The Archive as a Colonial Artifact: Feminist and Community-Centered Interventions in the Hanna Papanek Collection

Abstract

Archives are not passive containers of history—they are sites where power is exercised, identities are classified, and visual narratives are constructed. The Hanna Papanek Photograph collection, housed in Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library and managed by Koshul and Malik (2022-2024), offers a compelling case study of how ethnographic images of South and Southeast Asian women are archived, framed, and reinterpreted without the agency of their subjects. Captured in the mid to late 1900s, these photographs document gendered experiences in religious, domestic, and political spaces, often reinforcing colonial narratives of exoticization, subjugation, or victimhood. This paper challenges the authority of the archive itself through anthropological perspectives, feminist archival theory and community-driven methodologies. By interrogating metadata interventions, reparative description, and alternative classification systems, it explores how archival structures codify power and how feminist and decolonial interventions resist these structures. The study examines what it means to “decolonize” an archive when subjects cannot retroactively consent and how metadata can evolve without replicating colonial taxonomies. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper repositions archives as active, ethical sites of intervention, rather than passive depositories of knowledge. It argues that to truly transform the colonial legacies of ethnographic photography, archives must move beyond preservation toward ethical curation, engaging with communities represented rather than merely cataloging them