Re-framing archival thought in Jamaica and South Africa: challenging racist structures, generating new narratives

This paper compares and contrasts the relative successes and failures in Jamaican and South African national archival systems. It does so to provide international perspectives on Britain’s colonial legacy on archives. Although local differences greatly matter, Jamaica and South Africa have histories of extended British settler-colonialism which encoded white supremacy in social relations, bureaucracies, and social epistemology which in turn shaped ‘institutional gaze’ that guided the appraisal of collections, preservation efforts and state-recording keeping practices. Archivists in these societies are acutely aware of these problems, and so the paper examines how they have addressed questions around racism and redress to try adequately ‘unsilence the past.’ Through comparison we identify what practices have been useful in generating new narratives of belonging, value, and dignity. And finally, we assess which kinds of archival thought can cross-pollinate between Jamaica and South Africa to develop more equitable democratic spaces that can instantiate what this paper calls the hospitality of archival difference. The paper ends by arguing that thought and practice heeding this principle may be conducive to ‘ground up’ approaches to issues of memory, education, and research.