Rage Against the Archive #2

Anshul Roy

2024 / 10 minutes
United States / United States
English

Rage Against the Archive is an experimental browser-based video that critically examines how the New York Public Library’s website catalogs and displays dehumanizing ethnographic photos from the 19th-century colonial-era publication The People of India. The video questions capitalism’s influence on the archival process and documents the “hacking” methodology used to insert alternative texts on the website using HTML in a symbolic act of Electronic Civil Disobedience. The People of India, published between 1868 and 1875, is one of the world’s oldest and most comprehensive ethnographic works, commissioned by the British colonial government in India after the 1857 First War of Independence. In the aftermath of violent uprisings and the first challenge to their colonial rule, the British government sought to understand the native tribes and their cultures to better control them and prevent future rebellions. The camera, masquerading as an objective device, was employed as an imperial tool by the colonial government to document natives, effectively othering them in the process. This video scrutinizes whether institutional archives inadvertently perpetuate colonial exploitation and the violence of the camera, while also highlighting how technology continues to commodify the bodies of people of color.