Colonial Archives, Endangered Heritage, Future Imaginaries: the Sudan archive at 70

Project Summary

This project convenes an interdisciplinary group of scholars, archivists, and Sudanese and South Sudanese interlocutors, to address an urgent and unresolved question: What challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities do colonial archives face at our present moment, when ruptures created by European colonialism are demonstrably unhealed and asymmetrically experienced? Building on expertise at Durham University, and bringing in critical, diverse voices from elsewhere, our project unites archival theory, heritage studies, and interdisciplinary practice in novel ways. The team seeks to unsettle the fixities of the colonial archive in order to reposition it as a fluid, multivocal, and reflective space.  It aims to model ways of working in and with colonial collections – and to foster Durham’s leadership in critical archive and heritage research. The focus is Durham’s most significant archival collection: the Sudan Archive (SA), whose unique formation, transnational scope, and international reputation make it ripe for our intellectually ambitious and methodologically innovative approach. Founded in 1957, a year after Sudanese independence, SA’s significance is thrown into relief by ongoing war and humanitarian crises in Sudan and South Sudan, with regional repercussions. SA has been a crucial site of world-leading research and teaching for decades, not only on Sudan/South Sudan, but also other British colonies. However, it has never been the focus of sustained critical analysis and interventions, even as loss and threats to archives in Sudan increase its importance as both symbol and repository of resilient histories. 

Ambition:

• Presents. To reimagine the collections, functions, and spaces of colonial archives today, with an emphasis on SA and other UK collections from the British Empire. Having used the pre-project year to scope cognate archives, we will analyse their practices and SA’s through the lens of Critical Archival Studies, which emphasises social justice and co-curation.
• Pasts. To demonstrate the potential of colonial archives to tell connected histories in unexpected ways, informed by ecocritical, reparative, transnational, and visual approaches to the past. Incorporating Sudanese and South Sudanese knowledge frameworks will be a priority, alongside research connecting industrial and military histories of the Northeast with colonised Sudan.
• Futures. To facilitate creative interventions through which colonial archives can be repurposed to imagine liberated futures. These may include artistic engagements with the counter-archive (or anarchive), and strategies for addressing displaced or orphaned archives as a form of endangered heritage.

Term:

Michaelmas 2027

Activities and Events:

Will be added in due course