Historical discourse includes and excludes events, people, and concepts very deliberately, especially in neocolonial societies. But it’s important to be aware of that there is the ability and responsibility to reconstruct the narrative. One method of decolonization is the prioritization of the voices of the colonized and oppressed. Through the recording of the first-hand experiences that marginalized people face, there lies an ability to prevent the erasure of the history that those in power were willing to hide.
Archival sources include letters, photos, memos, manuscripts, and more. But, often, the written records in an archive cannot emphasize the emotion or significance of an event the way that an audio source can. 1 The “Voices Remembering Slavery” collection in the Library of Congress could be very resourceful to someone analyzing memory, emotion, or how people remembered traumatic events from their own past. In addition, using oral histories as legitimate sources plays a larger role of helping shift away from archaic structures of oppression.
It is important to note that oral historical records aren’t meaningful in their nature, they can be highly problematic as well. In the Slave Narrative Collection, the interviewers were primarily white and that led to a perpetuation of stereotyping the informants, who were all Black. But as the Library of Congress notes, “the representations of speech in the narratives are a pervasive and forceful reminder that these documents are not only a record of a time that was already history when they were created: they are themselves irreducibly historical, the products of a particular time and particular places in the long and troubled mediation of African-American culture by other Americans.”2
The perspective through which the marginalized are analyzed and understood in academia has historically been that of white men. But by privileging oral history, there is an acceleration of the process of changing the rigid metanarrative that has been consuming our society for decades. In 1940, Juan Bautista Rael documented the Hispanic music and culture of the Northern Rio Grande.3 The documentation of Mexican wedding songs, alabados (hymns), and other forms of music provide proof that American culture has been created and shifted by various groups of people.4
Decolonizing the archives and history as a discipline means accepting oral histories as legitimate and useful sources. Although, because technology has made it so easy for everyday people to be a part of this archival process, I wonder how historians’ perspectives on the validity of oral histories will shift in the next decade. Just as the 1970s propelled a “new social history,” or a history that is written from the bottom up, the upcoming decades also have potential to facilitate collaborative collecting and further democratize the archive. 5
- “Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland, June 11, 1949,” Voices Remembering Slavery, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1950037_afs09990a/
- “A Note on the Language of the Narratives,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/#note
- “Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/hispano-music-and-culture-from-the-northern-rio-grande/about-this-collection/
- “Valse de Cadena (Chain Waltz) [Audio],” Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/raelbib000012/
- “The Importance of the Slave Narrative Collection,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/importance-of-the-slave-narratives-collection/
