Oral History, Memory and the Archive in Postcolonial Societies

Abstract

Oral history began as a method for recovering testimony from people whose lives had left no written trace, and it has since become a body of theory about how memory works and what it can be made to tell us. This paper traces that development and sets it against a parallel change in archival thinking. The early practice treated the interview as a substitute document, to be checked against the record for accuracy. The interpretive turn treated the interview instead as an account shaped by later experience, by narrative convention and by the relationship between interviewer and narrator, and argued that these features are evidence in their own right rather than contamination to be corrected. Memory studies supplied the conceptual apparatus for that argument, distinguishing individual recollection from the collective and cultural forms through which groups sustain a usable past. The paper then turns to the archive, examining the argument that archives are instruments of power that produce silences as systematically as they preserve records, and considering the community archive movement as a response. Postcolonial and Partition scholarship supplies the sharpest cases, since the events in question were experienced by millions and documented by almost none of them. The paper closes with the practical ethics of the interview and with the problems that digital infrastructure creates for context and consent.