Critical archival theory and the Caribbean’s neoliberal archival turn

Abstract

This article draws attention to the present-day transnational rise of state archives in the Greater Caribbean. It takes as a case study the Dominican Republic’s National Archives System (NAS) and National General Archives (AGN), which opened in 2008 and 2011, respectively, to signal a Caribbean neoliberal archival turn and interrogate the data politics behind these institutions’ neoliberal promises of equality, progress, and freedom. Intersecting Critical Archival Theory and Critical Caribbean Studies, the article pushes for a new critical archival theory of color that draws from scholarship centering the erasure of histories of enslavement and the hyper-masculinization of white colonial privilege. In doing so, it advocates for a decolonial practice of public archives demanding that archivists and archive users reckon with these archives’ historical role in powering anti-Black racism and structural oppression.