“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives1 (original) (raw)
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‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impact of Community Archives
Although much published work assumes that independent community archives have an important impact on communities, little research has been done to assess this impact empirically. This article begins to fill this gap by reporting the results of a series of qualitative interviews with academic members of one ethnic community regarding their responses to one community archives. More specifically, this article reports on interviews conducted with South Asian American educators regarding their responses to the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), an independent, nonprofit, community-based organization that operates the websites www.saada.org and www.firstdaysproject.org. The article reports on several emergent themes: the absence of or difficulty in accessing historical materials related to South Asian Americans before the emergence of SAADA; the affective and ontological impacts of discovering SAADA for the first time; the affective impact of SAADA on respondents' South Asian American students; and SAADA's ability to promote feelings of inclusion both within the South Asian American ethnic community and in the larger society. Together, these responses suggest the ways in which one community archives counters the symbolic annihilation of the community it serves and instead produces feelings of what the authors term “representational belonging.” The article concludes by exploring the epistemological, ontological, and social levels of representational belonging.
2009
This paper presents a theoretical perspective of documenting diverse cultures and communities, using constructs of cultural memory and authenticity, then illustrates its context with the practices of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other cultural institutions that serve as mediating structures between and among people and information; more specifically between cultural communities and groups and the records that document their lives. In the case of libraries and other cultural institutions seeking to document diverse cultures and communities, this entails preservation and access not only to books and other textual materials but also to other information and cultural artifacts of life and community.
South Asian American Digital Archive - Public History Review - Journal of American History
Journal of American History, 2021
In this piece I discuss the South Asian American Digital Archive's evolving organizational strategies and participatory projects, from its founding in 2008 to the present. In line with Johnson, Drake, and Caswell's call for archives and institutions to take up liberatory memory work, SAADA is "dedicated to animating traces of the past for social justice activism in the present and to envision and enact radically just futures" (https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/reflections-from-the-2016-mandela-dialogues). This public history review examines how SAADA puts liberatory memory work into practice and how SAADA's struggles and triumphs in this pursuit reflect broader ongoing efforts to enact a coalitional South Asian American identity and politics.
‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation
Archives and Records
Through data gleaned from semi-structured interviews with 17 community archives founders, volunteers and staff at 12 sites in Southern California, this paper develops a new tripartite framework for understanding the ontological, epistemological and social impact of community archives. Throughout, it reflects the ways in which communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender and political position experience both the profoundly negative affective consequences of absence and misrepresentation in mainstream media and archives (which it calls ‘symbolic annihilation’) and the positive effect of complex and autonomous forms of representation in community-driven archives (which it terms ‘representational belonging’).
Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges1
Journal of the Society of Archivists, 2007
This article will examine the community archive movement, exploring its roots, its variety and present developments. It will identify the possible impact on the national archival heritage, particularly on the many gaps and absences in that contemporary heritage, of community archive materials and examine some of the opportunities and challenges that these initiatives present to the mainstream profession. This capacity to evacuate any historical dimension to black life remains a fundamental achievement of racist ideologies in this country. .. This reintroduction of history is not a minimal aim. Racism rests on the ability to contain blacks in the present, to repress and to deny the past. (Paul Gilroy, Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 1987) 2 Part of our problem is that we do not know our histories; part of your problem is that you do not know our histories. So much of the hostility we face is based on ignorance and we must challenge this. (Stephen Small, The Politics of British Black History, 1991) 3 Personally, I see no reason why, as a white woman, the history of black people in this country is any less part of my history than castles and medieval churches. .. It is something we all share, just by being here. (Deborah Lamb, Director of Policy and Communications, English Heritage, 2007) 4 These three quotations explore the implications of exclusion from history and from heritage. They all examine the question from the perspective of Black history, but could easily be applied to a number of different groups or identities who are marginalised or under-represented within our histories. The point that is made is that
Imagining transformative spaces: the personal-political sites of community archives
Archival Science, 2018
Although much has been written about formal archival spaces, little scholarship has addressed the physical spaces of community archives. This paper asks: How do community members imagine the physical spaces that steward identity-based community archives? Based on focus groups with more than 54 community archives users at five different community archives sites across Southern California, this paper examines how members of marginalized communities conceive of the physical space inhabited by community archives representing their communities. The sites explored range from a prominent location on a university campus, to storefronts, strip malls, and small cinderblock buildings. Yet across sites, users spoke about community archives spaces as symbolic and affec-tively moving locations. Many users described their community archives site as a ''home-away-from-home,'' marked by intergenerational dialog and a profound sense of belonging. For other users, community archives sites were described as ''politically generative spaces'' which foster dialog and debate about identity, representation, and activism and enable the community to envision its future. And yet, while the very existence of community archives is political, many participants felt that the full political potential of these sites is not yet realized. By listening to the voices of the communities represented and served by community archives, our research both indicates that a shift is warranted in archival metaphors of space and reveals how community archives are personally and politically transformative spaces for the communities they represent and serve.