These are the slides to my 10 minute talk, "Navigating Archival Silence" for the panel "Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities" at the 2013 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. http://www.adelinekoh.org/blog/2012/04/02/racend/

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@adelinekoh
Navigating Archival silence:
creating a nineteenth century postcolonial archive
Adeline Koh
Duke University and Richard Stockton College

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@adelinekoh
The Archive & Power
• Archives as forms by which knowledge is made visible/
knowable
• Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge
• rules: limit possibility of knowledge
• Derrida: Archive Fever
• “achrontic power”

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@adelinekoh
Digitizing “Chinese
Englishmen”
• Demo of “Digitizing
Chinese Englishmen”
• Currently in alpha form
at http://
chineseenglishmen.adeli
nekoh.org
• Attempt to create a
“postcolonial”
nineteenth-century
digital archive

4. Archival Silence in the 19th
century archive
• 19th century studies--undergone digital
revolution in creating digital archives
(NINES.org, Swinburne Project etc.)
• But little that explores the colonial history of
the 19th century
• “Digitizing Chinese Englishmen” attempts to
deal with this archival silence

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Who are the
@adelinekoh
‘Chinese
Englishmen’?
✤ Anglophone Chinese diaspora
in Southeast Asia, specifically
Singapore and Malaysia
✤ Torn between two Empires:
Qing Chinese and British
✤ Privileged class of non-
Europeans
✤ Bourgeois intermediaries
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@adelinekoh
The Straits Chinese
Magazine
✤ Modeled after Blackwoods and
Macmillans
✤ Upper-class periodical to give
voice to Chinese diaspora of
Malaya
✤ Edited by Song Ong Siang and
Lim Boon Keng
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@adelinekoh
Designing a
Decentralized,
“Postcolonial”
Archive
- “Decentralized” archive--> modes
for democratic access and
exchange
-”Postcolonial” refers to Edward
Said & postcolonial studies
collective of the 1980s, more of a
mode of criticism than time period

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@adelinekoh
A “Postcolonial” 19th-century Archive?
• A ‘postcolonial archive’ is one
which examines and questions
the impact and creation of
imperialist ideology within the
structure of the archive itself
• Elizabeth Povinelli--investigate
the compositional logics of the
archive
• Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu,
Thomas Nygren: an archive
which interrogates traces of
colonialism & apartheid in
knowledge production

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@adelinekoh
The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• Subject matter--> allows
for more comparative
structures of similar
hybrid dynamics across
19th century European
empires
• Spinoffs: “African
Englishmen,” “Indian
Englishmen,”
“Caribbean
Englishmen” etc...

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@adelinekoh
The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• “Hypertext” linkages,
use of tags, provide
different types of
reading
• May “open up” text to
different interpretations

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@adelinekoh
The Structure of Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’
• Comments field-- “Opening up” of archive

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@adelinekoh
CMS Shift
• Now hosted in WordPress
• Shift to Scalar: http://scalar.usc.edu/
• metadata will be tagged in RDF format,
allowing others to interact easily with the
archive
• Scalar: allows comments to play a more central
role in determining the structure of the archive

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@adelinekoh
Social Media & “Chinese
Englishmen”
• Twitter account: @CEnglishmen
• Twitter hashtag: #CEnglishmen
• Future: Tumblr blog?

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@adelinekoh
To Summarize
• “Digitizing Chinese
Englishmen”--an
attempt to think
through creating a
postcolonial archive
• Through attempts to
be self-critical of
knowledge formation