ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attends to the challenges posed by collections and archives such as the Doomsday Vault in relation to their 'hauntings', their 'unfinished business' particularly as these relate to the 'ruinations' that describe 'the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation’ of imperial formations. Yet, questions about the hauntings in archives and collections also direct analytical sensibilities to the situatedness and site-specific co-evolutions of archival practices and imperial formations. Haunting can become an appropriate method in evoking necessarily uneasy stories of and with museum objects. B. Subramaniam talks of 'interdisciplinary hauntings' when describing how her combined disciplinary backgrounds – biology and women's studies – allowed her to perceive and recognize the ghosts of eugenics that continue to pervade evolutionary biology and the history of variation, of women in science and of flower colour. Hauntings thus evoke truly frightening questions for museum collections imbricated in imperial and colonial practices and orders.
