On anti-colonial time: encountering archival traces in a haunted present

Abstract

This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt’s project of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century, I demonstrate the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. I think through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting and fragmented, the other institutionalised and material, and ask how these different forms of memory constitute different types of anticolonial archives. Both forms of memory and practices of archiving appear in the present, albeit in vastly differing ways. The first form is a series of vignettes around Gamal Abdel Nasser and Patrice Lumumba, and the connections between them, their families, and anticolonial Egypt and anticolonial Congo during the 1950s and 1960s. These vignettes are fragmented, ranging from a family’s oral history to faded street signs, and do not produce a strong or sturdy archive; yet they have much to tell us about both the crisis of anticolonial politics as well as the contemporary moment of crisis in Egypt. The second form is the practice of economic nationalisation that was a central pillar of Nasser’s project in Egypt throughout the 1950s and 1960s. I show the ways in which this practice lives on in the present, in particular through strikes by industrial workers in the 2000s leading up to the 2011 revolution. In some ways, this second form of memory is more institutionalised and ‘traceable’ through policies, documents, and people, constituting a different type of anticolonial archive. Through these two forms, demonstrate both the urgency of the past and the present in Egypt, as well as the ways in which the crisis of the anticolonial past has structured the crisis of the postcolonial present.