Ghosts of archive: deconstructive intersectionality and praxis

Answering the call to justice: archive in the service of living and future ghosts

Peterson (2019, 356), writing about the role that narrative plays in collective forms of cultural memory, posits the argument that “[t]he dilemma then, is how to grasp, narrate and transcend the unfinished business of colonialism and apartheid and to lay to rest all sorts of ghosts that continue to haunt post-apartheid South Africa.” As scholars, artists and indeed anyone engaged with questions of heritage in a “postapartheid” South African milieu, we have intimate knowledge of these ghosts. Many of us are haunted by missing and suppressed voices. We ceaselessly agonise about the ways in which we might respond to this haunting through our work, thereby finding ways of eschewing colonial frameworks of knowledge. We struggle with the demands the ghosts make on how we conceptualise our responsibilities to the past, the present and the future. Accordingly, archives, as pre-eminent institutions of memory – both as physical repositories and, in a conceptual sense, as the intellectual substrate that determines what can be uttered – have been objects of deep and sustained focus for South African thinkers and a variety of practitioners alike. They demarcate the uncertain edges of what can be known and, in greater measure, the vastness of our ignorance, or the spaces our ghosts inhabit. Seen against this background, one can appreciate why the fire that lay to waste the Jagger Library reading room at the University of Cape Town elicited such complex and sometimes contradictory responses, ones in which hierarchies of archival presence and absence were at stake.

In discussions on archive where ghosts loom large, Verne Harris’s writing has long been indispensable. The prominence of Harris’s scholarship in this field is due in part to his acumen for weaving insights from his practical experience in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and as Nelson Mandela’s archivist¹ together with his expansive set of critical and theoretical tools, founded in Marxism and honed through a protracted engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida. Ghosts of Archive demonstrates this capacity in abundance. It is a deeply captivating book that shines in its detailed accounts of the dilemmas, difficulties, ambivalences and failures through which Harris teases out the complexities of the ethics of convening, curating, conserving, employing and theorising archives.

But Ghosts of Archive is also a restless – even breathless – book. The arc it follows is one that undulates rather scratchily from the foundational, yet tricky question “what is an archive?,” to a meditation on past, living and future ghosts, the inescapable spectrality of archive, the ways in which state apparatuses limit our collective reckoning with difficult pasts,² the right to forget, archival banditry and, finally, an outline of a “justice praxis for archive.” The zig-zagging quality of the text is perhaps due to it being largely composed of sections from earlier articles published between 2012 and 2018. Consequently, the sixth chapter, which focusses on the oeuvre of Hélène Cixous, initially reads as a little odd in context of a text that is explicitly concerned with spaces of colonialism and violence. Nevertheless, by its end one understands the breadth and pervasiveness of what Harris’s thinking-through-archive means for remembering, forgetting and narrating in the widest of scopes. It is in the impassioned conclusion, the argumentative climax of the book, however, where Harris formulates the central thrust of this volume in an urgent, impossible-to-ignore manner. This chapter takes umbrage with the notion that archival work should in any way be guided by a sense of “neutrality” or “impartiality.” Instead, he insists that “the work of archive is inextricable from struggles against oppression; far from being impartial custodians, practitioners in archive are active shapers of memory and, whether they like it or not, must choose sides” (116). Drawing on Randall Jimerson’s contention that the purpose of archival work should be to respond to a call for justice, and Derrida’s contention that archive enables a “realisation of responsibility before the ghosts” (47), Harris puts forward an outline of an archival praxis that heeds such a call. Included in this outline are 13 points that arise from the argumentative ground covered in the first six chapters. It offers an ethical framework with which any future rendezvous with archive will need to contend.

In this final chapter, Ghosts of Archive delivers its most incisive intervention in a world in crisis, a world that comes prominently into view in the sections that bookend the chapters. Here, Harris offers what he terms a “framing” and a “re-framing” respectively, as he emphasises that the text was collated, and its constitutive argument woven together during the COVID-19 pandemic. He reminds us elsewhere in the book that the pandemic was also the time during which George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in the US, and that by this time “11 Black South Africans had already died at the hands of security officials during the virus lockdown” (35). Drawing our attention to the context in which the book was made means situating the work of archive in relation to vulnerability and precarity as profoundly contingent on race. Such a move necessitates a reflection on positionality, complicity and responsibility, one that Harris faces head-on, thereby bringing the intersectionality of the title into play and articulating why this work matters deeply in our present moment.

Apposite as Harris’s self-reflection might be, he does not offer it as a curative. Instead, a sense of hopelessness seeps like an ink stain through these framing sections.³ It also tints the endings of those chapters where no neat conclusions are offered but, instead, an acknowledgement of untraversable borders. For instance, Chapter five concludes with Harris stating that: “I have said nothing at all about questions like this because I have nothing to say. For me, they are not so much questions as markers of impossibility” (96). One such border is that of “healing,” which Harris tackles in Chapter five, titled “A Time to Forget.” Here, Harris shows that while archives ostensibly reference the past, the liberatory potential of an archival praxis that responds to a call for justice is concerned with the present and the future, with helping to deliver justice to those whom Esther Peeren calls “living ghosts” and Achille Mbembe, “the living dead” (cited in Harris, 46). The justice to which Harris persistently returns does not entail, as he says, “to forget what happened” (91), but “to have the traces of violation removed from their living memory, to have the active reliving of violation end” (91). After Ghosts of Archive, I am moved further to misgivings when I encounter redemptive sentiments concerning the fire at UCT, whether of the promises held by digitisation or how the library will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes. What matters for the library now is how it can respond to the call for justice, which Harris positions at the heart of archival work. It is the crux of this text, vital to anyone whose work takes them in and out of archives.

Notes

1. A role he fulfilled between 2004 and 2013, among other endeavours in archival work.

2. The salient example here being the TRC.

3. Harris does, nevertheless, insist on the importance of faith, stating that “Hope is not helpful to the work of archive, but faith is indispensable” (144).