Paradoxes of curating colonial memory

In the last decade, many initiatives were taken to digitize colonial archival legacies. In this article, we analyse Dutch policy and a number of Dutch initiatives in this field with the aim to find answers to our central question whether digitization of colonial archival legacies offers possibilities to decolonize these archives. The aspiration to decolonize colonial legacies seems to be a paradoxical statement since there is something innately colonial in the recordkeeping systems that cannot, and should not, be removed. But digitization of archives means creating new recordkeeping infrastructures, and these new infrastructures shape new interfaces between the documents which were created in the past and the users of today. We argue that decolonizing these archives can be based on a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the variables which shape the new digital archival infrastructure. Inspired by the third-space perspective and the concept of (de)coloniality, we explore the possibilities to develop archival infrastructures that contribute to decolonizing colonial archival legacies in the sense of offering multivocality, multiple agency and multiple provenance. We conclude that what we call third-space infrastructural frameworks create promising opportunities to contribute to the decolonization of colonial archival legacies.