Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation JEANNETTE ALLIS BASTIAN Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, MA, USA (E-mail: bastian@simmons.edu) Abstract. Analyzes attitudes and use of archives by post-colonial scholars who find that colonial records offer the voices of the master narrative but do not reflect the voices of the oppressed and voiceless. Argues that framing records within social provenance and a ‘community of records’ offers archival solutions to the dilemmas of locating all voices within the spaces of records. Keywords: archives, collective memory, colonial, community, post colonial, prove- nance, records ‘‘As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestor held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any com- fort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to, me, what I became after I met you.’’ Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place Introduction That old cliche´, ‘‘history is written by the winners,’’ 1 is nowhere bet- ter illustrated than in the accounts of former colonial societies, retold and renewed through history texts, fiction, poetry and film, in monu- ments, paintings and architecture. While history celebrates the ex- ploits and conquest of the colonizers some form of subtle second class status generally seems to adhere to the histories of the colonized. ‘Subaltern Studies,’ is one of several distinctly ‘other’ phrases often applied to such alternate histories – never the main event, always the ‘sub.’ But for the common folk who toiled in this ‘sub’ non-history zone, their lives were the main event. And for us in our enlightened post-colonial world, these lives should be, if not primary, then at least 1 In searching for the origins of this phrase I found many references to the phrase but no firm attribution. One possibility: ‘‘History is written by the winners’’ may be a generalized adaptation of a quote that is only attributed to Napoleon: ‘‘History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.’’ Archival Science (2006) 6:267–284 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10502-006-9019-1