Black Feminism in the Colonial Archive

In this paper, I stage a Black feminist intervention to the colonial archive. I argue that the colonial archive is a space of immortalized violence and power. Further, the archive is a determinator in the construction of historical fact-making according to dominant systems of colonial power, thereby determining what becomes history and what it omits. In this process, the archive freezes colonial subjects in its space according to their lived experiences under colonialism, dehumanized, silenced, disappeared, hyper-sexualized, and violated. Black women immortalized within the archive are defined by the duality of violent hypervisibility and a silencing disappearance. A continuum of this archival violence is symbolically fostered by a (dis)remembrance of these Black women through the uncritical utilization and reproduction of the violent archival depictions of Black women under systems of colonial oppression in social science research and artistic performances. A Black feminist lens to the colonial archive intervenes in the archival’s story of narrative and historical fact-making, i.e., the story the archive allows to be created. A Black feminist intervention in the archive names, illuminates, and identifies this continuum of an archival story and opens a space to not rescue these Black enslaved women from this immortalized violence but raises the political stakes of what it means to confront the colonial archive and its violent reproductions. This intervention reflects Black feminist political commitments to name and dismantle oppressive power structures and pave the way to collective liberation. I will stage this Black feminist intervention by highlighting the archive’s enablement of the story of historical Black women figures, like Saartjie Baartman and Rachael Pringle-Polgreen. As I will show, this Black feminist intervention in the colonial archive then opens the space to reinvestigate broader political questions of justice, memory, legacy, Black female agency, and violence.