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 decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting and fragmented, the other institutionalized and material, and asks 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. The second form is the practice of economic nationalization that was a central pillar of Nasser's project in Egypt throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Through these two forms, the article demonstrates 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.