The Crying Child

Abstract

This article sketches key concerns surrounding the digital reproduction of enslaved and colonized subjects held in cultural heritage collections. It centralizes one photograph of a crying Afro-Caribbean child from St. Croix, housed in the Royal Danish Library, to demonstrate the unresolved ethical matters present in retrospective attempts to visualize colonialism. Working with affect and haunting as research material, the inquiry questions how museums and other cultural heritage institutions are caretaking historical violations, identifying themselves as hosting agents, and navigating issues of trust and accountability as they make their colonial collections available online. Speculating about what an ethics of care in representation could look like, the article draws on reparatory artistic engagements with such imagery and proposes how metadata could be rethought as a cataloging space with the potential to alter historical imbalances of power. Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant's words the bridge to the dead or the scriptural tombs in which they await us? ("Venus in Two Acts," Saidiya V. Hartman 2008) While researching I become part of your army of ghosts. Haunting. Haunting. (Unearthing. In Conversation, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński) 1

The “colonial object” in autoethnography: Examples from Ireland, Hong Kong, and Zambia

“…Julian and Maurna Crozier's slide photos are of a genre of colonial photography that magnified the importance of the British, pictorializing the colonized to iteratively assert imperial domination (Bickers, 2012; Thomas, 1994; Widdis, 2018). Like the images in public archives analyzed by Temi Odumosu (2020), they provide empirical evidence about power relations, in Elizabeth Edward's words “springing leaks” in the official record (Edwards, 2001, p. 12). Features that initially appear coincidental—such as how, in Figure 4, the photographer is looking down from a ship, or, as in Figure 5, is standing on the ground looking up at a white protagonist—highlight systemic inequalities, both recording and reconstituting ideas about racial and class domination.…”

Critiquing the Machine

“…This category is heavily crosslisted with the two preceding it, and, as a result, can be seen in two different ways: 1) as another entryway into articles about groups; or 2) about entirely separate approaches to problem solving. Stated more plainly, as most professional LIS and GLAMS literature presents a problem, analyzes it, and then offers solutions, articles about ethics (Odumosu 2020;Wagner 2019;Martin 2019;Kazmer 2019; may also be about marginalized issues (respectively: race, gender and queer issues, privacy, gender and names, and race and archives) and may also offer specific recommendations (respectively: ethical digital description, unpacking misnaming, omitting details from living name authority records, community consultation and description). Therefore, these articles would be added to multiple subcategories.…”

Counter-archives as heritage justice: photography, invisible labor and peopled ruins

“…The facilitation of digital databases to give different stakeholders more control over photographs and other archival materials has been celebrated as a productive move by Western museums to enable a certain control of narratives to stakeholder groups in communities of origin. This constructive pathway is multi-directional but not without restrictions and problems (Odumosu, 2020; Sassoon, 2005). In reference to the work of archaeology in Syria, for example, Baird (2022) encourages institutions to think more carefully about the ways in which archives, like objects, are a form of diaspora, a heritage that resides outside Syria, and indeed is inaccessible to many Syrians not just because of where it is, or the language it is produced in, but also the kinds of knowledge and monetary capabilities needed to access them, even when they are digitally available.…”