The Archive Under Occupation
Memory as a right to know
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In the summer of 1982, during the siege of Beirut, the archive of the PLO Research Center was seized: books, manuscripts, maps and documents that Palestinian researchers had collected over many years. Part of it was later returned, and the fate of another part is still unclear. Rona Sela (2018) has shown that this event was not an exception; it was one link in a chain of seizure and concealment of Palestinian photographs, films and documents in archives to which Palestinians have no access.
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida reminds us that the word archive comes from the house of the archons, the rulers who kept documents and held the right to interpret them. The archive is always a question of power: who keeps, who has access, who has the right to say what a document means. Under occupation these questions are not abstract. A family that wants to prove where its village stood before 1948 needs the very document that someone else holds.
In response, Palestinians have built archives of their own. All That Remains, edited by Walid Khalidi (1992), recorded the history of 418 depopulated villages. Oral history projects have recorded the voices of people who are the last witnesses. But community archives are fragile: one server, one user account or one corporate decision to remove content is enough to wipe out years of work. Michelle Caswell (2014), in a study of the photographs from Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia, has shown that a record made by the perpetrators of violence can become an instrument of testimony in the hands of survivors. The archive does not only preserve the past; it is a field of narration in the present.
My argument is that memory should be understood as an epistemic right, and that infrastructure should be built for it. That means distributed copies that do not disappear when one copy is removed; persistent identifiers that continue to show that a document existed after it has been moved or deleted; careful recording of each document’s provenance, because in a situation of conflict a document’s credibility is its source; and description first in Arabic, the language of those to whom this memory belongs. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019) asks us to ‘unlearn’ the imperial archive so that other, potential histories can appear. I ask where and how those potential histories are to be kept.
Questions for discussion
- In a situation of conflict, what does the credibility of a digital document rest on?
- Can returning a digital copy of a seized archive take the place of returning the archive itself?
- How can community archives remain durable in the face of removal by platforms?
References
Sela, Rona. 2018. “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.” Social Semiotics 28 (2): 201–229.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Khalidi, Walid, ed. 1992. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.
Caswell, Michelle. 2014. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso.