TY - CHAP TI - The Archive After Theory AU - Ward, Megan AU - Wisnicki, Adrian S T2 - Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 AB - [Beginning of essay]: The digital archive is a reactive entity, one that attempts to account for its own authorizing logic in ways that make it theoretically, not just technologically, separate from earlier physical archives. This is in part because the first digital archives emerged in the midst of the archival theory of the 1990s and 2000s. Many of the earliest digital archives were created with the understanding that archives are political, interpretive tools. But postcolonial digital archives in particular—both those that date to that era and those developed in the present—manifest a double awareness of this reactivity. In addition to the theoretical and technological strictures of the archive, the postcolonial digital archive is haunted by its historical predecessor, the imperial archive, that which embodies “a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire” (Richards 6). The postcolonial digital archive thus critiques its relationship to imperial culture by acknowledging its rootedness in imperial and colonial pasts. At the same time, it engages with postcolonial and archival theories to reinterpret the imperial and colonial ideologies embedded in the archive’s primary materials, both through digital remediation and critical frameworks. Historically and hermeneutically, this is the archive after theory. CY - Minneapolis DA - 2019/// PY - 2019 LA - en PB - University of Minnesota Press UR - https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/a8eccb81-e950-4760-ba93-38e0b1f2b9d0#ch18 KW - Archives as paradigm KW - Corpus representativeness KW - DH Digital humanities KW - DH Sociocultural approaches ER -