Uses of the archive in Spanish Post-Colonial Documentaries

Abstract

This article analyses a series of recent documentaries articulated from archival material linked to Spanish colonial processes and imaginaries in the Sahara, Equatorial Guinea and the Canary Islands, contributing to the limited debates on Spanish postcolonial documentary. Specifically, it focuses on Africa 815 (Pilar Monsell, 2014), De los nombres de las cabras (Silvia Navarro Martín and Miguel G. Morales, 2019) and Anunciaron tormenta (Javier Fernández Vázquez, 2020). This research examines the creative approach to various archives and colonial tropes to address how these documentaries interrogate history and the imperialist structures of vision and knowledge. Within this history, these films take institutional and personal documents as epistemological experiments (Stoler, 2009), in which colonial power relations that produce facts, taxonomies and cultural identities are inscribed.