The Archive is Political

Who gets remembered, who gets erased—and who’s rebuilding the record

We tend to imagine archives as neutral spaces.

Quiet rooms filled with boxes. Digital repositories. Organized shelves. A place for memory, for preservation, for fact.

But archives are not passive collections of knowledge. They are acts of curation, exclusion, and power. They do not merely document what happened—they determine what counts as having happened.

To archive is to declare: This matters.
To omit is to say: This does not.

In this way, every archive—whether state-sanctioned, institutional, or personal—is a political structure. It is not only what we preserve that reveals our values. It’s what we let be forgotten.

And in a time when history is being contested, re-edited, and re-forgotten in real-time, the politics of the archive are no longer abstract. They are existential.

Archives Are Not Memory. They Are Power’s Memory

Memory is messy, emotional, embodied, fragmentary. Archives, by contrast, are formalized systems. They decide what gets entered, what gets cataloged, what survives.

And those decisions are rarely neutral.

In colonial contexts, entire civilizations were written out—or reinterpreted through imperial lenses. In scientific institutions, data from women, indigenous people, or non-Western systems of knowledge was routinely ignored, mistranslated, or destroyed. In national archives, the state writes its own legitimacy, and often omits the damage done along the way.

The result is a curated reality that reinforces the worldview of whoever maintains the archive.
Not just what is remembered, but how it is framed.

This is why the archive is not just a repository. It is an interface between history and ideology.

Who Gets Remembered

To be included in the archive is not simply to be recorded. It is to be authorized. It is to be granted epistemic legitimacy.

This legitimacy is distributed along lines of power:

• Whose language is documented?
• Whose rituals are preserved?
• Whose voices are considered “credible”?
• Whose lives are annotated, cataloged, and searchable?

And just as importantly:

• Who remains in footnotes, if mentioned at all?
• Who was never filmed, transcribed, or photographed?
• Whose names were left out of the minutes, the indexes, the collections?

Entire categories of human experience—mystical, oral, domestic, communal, embodied, emotional—have often been excluded by design.

Because to record is not only to remember. It is to define what counts as real.

Who Gets Erased

Erasure is rarely loud. It is structural.

It happens in silences. In metadata choices. In what institutions choose not to fund. In whose names are spelled wrong or lost. In whose materials are “not considered archival.” In what formats are considered credible—paper over song, document over ritual, statistic over testimony.

And erasure is not always deliberate. Often it’s procedural. Bureaucratic. Innocuous-seeming. But the effect is the same: entire epistemologies vanish from the official record.

This is why archival work is not just technical. It is cultural warfare in slow motion.

The Digital Archive and the Illusion of Inclusivity

One might assume that the digital age solves this. After all, we now have the capacity to preserve everything. Infinite storage. Cloud backups. Decentralized databases.

But digital archives are still built on old assumptions. And they come with new problems.

First: searchability becomes a filter. If something isn’t tagged in a way the system recognizes, it may as well not exist. This reinforces dominant language patterns and marginalizes the non-linear, non-standard, and non-Western.

Second: what we save still depends on who’s archiving. Whose servers are we using? Who funds the platforms? Who moderates the data? And who decides what violates "community standards"?

Third: abundance can erase just as easily as scarcity. When everything is archived, attention becomes the new scarcity. The noise overwhelms signal. And marginalized voices are drowned again—not by omission, but by digital sedimentation.

So the political question remains: who is building the systems that remember? And what do they value?

Archival Refusal as Resistance

Sometimes, not archiving is itself a political act.

Communities that have been historically surveilled, exploited, or fetishized may choose to withhold information—to preserve it orally, ritually, or in embodied forms that resist extraction.

This is not a lack of preservation. It is a refusal of the colonial gaze. A form of archival sovereignty.

In this light, some erasures are strategic. Not every sacred story should be searchable. Not every cultural fragment belongs in a database.

There is wisdom in opacity. And sometimes forgetting is a form of survival.

Who’s Rebuilding the Record

Despite these challenges, a quiet revolution is underway. Across disciplines and communities, people are reclaiming archival power.

Examples include:

• Decolonial archivists creating community-controlled repositories
• Digital zine libraries preserving radical literature
• AI-powered recovery projects unearthing lost voices in historical datasets
• Indigenous knowledge holders building protected memory systems grounded in ceremony
• Citizen-led oral history projects documenting local trauma and resilience
• Art as archive—where performance, sculpture, and film become containers for endangered memory

These are not just alternative archives. They are epistemic interventions. They are restoring pluralism to memory itself.

And they remind us that the archive is not static. It is a living practice.

The Ethics of Archiving

To engage with the archive seriously is to ask not only “what is remembered,” but:

• Who is authorized to remember?
• What permissions are needed to hold memory?
• What is the emotional, cultural, and spiritual cost of documentation?
• Is the archive a sanctuary—or a spectacle?

True archival ethics must hold space for:

• Ritual care
• Consent and contextualization
• Symbolic literacy
• Restorative framing
• Temporal humility

Because memory is not just data. It is relationship.

Conclusion: Remembering as Resistance

In a time when truth is fragile, institutions are failing, and histories are being rewritten in real-time, the archive becomes a site of radical responsibility.

It is not enough to collect. We must curate with conscience.

It is not enough to digitize. We must re-sacralize memory.

It is not enough to cite sources. We must build frameworks that restore what was deliberately forgotten.

Because the archive is not just about the past. It is a design for the future.

And how we remember now will shape what remains when the systems that misremember us are gone.