Cultural archive is a term associated with social
anthropologist Wendy James referencing the repository of knowledge found in everyday interactions that individuals reference to validate their existence in the world. This term was coined during James' research of the
Uduk people The Uduk are a Nilo-Saharan group from eastern Sudan. They call themselves ''Kwanim Pa'' and are culturally and linguistically related to neighboring communities, such as the Gumuz and the Kwama from the Sudan-Ethiopia borderland. Due to the rece ...
of
Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...
in the 1990's.
The term is most commonly associated with
Culture and Imperialism
''Culture and Imperialism'' (1993), by Edward Said, is a collection of thematically related essays that trace the connection between imperialism and culture throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The essays expand the arguments of ''Orient ...
, the 1993 collection of essays by postcolonial theorist
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Said (; , ; 1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian-American professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.Robert Young, ''White ...
. The term first appears in reference to Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Said suggests the cultural archive is a major site where investments in imperial conquest are developed. These archives include "narratives, histories, and travel tales."
Said emphasizes the role of the Western imperial project in the disruption of cultural archives, and theorizes that disciplines such as comparative literature, English, and anthropology can be directly linked to the concept of empire.
Gloria Wekker
Gloria Daisy Wekker (born June 13, 1950) is an Afro-Surinamese Dutch emeritus professor (Utrecht University) and writer who has focused on gender studies and sexuality in the Afro-Caribbean region and diaspora. She was the winner of the Ruth Bened ...
's 2016 book ''White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race'' utilizes a scavenger methodology by "work
ngwith interviews, watching TV and reading novels, analyzing email correspondence..." in order to develop a clear understanding of the
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
cultural archive.
According to Wekker, her book is "guided by the concept of the cultural archive
(Said 1993), which foregrounds the centrality of imperialism to Western culture. The cultural archive has influenced historical cultural configurations and current dominant and cherished self-representations and culture. In a general nineteenth-century European framework, Edward Said describes the cultural archive as a storehouse of "a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference . . .
nd,in Raymond Williams' seminal phrase, 'structures of feeling.' . . . There was virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that there are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own domain".
(1993, 52, 53) Importantly, what Said is referring to here is that a racial grammar, a deep structure of inequality in thought and affect based on race, was installed in nineteenth-century European imperial populations and that it is from this deep reservoir, the cultural archive, that, among other things, a sense of self has been formed and fabricated".
(p. 2)
References
{{reflist
Anthropology