In his seminal text, Archive Fever (1996), Derrida writes of the intersections between patriarchal authority and physical emplacement that occur in the archive, stressing that it is “in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives can take place” (10). He adds that it is at the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of place and law, that archives exist, and that archives must go hand-in-hand with “this topo-nomology, with this archontic dimension of domiciliation, with this archic, in truth patriarchic, function, without which no archive would ever come into play or appear as such” (10).
Derrida’s work makes clear that the archive as concept is inextricable from the physical location in which its contents are housed, and that this physical locatedness contains authoritative, patriarchal resonances. Such an observation might be extended to take into its scope the particularities of the geographical location of the physical archive building. If the stone and mortar housing of an archive signifies certain things about the conceptual material housed within (that it is worthy of preservation, according to a certain politics of cultural and historical value), and it is accepted that the structures of law and the intricacies of politics have governed the construction of such a public building, what might this mean in a national (South African) and a continental (African) context?
Derrida’s insistence on the patriarchal overtones of the archive’s physical, public dominion provides as useful way of thinking about the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in South Africa, whose founding personality, Guy Butler, strongly resembles Derrida’s patriarch figure (the “arch patriarch”). It might be possible to unpick the particularities of how a physical building placed within a geographical network of post-colonial power dialectics is imbricated in the meanings that can be drawn from the archival material it houses, and that might be read into the historical placement of a founding figure such as Butler, whose collection lies at the heart of that archive.
The recent relocation of the NELM holdings from the old parish house in which they used to be housed to the new eco-friendly customised building in which they are currently housed stimulates reflection on how colonial geographies intersect with the historical significance of the buildings in which archives are founded. How do African archives contend with the legacy of having been formed in the wake of 19th century colonial knowledge institutions that worked in the service of upholding colonial rule? How are these archives repositioning themselves as colonial geographies mutate into postcolonial geographies?
References:
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.