“Harder to live with a history”: Queer archives and decolonising memory in postcolonial India

This article asks how queer archives might contribute to decolonising memory studies without reproducing either the state-centred limits of postcolonial historiography or the civilisational recoveries enabled by some decolonial vocabularies. Taking the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA), hosted at a public law university in India, as its point of departure, it makes three theoretical moves. First, it reads postcolonial approaches to memory for both their critique of colonial archives and their continuing dependence on state institutions and inherited epistemic forms. Second, drawing on Achille Mbembe’s account of simultaneous multiplicities and the university as a commons, it theorises queer archiving as a decolonial pedagogy of presence, in which memory is produced through contested relations rather than secured within a stable repository. Third, it argues that queer archives can make law remember itself differently by displacing the judgement as a privileged form of legal memory and reopening legal history to affect, performance, activist labour and unfinished social life. Decolonising memory, in this account, entails redistributing archival authority and sustaining plural, revisable and future-oriented relations to the past.