ABSTRACT
Postcolonial literature often enters into the colonial library in order to question the archive housed there. What is this archive? In The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, Thomas Richards refers to a ‘paper empire’ of data collected by the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, the India Survey, and British universities. Richards suggests that the archive in Victorian England ‘was not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire’. 1 Richards here describes the archive in a Foucauldian way, because by the term archive, Foucault ‘[does] not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past or as evidence of a continuing identity’. Rather, Foucault reads the archive as the ‘first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’. 2 Richards’s study identifies the specific archival technologies of power that the British Empire deployed in relation to its colonies. In questioning this archive, many black international writers attempt to deconstruct these technologies of power. Indeed, the work of V. Y. Mudimbe, as a novelist and a philosopher, is marked by just such a questioning of the archive. Explaining its power, he writes, in The Idea of Africa, that ‘To comprehend the archaeological organization of this very idea of Africa and its resonances, it seems to me, it is impossible not to consider Western literature and, particularly, its culmination in the “colonial library”’. 3 In placing the ‘colonial library’ in quotes, Mudimbe refers beyond a singular, physical space, beyond one building, and out towards a more general archive governing the epistemological bases of various disciplines producing knowledge about Africa.
