Caswell

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Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives (2021)

intro

Many scholars used to think of the time between 1946, when the Luce- Cellar Act imposed a restrictive 100-person-a-year quota on Indian immigration, and 1965, when the US Immigration Act was passed, repealing the quota, as being a kind of dead space for the community, with little cultural and political activity.3 This film is evidence of a largely unknown continuity of South Asian American stories…

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What we see is not a progress narrative where society gets less racist over time culminating in a harmonious multiracial America, but a cyclical repetition of oppression in which a minoritized community is doomed to suffer the repeated consequences of white supremacist violence.

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…spiritual.”When asked by Alam if it pro- duced an experience of “disembodiment” to see old family movies juxtaposed with recent news footage of hate crimes, Dhillon’s daughter Ravi responded, “the politicization produced the very opposite feeling. I felt it was closer to home. I felt it was more personal.” 14She then recounted stories about racism her Indian cous- ins experienced when traveling throughout the United States. For her, Alam’s rein- terpretation of her family’s own home movies enabled her to draw through-lines between the personal and the…

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At their best, that is what archives empower people to do—see themselves in a new light across space and time. At their very best, archives then catalyze this new self-reflection into action, motivating users into activism beyond their personal contexts. Using Kathy Carbone’s term, Alam transformed the Dhillonn footage into a “moving record,” that is, a record that moves us as secondary users as it cir- culates through Alam’s activation in his remixed piece. 16As the initial record travels through space and time via “Lavaan,” it gets activated and reactivated, contextual- ized and recontextualized, creating a new record with each viewing, catalyzing limitless visceral and politic…

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In previous work, I’ve used the terms “symbolic annihilation” to describe the affective impact of being ignored, misrepresented, or underrepresented in archives and “representa- tional belonging” to describe the feeling of complex and nuanced representation after such erasure. 17Community archives, I have argued, counter symbolic annihi- lation by catalyzing representational belonging in minoritized communities. But the Dhillonn home movies and Alam’s reuse and remixing of th…

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the affective impact of representational belonging, toward a deeper understanding of our current political moment. That understanding gets us one step closer to action.

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This book contends that if community archives are to fulfill their liberatory potential they must be activated for resistance rather than assimila- tion or integration into the mainstream. As such, community-based memory workers must go beyond the recuperation of minoritized histories, however important, to catalyze those histories for liberation. The aspects and aims of libera- tory memory work are the subjects…

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SAADA is a post-custodial digital-only archive, meaning that, rather than accept- ing custody of materials, we borrow physical materials, digitize them, return them, and steward digital surrogates.

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When we first started, professional archivists frequently dismissed us. We were told that community archives do not exist in the United States (in response to the majority of the literature on community archives emerging from the United Kingdom at that time), we were told that digital archives are not really archives (based on doubts about the sustainability of digital preservation), and that com- munity archives are merely illegitimate “stepping stones” until the materials are ultimately donated to mainstream institutions (based on racist paternalism that assumes communities of color are not capable of stewarding their own materials). It has been amazing to witness seismic shifts in the field, such that, even with some continued pushback, there is now a large body of literature about community archives in the United States; now even the most technologically-averse archivists no longer see digital preservation as an oxymoron; and now even the most conser- vative archivists working in predominantly white institutions are talking about “community eng…

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Following in the footsteps of advocates like Bergis Jules, Mallick and other community archivists have recently formed a Community Archives Collaborative to strengthen and codify this resource sharing.

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There is a continuum that posits white people, on one end, replicating white supremacist structures and appropriating cultures that are not their own, and on the other end, acting as co-conspirators with people of color for mutual liberation. I aim to always be on the side of the latter, but I cannot say I always get it right. I have tried to learn when to speak up and when to listen, when to provide direction, and when to take orders.

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I consider these two projects—sustaining SAADA and other community archives and dismantling white supremacy in mainstream university and government repos- itories—to be twin pillars with the same goal: creating liberatory archival theories and practices.Through the anti-racist workshops and my work with SAADA, I aim to both dismantle the master’s house and build a new house simultaneously, and pick up on Maria Cotera’s reimagining of Audre Lorde’s apt metaphor in the digi- tal archival realm. 20For me, this is both/and work; I must both tear down and build up, even if it means frantically doing twice the work. Part of this work for me has been building theory and research that critiques dominant Western archival theory and builds new liberatory theory and research based on the work of community …

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On the social sciences research side, I direct a team of students at the UCLA Community Archives Lab.

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By imagining what does not yet exist, but might if we collectively will it, I am trying to extricate archival theory and practice from the constraints of the oppressive sys- tems in which it is rooted and for which it has been a tool. My speculation is nor- mative and prescriptive in the sense that I identify directions that I think archival theory and practice should take at the same time acknowledging my opinions about the future of archival practice are that of one person among…

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This recent burst of energy and insight, while encompassing various and some- times conflicting methods, theories, and aims, can best be described as critical archi- val studies.

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…define criti- cal archival studies as those approaches that “(1) explain what is unjust with the current state of archival research and practice, (2) posit practical goals for how such research and practice can and should change, and/or (3) provide the norms for such critique.” 23Building off definitions of critical theory from the Frankfurt School and its reverberations in what is now known as Critical Library and Information Studies, critical approaches to archival theory and practice are unabashedly emancipatory in aim, emphasizing the structural and interlocking nature of various forms of oppression, white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy foremost among them. Critical approaches to archives not only reveal how power is imbricated in archival theory and practice, but seek to create a transformative praxis that liberates rather than oppre…

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…hips, to envisage alternative realities, and to reach beyond the taken-for-granted towards possibili- ties.” 26Most importantly, as this book argues, critical approaches also require us to act, to start to build the liberatory worlds that we have imagined.

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This book is located within, builds off of, and expands critical archival studies, simultaneously situating the current state of archival discourses and practices in the oppressive structures from which they emerge, imagining new ways of thinking about and doing archives that emancipate rather than oppress, and most impor- tantly, describing projects that begin to enact such visions of liberatory memory work. It argues, contrary to dominant tropes, that archival endeavors should not be about documenting the past, nor even about imagining the future (as I have previ- ously argued), but about building a liber…

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While liberation will take various forms, make various demands, and call for various archival theories and practices depending on context, liberatory approaches fundamentally center oppressed communities, using records and archives to invert dominant hierarchies caused by white supremacy, hetero-partriarchy, capitalism, and other forms of oppression. Such inversion is not aimed at replacing those cur- rently at the top of the hierarchy with those at the bottom, but rather, at disman- tling the notion and instantiation of hierarchy altogether, so that all humans can live more consens…

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34Furthermore, the term “minoritized” shifts the action to those in power; people in power minoritize, or make others (those with less power) into a minority.

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Previously the domain of under-employed h ans, what we now refer to as “archival studies” began to more closely align with library science in the 1980s, such that most professional archival jobs now require a master’s of library and information science degree, and by the 1990s, library and information stud- ies departments (rather than history departments) began to confer doctoral degrees on scholars firmly rooted in the archival tradition. As library schools and library science were shifted to schools of information studies or “ischools,” they brought archival stud- ies along with them, such that we can now describe archival studies as a sub-field of information studies that is concerned with the creation, administration, and use of records as “persistent representations” and potential evidence of human activity that travel across space and time, as well as the people, communities, and institutions that stewa…

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Yet, as some scholarship in archival studies finds firm roots in the humanities, archival studies scholarship has largely been ignored by investigations into “the archive” from humanistic fields, such as anthropology, ethnic studies, gender stud- ies, and literature. The two discussions—of “the archive” by humanities scholars and “of archives” by archival studies scholars (located in library and information studies departments and schools of information)—are happening on parallel tracks. The “archival turn” in the humanities, it seems, has veered humanities scholars firmly away from the very scholarship that has most critically engaged archival issues for decades. For humanities scholars, “the archive” has become a Foucauldian or Derridean metaphor, an idea, rather than a material reality. By contrast, archival studies scholars, while more than capable of metaphor and abstract thought, ground their theories in what I would call “actually existing archives,” be they analog or digital, consisting of tangible or intangible records, held by individuals, families, communities, or instituti…

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In putting critical theory from the humanities into conversation with archival theory from information studies, I hope to bridge the two disciplines and heal what has been an unproductive rift.

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Here we can broadly divide c nity archives into two categories—those that represent and serve dominant com- munities, such as historical societies that are often invested in white supremacist histories as a way to maintain or increase local property values, and those that represent and serve under-represented, marginalized, and/or oppressed communi- ties. It is the latter group of community archives that is the subject of …

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Another important distinction needs to be made between community archives in which community members have autonomy over archival practices, and extractive collective practices by which mainstream institutions, usually comparatively well- funded, predominantly white universities, collect materials from oppressed commu- nities without entering into an ongoing relationship of …

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As I have argued elsewhere, community archives instantiate what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “strategic essentialism,” that is the temporary deployment of essentialist identity categories by marginalized groups for discrete political gain. Strategic essentialism simultaneously acknowl- edges that identity categories are socially constructed and builds solidarity among individuals who identity with such categories based on shared lived experiences of oppr…

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43They are participatory, in which the community being represented and served actively participates in archival practices.

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…engage in shared stewardship in which custody of materials is not transferred in a discrete transaction from one party to the other, but rather, entails entering into an ongoing and mutual relationship.They reflect a multiplicity of viewpoints and record formats…

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…multimedia materials, to immaterial and intangible records.They are explicitly activist in orientation, exhibiting none of the professional pretense of objectivity or the false sense of neutrality still weighing down the prac- tices of mainstream archives.

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They entail reflexivity, in which participants actively engage in self-critique with the goal of improvement.

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They value the affective or emotional impact of archival collecting and use, taking into consideration how records make people feel.

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The stuff—what gets c lected—is only as important as it enables connections between people, who use the stuff to share stories, transmit memory, and build relationships.

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Most importantly, in contrast to many mainstream c ing practices, community archives value people over stuff.

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This book argues that archivists and users of archives can engage in liberatory memory work by activating records for temporal autonomy, self-recognition, and the redistribution of resources.

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…the book’s main theoretical contribution, namely that archival labor should be harnessed in the contemporary moment as a disrup- tion of both dominant white progress narratives and cycles of oppression that inequitably target people of color and queer commu…

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The aim is to inspire readers to activate archives to interrupt oppressive cycles.

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Throughout, this book moves toward a new understanding of the nature of archival work. It provides us with new language to describe the ethical obligations of memory workers, and shifts us from a cruel and cold neutrality to a messy engaged commitment to co-liberation.

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It challenges those of us involved in community-based archives to move beyond the politics of more robust representation (however important that is), and toward a liberatory activation of records that catalyzes their creation and use to dismantle systems of temporal, affective, and material oppression.

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1 A Matter of Time: Archival Temporalities

Bunch’s tweet and the accompanying Smithsonian statement illustrate a com- mon trope for archivists: we preserve traces of the past for the future.

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Yet this construction relies on a linear temporality that is rooted in d nant Western progress narratives. Such assertions should compel us to ask: Whose traces? Whose past(s)? Whose present(s)? Whose future(s)? Who is present in this conversation, of course, determines whose present is accounted for and to whom.

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…d nant Western archival thinking within linear Christian temporalities that assert the inevitable march of history toward human progress. Such constructions falsely assume that ongoing oppression is primarily a thing of the past and position archival inter- ventions as key components of processes of learning from and improving upon that past.Yet these linear progress narratives are incommensurable with cyclical concep- tions of time emerging from non-dominant tradition…

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…3Using insights from critical race theory and queer theory, this chapter then uncovers the whiteness and heteronormativity of dominant archival temporalities that fix the record in a singular moment in time and imbue it with the potentiality of future use.

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Most importantly, this chapter asks: Is it possible to liberate archives and records from the “white temporal imaginary”?

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…r Mark Rifkin writes, Indigenous duration operates less as a chronological sequence than as overlap- ping networks of affective connection (to persons, nonhuman entities, and place) that orient one’s way of moving through space and time, with story as a crucial part of that…

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Settler colonialism seeks to obliterate these cyclical temporalities in its ongoing quest for extraction.

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22For Afro- futurists, the past is neither something that can nor should be left behind, but rather, becomes an inextricable informant to and, in some cases, coinciding temporality with, the future.While there is not a singular Afro-futurist construction o…

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These raging debates are beyond the scope of this book, but the Christian notion of a linear progression is a key concept here.

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To view time progressively is to posit a sense of linear temporal movement marked by the improvement of the human condition. Things inevitably get better over time. Oppression wanes, ignorance is dispelled, rights are accrued, honored, and enforced.

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32Justice is the inevitable end goal in Christian eschatology; all events are merely steppingstones on that inescap- able march toward the apocalypse, in which the messiah returns, a cosmic justice is enacted, and time ends.

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Time as a linear progression is woven throughout the European philosophical tradition, from the Enlightenment to Hegel, from social Darwinism to positivism.

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Marx too plots a straight arrow of time.

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41This inequitable d bution of time also has been described by activist, artist, and lawyer Rasheedah Phillips, who notes how racialized poverty and criminalization impose white tempo- ral regimes on her Black clients and neighbors, ranging from the imposi…

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White time, for Mills, instantiates across mul- tiple venues: in settler societies that deny history before colonization; in dominant expectations of productivity and proper use of time; and in carceral regimes of wait- ing and “serving” time. Mills writes, “Whites are self-positioned as the masters of their own time, as against those mastered by…

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In white American political i ogy, it is only a matter of time before everyone is treated as white, whiteness held out eternally as the ideal state of being.While whiteness remains attainable or achievable to an ever-greater swathe of the population in thi…

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…that it does not necessarily get better and that the arc of the moral universe does not necessarily bend toward justice. Instead of an inevitable linear march toward progress, we are witnessing and participating in cycles of oppression: two steps forward, two steps back…

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Extending the work of Charles W. Mills, we may say that dominant Western archival theory relies not just on linear Christian time or modernity, but on white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative temporalities, that is, notions of time that are inextricable from and invested in whiteness, maleness, and straightness. Specifically, dominant Western archival concepts are cleaved onto notions of social progress, which, in the American context, translates into linear white narratives of racial progress ending in an inevitable post-racial white future.

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Dominant Western archival t ory’s twin fixations with fixity and futurity belie the white temporal imaginary.

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…fixity belies a host of temporal assumptions that presume fixity in a point of time and space is possible. If time is cyclical, overlapping, and recurring, so are the events that produce records. Fixity thus becomes a fiction. And not just a fiction, but an instrument of control.

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…, a record fixes events and actions in time and therefore keeps the fear at bay.” 59In this dominant formulation of records, fixity is what enables records to serve as evidence of the past; what is fixed is ontologically reliable, what is fluid is suspect.

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Anderson further argues that the dominant Western archival insistence on the physical instantiation, or materiality, of records relies on this temporal break between record creation and use, which in turn, relies on linear temporalities.

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Thus while records contain information, they are distinct from other forms of documents in that they may also serve as evidence of action; they are forever-into- the-future linked to the action that created them.

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In this sense, records are of the past but defined by their future potentiality.

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Action and its evidence. Primary and secondary values. Record creation and use. These conceptual pairs rely on a clean “temporal break” in a linear model as Anderson describes.Yet linear temporalities are not universal, context-less, or value neutral, as p…

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…describes.Yet linear temporalities are not universal, context-less, or value neutral, as previously outlined. They are fundamentally rooted in Enlightenment thinking and in white cultural imaginaries of racial progress, and have been imposed on much of the world through colonialism and neocolonialism.

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If the arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice, then records are not just fixed evidence of the past, they are fixed evidence of some morally less-just past. As such, they can then be used in some more-just future, a future closer to the justice-end of the arc of the moral universe…

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Not only does this construction assume a straight line between past, present, and future, it also assumes that the real issue society faces is ignorance, and not maldis- tribution of power; if only we learned from the mistakes of the past by engaging with our history, our future society would be (magically, somehow) more just, the logic asserts. As such, the societal role of the archivist is to preserve traces of the past and encourage educational use of those traces; it is not to fundamentally shift power struc…

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Furthermore, any discussion of archival responsibilities and roles must acknowl- edge that white supremacy and heteropatriarchy are not just systems of the past, but rather ongoing scourges.

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To build archival theories and systems based on one dominant yet unnamed temporality masquerading as universal is to ignore and de-legitimate countless other non-dominant ways of viewing time. Given that time is a fundamental com- ponent of ontology and epistemology, to steamroll nonlinear temporalities enacts ontological and epistemic violence on minoritized world views, what we may call chronoviolence. Chronoviolence asserts that the linear white way of constructing time is the only legitimate way, and then, through colonialism and wh…

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supremacist power structures, makes the world conform to the expectations of white temporality.

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As such, c olence gaslights members of oppressed communities who insist that what has been constructed as oppression of the past is indeed not past, but ongoing.

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What would an archival theory extricated from the chronoviolence of white temporal imaginaries look like? What would it look like to disentangle our defini- tion of record, and by extension, archives, from the linear progress narrative and white temporality presented by dominant Western archival theory? How might non-dominant temporalities help us rethink both the core concept of record and our archival interventions on records? To raise the stakes, is it possible to liberate archival theory from white supr…

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The records c tinuum model challenges linearity, replacing the life cycle with concentric circles that reflect dynamic and transformative nature of archival interventions and uses.

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For Faulkhead, records do not need to be fixed in time and space, or separated from the event of their creation, to be records. Indeed, such narrow definitions of record that rely on fixity and materiality have resulted in white supremacist theories that fail to recognize oral, kinetic, or performative records as records, and in so doing, deem entire civilizations “record-free,” or at least dependent solely on written colonial records to write history.

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Oral records, she convincingly argues, are records, and should be given their full eviden- tiary weight as such, rather than “fall[ing] into the gaps and vagaries of American archivy.” 86The consequences are not just conceptual; they are material.

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Separating “recordness” from fixity and materiality offers such alternate epistemo- logical forms.

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… Lee, and Saif show us, extricating records from the chronoviolence of the white temporal imaginary causes us to dispense with assump- tions about linear temporality and material fixity, resulting in radical redefinitions of records and, in turn, archives.

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…efinition of record to take the place of that offered by the Society of American Archivists’ glossary or by Geoffrey Yeo, but rather contend that multiple and conflicting defini- tions are necessary to make sense of varying cultural and political contexts.

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Pluralism has become an assimilationist strategy when what we need is a radical rupture that fully haults, acknowledges, accounts for, and undoes the ongoing violences of colonialism, white supremacy, and het- ero-patriarchy. Attempts to incorporate fluid, mobile, unfixed records into domi- nant archival structures will only further such vi…

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94Liberatory memory work does not ask for a recognition, it demands a refusal. Here, I am refusing to be pinned down to a singular definition of a core concept; to do so would be a colonizing move. The beauty must rest in the difference.

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While there is no singular way to disentangle records from the chronoviolence of dominant Western archival theory, such extraction also requires that we re- conceptualize archival use as well, shifting our imaginary about use from some vague, more-just future that might never come, to now. What does it mean to acti- vate records to end cycles of oppression in the current political moment? What does liberatory memory work look like if there is no guarantee the future will be better than the past?

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2 Community Archives Interrupting Time

More existentially, I began to ask: what good is research on community archives in the face of a white supremacist quasi-fascist regime taking control of my country? It is a question that I have been haunted by and that has guided my work ever since.

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For these communities, time was playing out in cyclical, not linear terms. Across sites, we found a prevailing sense that community members were seeing history repeat itself, that historic trauma their communities had suffered not only was never addressed and redressed, but that the same oppressive tactics their communities experienced decades ago were being used in the current moment, that white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy were manifesting in the same ways as they had in the past, and that oppression that community elders had experienced as young people was happening to young peo- ple in their communities again n…

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As these focus groups showed, community archives are more important than ever to communities

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fighting the white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy surfaced by (but clearly extending before and beyond) Trump’s election.

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Focus group participants also conveyed a sense that elders in the community, those who have experienced the pendulum swinging before, had a duty to educate younger generations that each era, whether its marked by oppression or freedom, is temporary.

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Although participants in the Lambda focus groups did not explicitly engage the theories of temporality discussed in the prior chapter, it was clear that they position Lambda’s collections as evidence of ongoing cycles of oppression, rather than as points on a unidirectional linear progress narrative. The future wellbeing of the community was a source of anxiety, particularly under the uncertainty brought on by the new administration. A better future, in which LGBTQ communities could fully express their rights, was not seen as the inevitable next step in the procession of history, but rather a precarious possibility given the repetitive cycles of oppres- sion LGBTQ communities have experienced throughout hi…

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…records do not mark singular unrepeatable moments in history, but rather, are in relationship with what I call corollary records documenting reoccurring moments in time in which the same or similar oppressions get repeated. A corollary moment is a point in time with historical precedence, where the pendulum swings back to the same place it had been before…

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At their most useful, records can be activated in c lary moments in the present, so that community members can learn activist tactics and strategies and get inspiration to keep going, in the words of Risi.

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To impose a linear progress narrative on this community’s imagining of time and records would enact a form of chronoviolence, as discussed in the previous chapter, and miss the community’s creative formulations of queer temporalities.

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These conversations led me to reformulate the concept of archival imaginary that I have been thinking through for almost a decade.

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…rchives.” 16In other words, minoritized communities and the archives that serve and represent them dynamically co-constitute each other over time, continually re-defining and shifting based on ever-changing notions of belonging, boundaries, and identities.

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If historical time is cyclical rather than linear, as the users of Lambda suggested, traces of the past are not activated to envision a distant (and wholly uncertain) future, but rather to mark corollary moments, or reoccurring points, in the now. In this way, records pinpoint the repetition of histories of oppression, rather than discrete, contained moments on an irreversible progressive march ending in liberation. We must shift the focus, then, of the archival imaginary, from some future moment to the present, as users of archives search for past corollaries to their current situation through archival use.

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Users activate these records now, not earmark them for the future. The imaginary is not forthcoming; it is already happening.

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Fujita-Rony did not downplay the importance of “representational belonging,” what I have described elsewhere as that feeling of seeing yourself and your community robustly represented after being symbolically annihilated in archives. But she wanted more from archives than just representational belonging; she wanted the community to transform those moments of self-recognition into political consciousness and, ultimately, action.

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…no one described what we might call a heteronormative or white conception of records as fixed material evidence of discrete finished moments. The chronoviolence embedded in dominant Western archival theory fails to account for the differing temporalities, and corresponding constructions of records, found at these sites of empowerment for minoritized communities. Instead of the fixity and futurity embedded in dominant Western archival definitions of records, users of these four community archives articulated a very different conception of records, one that hinges on shifting relationships over time—relationships between corollary moments in the past and present, between generations within a community, between their own community and other communities experiencing oppression…

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If archives preserve facts, and facts are no longer important under the new admin- istration, what good are archives? If activating records induces empathy, and empa- thy is no longer useful as a political tool, what good are records?

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44White supremacists cannot be educated into empathy, because a lack of empathy is not the primary problem; inequitable distribution of power is. Thus, white supremacists are acting out of self-interest in maintaining power.

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3 From Representation to Activation

This chapter will show how SAADA is drawing on corollary records from corol- lary moments to catalyze political consciousness and action in the now.

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Through strategic outreach with activists, artists, and other community members, archivists can ensure the records in their care are activated to stop oppression in the present. Ultimately, the chapter argues that community archives must pair liberatory appraisal with liberatory activation in order to resist the white temporal imaginary.

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…digital participatory microhistories,” which we defined as “any programmatic activity that uses Internet-based technologies to encourage com- munity members to directly create short records for inclusion in an archives.” 7Archival theorists restricted to the dominant Western tradition (including one of the reviewers of our 2014 Archives and Manuscripts article), deem such projects “unarchival” because they catalyze the generation of new records created for the explicit purpose of being archived, rather than collect pre-existing records that were created as the “neutral by- product” of administrative activity, with no foresight of inclusion in an archives, accord- ing to the dominant Western conception of “record.” Mallick and I argue that such distinctions are meaningless for many communities and indeed, that we are ethically compelled to generate new records in the face of racist erasures and silences in pre- existing…

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The project moves around and across a repetition of time, asking participants to reflect on the now for a very soon if uncertain future, when it will then ask participants to look back toward a very recent past. In so doing, it both reflects and produces a cyclical temporality; the past is retrievable, the immediate future is conceivable.

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…on’t have the answers, I’m trying to work through it and make meaning of it just like you are,” Mallick seemed to communicate, “Let’s figure it out together.” This sense of shared authority is a hallmark of successful community archives, I argue elsewhere.

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…more importantly, it underscores the affective importance of the creation of records to participants—those who write letters to themselves feel validated, heard, documented in the historic record, even if they choose not to share their letters with others.

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Rao’s graphics, taken together with Mallick’s remarks at the July 2020 zoom meeting, and years of Tides articles and recent social media posts, forge a cyclical temporality similar to that seen at the other community archives sites described in the previous chapter. These cyclical temporalities dispense with the racial progress narratives of white time; instead of insisting that “it gets better” for minoritized communities, these efforts show how oppressive histories repeat, how “historical possibilities” (to use Mallick’s words) can be invoked to forge affinities and solidari- ties in the present, how a precedent of anti-racist activism can inspire action for Black lives in …

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Community archives do not have the same pretense of neutrality to which many university or government repositories claim adherence. Such adherence is a guise for an oppressive status quo rooted in whiteness, as Mario H. Ramirez has traced. 33Instead, many community archives see themselves as active participants in their community’s political struggles.

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Our initial aims were recuperative in the sense that we were trying to recuperate lost histories, pulling them back from oblivion into the community’s conscious- ness. 35Our work was also representational in the sense that we were trying to increase the amount and types of representations of South Asians in US stories about the past. Recuperative and representational collecting kept us busy for nearly a decade, and guided by a very broad appraisal policy, we discovered (and digitized) more than we had ever anticipated about South Asian American…

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Building on Duff and Harris’s naming of “liberatory description,” I characterize these initial recuperative and representational collecting impulses as forms of libera- tory appraisal.

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While it is crucial to catalyze the generation of new records that fill in gaps, in order to truly center minoritized com- munities, archives must respect silences, resist surveillance, and honor consent.This will mean changing commonly accepted practices and polici…

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48Brown’s work is a powerful reminder that there is nothing inherently liberatory about the “com- munity” aspect of “community archives.”

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Furthermore, as many trans activists have noted, the heightened visibility brought about by increased representation can further expose vulnerable communities to violence and other forms of oppression.

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… true for archives as well.Visibility, one might ask, for whom? In this context, recuperative and representational collecting can be exploitative, extractive, and harmful, the result of oppressive appraisal prac- tices, if downstream use is not considered.

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Given this complexity, more representational collecting is not necessarily the result of liberatory appraisal, but it can be. Recuperative and representational collect- ing can be liberatory appraisal strategies if they are part of a larger liberatory proj- ect. Thus liberatory appraisal is the process of determining the value of records in regards to their potential activation for liberation struggles. Contrary to the past century of dominant Western appraisal theory, liberatory appraisal co…

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potential uses of records in making appraisal decisions, and further asks whose uses and for what aims. In this sense, liberatory appraisal is intimately tied to liberatory outreach, as it is only in the activation of records that their full liberatory potential can be realized. Its undergirding assumption is that archives can catalyze particular kinds of use (political, artistic, activist) by modeling that use in their own practices and by targeting outreach efforts to groups engaged in liberatory work.

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Community archives, it has become increasingly clear to me, must leverage the recuperative and representational imperatives to activate corollary records across corollary moments in the present for liberation from oppressive systems.

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…it is not enough for archival institutions to collect records documenting minoritized communities and/or activist movements with a vague notion of potential future use; these records must be activated by archivists and users for liberation struggles now. Archives, like many other cultural, social, and legal institutions, have a largely unrealized liberatory potential.

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…and representational work with SAADA, Mallick, myself, and other SAADA community members subtly began to shift focus from collecting more representative records to activating the significant body of records we have already collected toward liberatory ends.

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4 Imagining Liberatory Memory Work

Liberation Now!