The Archive as a Battlefield for the Future: Anti-colonial Struggles and Insurgent Temporality

Abstract

Anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial struggles of the twentieth century provide important intellectual and political resources as we collectively seek to forge alternative futures in the face of our depleted political present. Setting out with this analytical and political concern, this article is interested in the question of what it means to visit the archive of past struggles and past insurgencies. It argues for a critical historical method that foregrounds the agency of the insurgents themselves—the agency of women, slaves, foreigners, the poor and the peasants—as the subjects of an insurgent universality (Tomba 2019). The article explores the international brigades fighting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the peasants gathered to affirm the Second Havana Declaration, and the audience that comprised Thomas Sankara's speech in Harlem. The artifacts of insurgency, the authors suggest, are embodied expressions of collective struggles written not by one but by a multiplicity. They are the artifacts of a collective political subjectivity united in their insurgent claim to disrupt the temporal and spatial delimitations of politics in modernity—enacting an insurgent universality. The archive of insurgent universality is our future for it provides compelling ways to think, write, and act politically toward the present.