the industrial age. Its legacy is far-reaching and cannot be understated.
Even Said, while holding to the theory that[t]o have such knowledge of such
a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it,' does not make the obvious
jump to archives and records management as the ultimate form of gaining and
retaining such knowledge.26 The closest Said comes to connecting colonialism
- via Orientalism - to archives is in the following metaphor: 'In a sense
Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of
its aspects, unanimously held. What bound the archive together was a family of
ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective.'27
This disregard for the importance and role of real archives - both those of
the colonial government and post-independence national archives - and a
concentration on theoretical archives is postcolonialism's greatest oversight. In
his book - with a most ironic title to any archivist - The Imperial Archive, Thomas
Richards takes an in depth look at fictional literature produced in England during
the Victorian era - Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells - which
he considers the 'archive' of the British Empire. At times Richards does seem
to move in an archival science direction, claiming that '[kjnowledge itself had
become a weapon in the Empire's arsenal.'28 But despite all these allusions to
the idea of records management and storage, it is obvious Richards uses the word
archive to his own definition of 'not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but
the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic
representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for
the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.'29 Passages such
as 'the double of the imperial archive: a library of comprehensive knowledge
imagined outside the boundaries of state and empire, knowledge presumed to be
the property of an enemy'contain words familiar to an information professional
but on a level completely foreign to them.30 This line of thinking overlooks the
importance of paper archives in solidifying colonial control around the world.
Richards refrains from any mention of what I would call the 'actual' imperial
archive; that is, the collection and storage of information and records by
colonial bureaucrats that helped gain all this knowledge of the colonized to
which he refers. His arguments, therefore, offer little substance for archivists
and non-archivists alike. Archivists once again see their profession neglected
and redefined, and non-archivists fail to discover the real role archival practice
plays in society. Praising the accession of the archive to something with a 'new
theoretical status, with enough cachet to warrant distinct billing, worthy of
scrutiny on its own,' Ann Stoler recognizes the positive aspects of the trend of
works like Richards', but notes that in order for this to be in the best interest of
archivists they too must open up and have an equal voice.31
It is these theoretical archives that non-archivist authors most often refer to if
they use the word archive at all. Said comes to a conclusion that[t]he Orient
that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a
whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western
consciousness, and later, Western empire,' and it should seem only reasonable
that the quest for knowledge - and hand-in-hand, power - was part of this set
33
MICHAEL KARABINOS POST(-)cOLONIAL ARCHIVES
28 Richards, Imperial Archive, 111-112.
29 Richards, Imperial Archive11. On page 4 he also calls the imperial archive 'a fantasy of knowledge collected
and united in the service of state and Empire,' again disregarding the importance of archival and informa
tion science and concentrating solely on his own definition of the imperial archive.
30 Richards, Imperial Archive, 111.
31 Stoler, 'Colonial Archives', 92.