Where are the germs of imperial rot in archival thinking? As record-making and record-keeping were central technologies of empire, allowing the control of agents at a distance and the surveillance of colonial subjects from the metropoles, records work has long been colonial work. Where is imperialism’s imprint still discernible in archival concepts, terminology and practices? These questions require our urgent attention as records are weaponised by the formations of empire that are still operating today.

At the same time, these germs of imperial rot partly inform and forge our native contemporary cultural identities. We might consider examples of the exertion of native agency and participation in the records creation process and the function of Indigenous silences that also inform and forge contemporary archives. What are instances where archival concepts were wholly or partly embraced or co-opted for the survival of our native knowledges and communities? How can old archival ideas support the movement from Indigenous survival to sovereignty?

As was noted in 2021, “the field of archival studies in the West has not done much to trouble its origin story, which recites a lineage of ideas that come down to us through the texts of Muller, Feith and Fruin, Jenkinson and Schellenberg. Are there different stories we can tell about our intellectual past(s)? Stories that help us see the present and future differently by casting the past in new light?” Such questions form the central provocation of ICHORA 2024, which seeks to inaugurate a next stage in the decolonisation of archival thought – a project already underway – by looking further into the past for those “seeds of rot” that make critical intellectual history a vital field of contestation.

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