent citizenry. Within the Apartheid Archive Project, Stevens, Duncan and Canham (2017), drawing on the work of Christie, Wagner and Winter (2001) in the terrain of peace psychology, suggest that peacebuilding is centrally connected to social justice imperatives and the eradication of structural violence, and of necessity must incorporate elements that run counter to the status quo, and therefore should encompass forms of interrogatory destabilisation and a politics of insurgency.

Here, interrogatory destabilisation refers to forms of consciousness-raising that critique the continuing ideological and material bases for structural forms of violence, inequality, privilege and power within a given social formation, especially those social formations transitioning away from violent conflict and authoritarianism (Freire, 2000; Martín-Baró, 1994). Interrogatory destabilisation involves a repetitive critical deconstruction of the taken-for-granted assumptions and regimes of truth that suggest that power differentials and structural inequalities are normative in such societies, thereby unsettling status quos. As such, the process is deeply subjective and personally transformative, but is also a collective process of conscientisation that may potentially be socially transformative (Stevens, Duncan, & Canham, 2017).

Such a process of interrogatory destabilisation can form the bedrock for social movements that embrace a political project encouraging an insurgent citizenship and politics (Holston, 2009)—a politics of resistance or antagonism (Hook, 2014) amongst those who are precariously positioned in societies. Instead of perpetuating their positions on the periphery of society, these social movements attempt to reclaim elements of their rightful citizenship, often involving active forms of social protest and concientisation, but may also include everyday forms of social relating that run counter to what is considered as a socially acceptable form of dissent (e.g. in aesthetically provocative and confrontational social protests). As such, an insurgent citizenship and politics is a disruptive mode of engaging and living in the social world and may very well feel uncomfortably destabilising if it is mobilised politically in the service of social justice and equality, but opens up the possibilities for engaging with old and new configurations of power (Stevens, Duncan, & Canham, 2017).

Conclusion

The Apartheid Archive Project may be considered as a site of struggle and contestation that allows for a reclamation, refiguring and democratisation of history. In addition, expanding this archive allows us to examine apartheid’s historical and continued effects into the present; to move beyond a mutual recognition of woundedness and entanglements; and through an actional politics, to critique the status quo along cleavages and axes of power that sustain ongoing disparities in access, power and privilege at a political, social, cultural, psychological and material level.

The Apartheid Archive Project is also an illustrative exemplar of how innovative participatory methods and novel lines of intellectual inquiry may be combined within a decolonial mode of praxis. While recognising that there are limitations to memory, storied accounts, and narratives, they are nevertheless critical to helping to foster a decolonial ethic of rupture and destabilisation, premised on historical witnessing, recognition and demands for inclusivity that challenge historical and existing relations of power, forms of knowledge and ways of being.