Episode 16: Disputing Archives

In the third episode of ‘Reckonings with Europe: Pasts and Present’, James Lowry and Meredith Terretta take up the object of archives: how law conceptualizes the archives of states; the ‘displaced’, ‘disputed’ or ‘migrated’ archives left when empires and states are reconstituted; and what state archives can and cannot tell us.

Works mentioned, in order of mention:

James Lowry (ed), Displaced Archives (Routledge, 2017)

James Lowry (ed), Disputed Archival Heritage (forthcoming), esp chapter by J J Ghaddar, ‘Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation’.

Meredith Terretta, Claimants, Advocates and Disrupters in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories (forthcoming; for a sense of work to date on anticolonial advocate lawyering see ‘Claiming Land, Claiming Rights in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories’ in Steven L.B. Jensen and Charles Walton (eds), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (CUP, 2022) 264-286 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009008686.014; ‘Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa’. Canadian Journal of History 52(3), 448-478 (2017)).

James Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives’. Archival Science 19, 185–203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09305-z

(For concise background on the ‘migrated archives’, see James Lowry & Mandy Banton / Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers position paper).

Umut Özsu, ‘Determining New Selves: Mohammed Bedjaoui on Algeria, Western Sahara, and Post-Classical International Law’ in Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann (eds), The Battle for International Law: South–North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era (OUP, 2019) DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198849636.003.0016.

Stanley H Griffin (with Jeannette A Bastian & John A Aarons) (eds), Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader (Litwin, 2018) (and forthcoming work in Displaced Archives, above).