US-China summit’s symbolic archive tour masks deeper geopolitical knowledge asymmetries and historical amnesia
Original framing: “Trump to wrap up Xi summit with a tour of US archives - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Marginalized voices, such as those of *Hong Kong archivists* documenting protests or *Uyghur scholars* preserving oral histories, are systematically excluded from geopolitical narratives. The *2020 *International Council on Archives* report* noted that 60% of the world’s archives are inaccessible to non-state actors, disproportionately affecting Global South communities. Even within the US, *Black archivists* like *Dorothy Porter* have fought to include African American histories in national archives, yet their struggles are absent from the summit’s framing. The tour’s focus on Trump and Xi ignores how archival access is a tool of exclusion for those outside state power.
The US-China summit’s archival tour is not a gesture of transparency but a *performative assertion of historical dominance*, where the US’s colonial-era archival hoarding meets China’s state-directed historical revisionism in a spectacle that obscures deeper power asymmetries.
Indigenous knowledge systems, like the *Ifugao batan* or *Maori whakapapa*, reveal archives as living, relational fields rather than neutral records—yet these are excluded from geopolitical discussions, just as *Hong Kong archivists* or *Uyghur scholars* are silenced. Historical parallels, from the *Great Game* to the *Iranian coup*, show how archives have long been weapons of statecraft, yet the current framing treats them as apolitical backdrops. The trickster reminds us that the most dangerous archives are those we never question: the ones that define what is *remembered*, who is *seen*, and whose histories are *erased*. To move forward, solutions must center Indigenous sovereignty, global commons for critical data, and artistic resistance—because the real battle over archives is not about access, but about *who gets to write the future*.