ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen a number of historians begin to explore what happened to the documents that European authorities produced and collected during decolonisation. Most seek to detail archival developments specific to decolonisation in conjunction with an exploration of how archival questions alter ongoing debates about the mid-twentieth-century ‘end of empires’. The most ambitious work to put both into dynamic conversation. In a 2015 forum on ‘The Archives of Decolonisation’, for example, British historian, Jordanna Bailkin, detailed the movements of archives that anchored her recent study The Afterlife of Empire. She does so to reveal that one effect of ‘the era of decolonization’ was how ‘the notion of what constituted a “secret” was transformed.’ This, in turn, allows her to emphasise that ‘the violence of imperial collapse was one prized secret, which generated its own mechanisms of archival suppression’. Such histories of ‘the archives of decolonization’ grapple with questions central to the now flourishing historiography of archives, notably with how it is that we might have access to certain documents. Sephardi Jewry historian, Sara Stein, evokes this question in terms of ‘documents retroactively fabricated, left behind, hoarded and sought, guarded, concealed, buried in the sand’. The inspiration to understand ‘why some elements of decolonization have been so difficult to see’ has led these scholars to draw numerous lessons from vibrant discussions about the archives of empire, sparked by scholars such as the historian Antoinette Burton and the anthropologist Ann Stoler. Bailkin’s analysis of her own efforts ‘to delve more deeply into the question of why certain sources pertaining to decolonization are or are not available, and how their availability is organized’ expands on the work that Stoler and others have done to map the colonial histories that help explain why certain sources and collections are now out of reach. 2
