The Politics of the Parallel Archive: Digital Imperialism and the Future of Record-Keeping in the Age of Digital Reproduction

This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production – of existing materials and born-digital records – has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date – chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation.