Extending this insight, postcolonial thinkers argued that the archive itself can be a hunting ground. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) demonstrates how scholarly and cultural systems cast the East as an object to be mastered. Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) asks whether those at the margins can be heard within frameworks built to exclude them. Missionary journals, colonial courts, and ethnographies—however meticulous—often encoded the hunter’s priorities, making absence look like consent. Thus, the challenge is not only to add voices, but to question the scaffolding that muted them. [...]
