Decolonization Now
Decolonization Now

Counter-Archiving Decolonization: Methods, Modes, Narrations

This workshop took place at in November 2024. We are currently working on a digital archive around the contributions by workshop participants. In the meantime, you can find the workshop prompt below and the program here. 

The vegetable market in ‘Aqbat Jaber camp for the Palestine refugees in the Jordan Valley, 1956. UNRWA Film and Photo Archive, photographer unknown.

Students Prosper Anani (Togo), Pierre Loleta (?), unnamed (Yvory Coast), André César (Mauritius), Edouard Ntakiyica (Burundi) in conversation during the inauguration of the library of the Institut Africain de Genève in 1962. Source: Geneva Graduate Institute Archives, Fonds IUED 651/1.

The homepage of Maktabat Sabil (Sabil Library), a Palestinian public library built on sharing resources and knowledge on Palestine and its anticolonial struggle. Source: www.maktabatsabil.com.

Paper boats inscribed with lines from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Hum Dekhenge” (We Shall See). Anti-CAA Protests, New Delhi, India, Wikimedia Commons.

The accompanying images collectively evoke the politics, practices, and audiences at the heart of our opening workshop on anti-colonial archives and counter-archiving decolonization, which inaugurates our workshop series titled Decolonization Now: Histories, Politics, Possibilities. Curated from locations spread across the Jordan Valley, Delhi, Geneva, and the digital realm, they span themes of collective memories, Third World internationalisms, developmental thinking, and the democratizing of anti-colonial resources.

We view these themes with an eye on the compendium of potential stories, methods and hopes that the concepts of the anti-colonial archives might harbor, being more than a simple repository of documents and public artifacts. We do so in a moment when structures of erasure expand violently against peoples’ bodies, minds, lands, memories, and aspirations of liberated, decolonized futures. Against this violent erasure — which encompasses hierarchies of settler-colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and racism — a critical examination of archives and archival discourse becomes more than a pedagogical endeavor of studying the past, but also a political strive to reimagine the future.

By figuring the archive in this manner, our approach builds on and resonates with the increasing attention given to an archival discourse over the last few decades across the various academic disciplines. Following a range of critical interventions, scholarship has moved beyond understanding the archive as a single, coherent, self-inhering space. Problematizing the ontological stability of the archive, scholars and practitioners have deftly interrogated the practices and processes of collection,  classification, and violence through which the archive — as institution, practice, and status — orders categories of thought, knowledge, and representability.

In the field of postcolonial historiography, this archival discourse has generated a renewed reckoning with the colonial archive. Reading colonial documents, records, images, censuses, reports, and other artifacts against the grain, a generation of scholars have been recuperating histories of colonial and settler-colonial governmentality, violence, labour, language, body, sexuality, and subaltern agency. And yet, even as this scholarship highlights and traces the multitudinous dimensions of the colonial experience, it has often run the risk of overly centering colonial archives and the overarching state institutions that store them. Put otherwise, what potentially gets effaced by a singular focus on the colonial archive are the varied (after)lives of the archive as states and peoples moved towards ostensibly new, postcolonial forms of belonging and recording. Far from a seamless transfer of institutional and legal control from colonial to postcolonial archives, the demands of imagining anti-colonial, de-colonized futures put into place new modes of thinking, institutionalizing, and categorizing the past.

Thus, moving beyond either static spatial or temporal frames, scholars have turned towards locating and curating other repositories of anti- and de-colonial resistances and memorialization. Straddling the boundaries between the public/private, national/international, and the textual/visual, these repositories reveal the heterogenous practices of archiving the past that continue to emerge in postcolonial realities. Drawing on archives encompassing films, photographs, oral testimonies, conference documents, poems, posters, and murals, they capture the material imprints and traces of the hopes, anxieties, memories, aspirations, and possibilities which are necessary for imagining transformative, liberated futures.

Building on these ideas, our workshop aims to collaboratively envision — through presentations, film screening, and critical discussions — the methods, modes, and narrations that different archival stories and methodologies engender, especially in relation to the rich and creative legacies of anti- and de-colonial thought and practice that spanned the 20th century and continue to inform our contemporary presents. Bringing together scholars working across different geographical regions and through various methods, this workshop asks three sets of questions pertaining to anti-colonial archives and to the process of counter-archiving de-colonization:

On meaning, what are “anti-colonial archives”? Where can they be found? Which historical conditions and possibilities shape and determine such archives? And how might they be re-examined outside their dominant frames of understanding?

On methods, what are the methods via which one can create an anti-colonial archive, or a counter-archive of decolonization? How do new digital technologies re-configure the relation between the past and the present? What about voices hitherto obscured by settler-colonial, imperial, patriarchal, or racist paradigms? Can they be recovered within the confines of disciplinary history, or do they require new horizons and imaginative, artistic labors outside the academia?

On politics, what is the purpose of returning to or creating/curating these archives? How can the anti-colonial archive politically intervene in present moments of social, political, and intellectual decolonization, liberation, and emancipation? How do we escape a sense of nostalgia, melancholy, or over-romanticism when revisiting these archives? and what are the ethical concerns in attempting to imagine and curate repositories of decolonization?

Decolonization Now:
Histories, Politics, Possibilities

Ahead of our second workshop the Graduate Institute's communications team conducted a short interview with us about our workshop series. 

Please tell us about your workshop (series) and the inspiration(s) behind it?

We are all funded through the SNF Doc.CH program and individually planned for a workshop within our projects. Realising that we work on different aspects of decolonization as a historical process, we decided to turn our individual workshops into a more coherent series. Organising this series together means that we continuously engage with methodological and historiographical questions regarding decolonization and work as a team, resisting the individualisation that unfortunately is part of our PhD journey. The first workshop asked how we archive decolonization and where to look for it. The upcoming second workshop interrogates how decolonization has been linked to teaching and communal learning. Workshops three and four will look at decolonization and the promises of development and the aesthetic and cultural imaginations of decolonization. 

What angles are you adopting in your approach? 

While bringing together scholars from different disciplines as well as practitioners, we understand decolonization as a historical formation. Decolonization as a process went beyond the formal transfer of power. It raised fundamental questions about the future and order of the world and until today, the discourse of decolonization continues to resonate, inspire, and compel. At the same time, it remains crucial to note that never has “decolonization” been an automatically liberating term. With our series, we want to think through, interrogate, and re-imagine the histories, political stakes, and potentialities of decolonization. In this sense, the “now” in the title of our series performs three tasks. First, it refers to the “now” burgeoning scholarship that illuminates the multidimensional histories of decolonization. Secondly, it throws its weight behind the more polemic calls for “decolonizing” hierarchies and structures of (settler-)colonialism which still endure in the present. And third, we critically ask how we might move forward towards different futures from the horizons of the “now” in which we find ourselves.

What impact do you hope the workshop will have on both your work and the work of the participants? 

We certainly hope to profit in our work from intellectually stimulating conversations. The larger point however is to create a community and forge personal connections that hopefully last beyond the framework of this series. We hope to go beyond the confines of academia in working with practitioners (artists, archivists, activists) and learn from their experiences in interacting with non-academic audiences. Lastly, we would like to build a digital platform with resources to learn about and teach decolonization.

Decolonization – as moment, process, and aspiration – stands as one of the most transformative and enduring historical developments of the 20th century. More than the transfer of political power from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization represents a complex becoming touching upon all facets of political, economic, and cultural lives in the postcolonies (and metropoles). Put otherwise, if decolonization constituted the end of “empire” as a political form, it also stood for the creation of multiple new beginnings, free from the legacies of colonial and imperial rule. This process has encompassed anticolonial movements, diverse forms of community-building, and postcolonial solidarities, engaging a wide range of participants, including educators, artists, and intellectuals.

This workshop series, based at the Geneva Graduate Institute, explores the histories, politics, and potentialities of decolonization through four themes: Archives, Pedagogies, Aesthetics, and Promises. It invites interdisciplinary contributions in various formats to foster intimate intellectual exchange. Outputs include a digital archive, currently under construction, and a special volume to creatively document and disseminate the findings. You can read the full workshop series prompt here.



Decolonization – as moment, process, and aspiration – stands as one of the most transformative and enduring historical developments of the 20th century. More than the transfer of political power from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization represents a complex becoming touching upon all facets of political, economic, and cultural lives in the postcolonies (and metropoles). Put otherwise, if decolonization constituted the end of “empire” as a political form, it also stood for the creation of multiple new beginnings, free from the legacies of colonial and imperial rule. This process has encompassed anticolonial movements, diverse forms of community-building, and postcolonial solidarities, engaging a wide range of participants, including educators, artists, and intellectuals.

This workshop series, based at the Geneva Graduate Institute, explores the histories, politics, and potentialities of decolonization through four themes: Archives, Pedagogies, Aesthetics, and Promises. It invites interdisciplinary contributions in various formats to foster intimate intellectual exchange. Outputs include a digital archive, currently under construction, and a special volume to creatively document and disseminate the findings. You can read the full workshop series prompt here.



Decolonization Now:
Histories, Politics, Possibilities

Decolonization – as moment, process, and aspiration – stands as one of the most transformative and enduring historical developments of the 20th century. More than the transfer of political power from colonial empires to postcolonial nation-states, decolonization represents a complex becoming touching upon all facets of political, economic, and cultural lives in the postcolonies (and metropoles). Put otherwise, if decolonization constituted the end of “empire” as a political form, it also stood for the creation of multiple new beginnings, free from the legacies of colonial and imperial rule.

Thus, decolonization raised fundamental questions about the future and order of the world. Setting their sights on the "global" across the decolonizing world, anticolonial thinkers and intellectuals fashioned and moulded forms of communities, and trajectories neither reducible to nor containable by the nation-form. Further, this period also witnessed the active participation of non-state actors like educators, poets, musicians, architects, and performers, beyond the realm of state-relations or postcolonial diplomacies. In this sense, decolonization not only spanned the "world," but included within its worldmaking ambitions (and ambit) an eclectic cast of protagonists. Moreover, materially, it led to the formation of new postcolonial solidarities and institutions – often with the official patronage of the postcolonial nation-state, but equally often through networks and affiliations that cut across fixed territorial or ideological boundaries. Taken together, these projects envisioned a future free from the legacies and hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

However, these histories which profoundly shaped the 20th century are not confined to it. In different – public, epistemic, and worryingly nationalist – registers, the discourse of decolonization continues to resonate, inspire, and compel. From our own vantage point in "international" Geneva, decolonization has offered scholars and practitioners a productive rubric for reckoning with the city’s imbrication in a (albeit hidden) racist and colonial past. At the same time, it remains crucial to note that never has "decolonization" been an automatically liberating term, shorn off its co-optations within pernicious ideologies of control, resentment, and purism – especially in our "postcolonial" presents. For instance, and as a generation of feminist and gender historians have shown, for many women, the experience of decolonization continued to remain coterminous with restrictive sexual and gender norms and various instances of violence. Further, turning towards more contemporary manifestations, over the last few decades the  rhetoric, prose, and poetry of what once might have been associated with a liberatory anticolonialism has been increasingly instrumentalized to consolidate and legitimise new forms of ethnonationalism and settler colonialisms.

With these concerns in mind, this workshop series offers a platform for scholars and practitioners alike to collectively think through, interrogate, and re-imagine the histories, political stakes, and potentialities of decolonization through four axes – Archives, Pedagogies, Aesthetics, and Promises. In this vein, the "now" in our title performs three interrelated tasks. First, it refers to the "now" burgeoning scholarship that illuminate the multidimensional histories of decolonization. Secondly, it throws its weight behind the more polemic calls for "decolonizing" hierarchies and structures of (settler-)colonialism which still endure in the present. And third, we critically ask how we might move forward towards different futures from the horizons of the “now” in which we find ourselves.

Based at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), each workshop will last for two days and welcome senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners from outside the academy. We envision these workshops to bring together a small number of participants with the aim of fostering an intimate and collegial atmosphere of intellectual exchange and encounter. Recognizing the pressures of academic life and constraints posed by disciplinary boundaries, we invite submissions that are either in process, exploratory, or multi-genre. We thus encourage participants from various disciplines to submit their contributions in a variety of forms, including textual (working paper, dissertation chapter), visual (poster, collage), oral (podcast, interview), and so on.

In terms of output, we aim to collaborate with participants on creatively giving shape to the workshops’ aspirations. This will include curating a living archive via this website that will bring together the various contributions and discussions (currently under construction). In the longer term, we intend to publish the workshops’ findings in a special issue.