Decolonising Archives: Listening Back to the Archives

In this paper, Namazi takes inspiration from Michel Foucault’s engagement with notions of archives in “The Archaeology of Knowledge ”, 1972, where the relationality of objects is described as the basis for the construction of knowledge; and Frantz Fanon’s articulations of the principal of decolonisation in “A Dying Colonialism ”, 1965.

Through these channels, Namazi investigates archival materials to highlight the stratifications of colonialism and the ways in which to challenge such realities.

As a result, the discourse between cultural memory and coloniality, underpins the position and the line of enquiry in this paper. The interwoven correlations between the two, in addition to Namazi's duo ethno-cultural lived experience, set out the objectives and interests for an archival investigation—with the aim of testing the role of archives as the embodiments of a collective cultural representation.