From archival pasts to provenance in place: toward antiracist, feminist futures in archival studies 

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Abstract
On a sunny day in May 2018, I arrived at the Musée des Archives nationales in Paris housed in the Hôtel de Soubise and operated by the Archives nationales, France’s state repository and an early model of the nation-state archives now found around the world. First built in 1371, the Hôtel de Soubise was designated by Napoléon I for the First Empire’s archives in 1808. His aim was to centralize there the records and archives of Paris and those seized abroad, an unrealized dream that was the “archival corollary” to his unrealized dream of a worldwide centralized imperial state (Milligan 2002; Montgomery 1989). Paris’s iconic broad straight boulevards that I had navigated to get to the museum were designed by Haussmann for Napoléon’s nephew, who wanted an imperial city that proclaimed even in its streets the glory of the Second Empire. The boulevards replaced the narrow winding streets that had proven so useful to revolutionaries throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, a period during which the French Empire had transitioned from monarchic to republican rule six times. As regimes changed, so did the name and mandate of the Archives: the National Archives (1790); the Archives of the Empire (1800), the Royal Archives (1815), the National Archives again (1848), and the Imperial Archives (1852). In 1871, it assumed its current name when its Director General placed a banner with the Archive nationales on it during the Paris Commune to ward off revolutionary fires, as his predecessor had done during the 1848 June Days uprising. 

This interweaving of imperial pretensions, cultural chauvinism, white nationalism, bourgeoisie modernist sensibilities and classism is a preoccupation of my presentation, which explores the synergy between archives, archivists, white supremacy and western imperialism – or, as Cabral (1980/1966, 127) would have it, “capital in action.” It does so by sharing images and narratives from two exhibitions featured at the museum during my visit: the main exhibition, “The National Archives in 100 documents” on the history of France; and the temporary one, “68: Les Archives du Pouvoir” on the 50th anniversary of May 68. In the process, I illustrate the Eurocentricism and violent erasures of the ‘origin’ story we tell ourselves about archival studies with its teleological march from the French Revolution and de Wailly’s Circular no.14, to the codification of provenance in the Dutch manual (1898) and its adoption by the first International Council of Archivists & Librarians in Brussels in 1910, to the subsequent globalization of provenance and nation-state archives. Interrogating the dominant creator-centric paradigm of provenance emerging from this history, I explicate how a provenance in place approach can contribute to the development of an anticolonial, antiracist archival praxis. This presentation highlights the importance of archival placements, looking back to archival pasts to imagine archival futures.

Speaker bio

Dr. J.J. Ghaddar is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk, Miꞌkmaꞌki, the homeland of the Mi'kmaq also known as Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She recently completed a Government of Canada SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship working with Raymond Frogner (National Center for Truth & Reconciliation) and Dr. Greg Bak (History Department) at the University of Manitoba. Ghaddar holds a PhD from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where she completed a Master of Information. Her work has appeared in premier journals and publications, including Archival Science (2020; 2016); Library Quarterly (2017); and Archivaria (2016). Her article in the latter, “Truth, Reconciliation & Indigenous Archival Memory,” won the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Lamb Award for best paper. More recently, she completed a chapter for the open source book, Disputed Archival Heritage (2023; ed. Dr. James Lowry) and published a two-part post on provenance in place for the Association of Canadian Archivists’ In the Field blog. These publications are part of her decades’ long cross-disciplinary inquiry into the complex dynamics between settler colonialism, apartheid state formations, white supremacy, decolonization and archives in national settings and global arenas from Canada, France and Algeria to UNESCO, the Non-Aligned Movement and the International Council of Archivists & Librarians.