ABSTRACT
A matter of time Chapter one uncovers how dominant Western archival theory relies on Christian progress narratives and asks us to imagine new ways of thinking about records that are not based on linear temporalities. The dominant Western linear progress narrative is rooted in Christian cosmology and represents only one of many ways to think about time. Non-dominant temporalities posed by Hindu and Indigenous traditions, Afro-futurist speculations, and queer theories all challenge linear time. Emerging from African American legal criticism, critical race theory posits that linear progress narratives are fallacies, asserting that racial inequities are only rectified when doing so converges with the interests of white people rather than due to the imagined inevitability of justice. The incommensurability of cyclical conceptions of time from the global South with linear progress narratives from the global North have led the philosopher Charles W. Mills to call the latter “white time.” What does it mean to liberate archives and records from the “white temporal imaginary”? How are records transformed when time is conceived of as cyclical? Translating a wide range of thinking about temporalities, this chapter intervenes on foundational concepts in archival theory that assume time is linear, and sets up the book’s main theoretical contribution, namely that archival labor should be harnessed in the contemporary moment as a disruption of both dominant white progress narratives and cycles of oppression that inequitably target people of color and queer communities.
