The digital archive project addresses the challenges posed by the transnational and multilingual formation of the African diaspora in Europe (and elsewhere) on the one hand and by the marginalizing of Black knowledge production in European societies, including institutions like museums and universities, on the other. The archive will both facilitate the digitization of physical documents and allow for a mapping of sites of knowledge production and archiving across Europe.
Digitization has revolutionized archival research by making resources in local archives globally accessible, allowing for new levels of engagement that are both broader, granting access to those who cannot physically visit the archives, and deeper, since digital copies are far less fragile than the originals. Digitization can also revolutionize what gets archived and by whom.
This project is primarily concerned with these latter aspects. Black European history reaches back centuries, but the archival collection and representation of this history is often reflective of historical violence. This is obvious, for example, in ongoing struggles around the return of stolen African artifacts in European museums, and, more disturbingly, the return of human remains routinely collected and exhibited well into the 20th century across the continent. Berlin’s museums alone still hoard thousands of African skulls and other remains. Some Black Europeans, such as Angelo Soliman who died in Vienna in 1796, were mummified and exhibited after their death. In other words, the relationship between archives, museums, and universities on the one hand and Black Europeans on the other, is more than fraught. While Black Europeans and Africans were turned into scientific specimen, their own cultural and intellectual production was not deemed worthwhile of collecting.
Nonetheless, there are countless sources of Black life to be found across the continent. Some in official archives, such as Berlin’s controversial Humboldt Forum, housing an enormous collection of “non-European” art that often was acquired through colonial theft. Some in community, labor history, or migration archives. Here, practices of indexing often pose problems in finding traces of Black lives as seemingly neutral processes of categorizing and labeling archive materials of course reflect dominant perceptions and blind spots. Part of the pedagogical mission of the project is to sensitize students to these politics of archiving and to equip them with practical strategies in approaching archives.
Finally, there are a few archives, such as Berlin’s Each One Teach One (EOTO), explicitly devoted to Black histories. These spaces are often volunteer driven and lack sufficient resources, the digital archive project will support groups like these with know-how and through digitization of materials. A significant amount of material, however, remains in private collections in individual homes. These materials are especially precarious since their owners do not have the means or expertise to preserve them properly and are often forced to discard these irreplaceable materials. One urgent goal of this project is to start digitizing these materials before they are lost forever.
The digital archive will serve as an online repository for these materials while they will remain in their original locations – part of the mission of the project is to raise awareness of the existence and importance of these documents and to support attempts at storing them locally in adequate spaces. The digital archive will also serve as a map of Black Europe, contextualizing materials in their location, supplementing them with interviews, oral histories and other materials. The digital archive will also list existing archives and initiatives (thus facilitating collaborations between local, regional, or national actors). Importantly, it will also serve as a meta map, linking existing digital maps, such as Black Central Europeor the Digital Atlas of Postcolonial Europe.
The digital archive will make the complexity of the African diaspora accessible, allowing visitors to zoom out to see the multiple intersecting nodes and to zoom in to explore specific locations or materials. Importantly, the archive will be interactive, eventually allowing for the direct upload of material from different locations. Students on both sides of the Atlantic will be involved in the creation of the archive from the beginning.
