Permission to archive: curating and contesting Palestinian history

The positioning of archives in relation to state power is characterized by an inherent tension. Archives buttress the authority of the state by institutionalizing and legitimizing preferred historical narratives. National archives exemplify this, as their management and accessibility is determined by state legislation. Yet archives can also threaten state power by enabling counter-histories that dispute and undermine official narratives. We explore this tension here in relation to the Palestinian case. Palestinians have long been at the forefront of archival contestation, curating grass roots archives to provide alternatives to the state collections that exclude them, while challenging conventional ideas of what comprises an archive. In so doing, they have utilized the power derived from archives’ implicit legitimacy. By seeking to bestow this legitimacy on different ideas of “the archive,” Palestinians act upon the latter’s potential power: Whoever owns the archives can own the past, and whoever owns the past owns the present. Drawing on Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, we examine how the creation, capture and treatment of Palestinian archives by various actors fit within the postcolonial archival terrain. In so doing we argue that contestations over Palestinian history show how archival power can come about not only by curating alternative collections, but also by challenging the very concept of an archive itself.