![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
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’).
Notes
1. Gossett, “Historical Erasure as Violence.”
2. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover’.”
3. For more information on symbolic annihilation, see: Tuchman, “Introduction”; Eichstedt and Small, Representations of Slavery; and Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History.”
4. ‘Imagine otherwise’ is now a common phrase in critical theory and activism, but can also be traced to Chuh, Imagine Otherwise.
5. Bastian and Alexander, “Introduction”; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?”; Daniel, “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience”; and Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community.”
6. Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect”; Daniel, “Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience”; and Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History.”
7. Barriault, “Archiving the Queer and Queering the Archives.”
8. Flinn and Stevens, “It Is Nohmistri, Wimekin History.”
9. Ibid.
10. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?”
11. Flinn and Stevens, “It Is Nohmistri, Wimekin History.”
12. Shilton and Srinivasan, “Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement.”
13. Hurley, “Parallel Provenance”; Wurl, “Ethnicity as Provenance”; and Bastian, Owning Memory.
14. Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community.”
15. Gilliland, Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives, 20–21.
16. Barriault, “Archiving the Queer and Queering the Archives”; McCracken, “Community Archival Practice”; Ashmore, Craggs, and Neate, “Working-With”; de Leeuw, “Alice Through the Looking Glass”; Chazan, Baldwin, and Madokoro, “Aging, Activism, and the Archive”; Ramirez, “A Living Archive of Desire”; Gibbs, “The Heart of the Matter”; Corbman, “A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives”; X, Campbell, and Stevens, “Love and Lubrication in the Archives”; Edelberg, “Archive Discipline”; Rawson, “Archival Justice: An Interview with Ben Power Alwin”; Theron and Kgositau, “The Emergence of a Grassroots African Trans Archive.”
17. Notable exceptions include: Wakimoto, Bruce, and Partridge, “Archivist as Activist”; and Sheffield, “The Emergence, Development and Survival.”
18. Kaplan, “‘Many Paths to Partial Truths’.”
19. Tuchman, Hearth and Home; and Tuchman, “Women’s Depiction by the Mass Media.”
20. Tuchman, Hearth and Home, 10.
21. Merskin, “Sending Up Signals,” 335. For a discussion of representations of other racial groups, see also: Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots. Merskin, “The Construction of Arabs as Enemies”; Klein and Shiffman, “Underrepresentation and Symbolic Annihilation of Socially Disenfranchised Groups,” 56–7.
22. Eichstedt and Small, Representations of Slavery. See also: Alderman and Campbell, “Symbolic Excavation and the Artifact Politics of Remembering Slavery”; Modlin Jr., “Tales Told on the Tour.”
23. Eichstedt and Small, Representations of Slavery, 107.
24. Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History.”
25. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’.”
26. Brophy, “The Development of a Model,” 44.
27. Archival Metrics Investigators, http://www.archivalmetrics.org/. The site contains an extensive bibliography about impact.
28. Wavell et al., Impact Evaluation of Museums, Archives and Libraries, 6. See also: Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives.”
29. Horton and Spence, ‘Scoping the Economic and Social Impact of Archives,’ .49–50. See also: Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives.” Duff and Cherry, “Archival Orientation for Undergraduate Students.”
30. Marsh et al., “Stories of Impact.”
31. Ibid., 32–3.
32. Thorpe and Galassi, “Rediscovering Indigenous Languages.”
33. Ibid., 83.
34. Wavell et al., Impact Evaluation of Museums, Archives and Libraries, 19–20.
35. Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives: A Preliminary Investigation.”
36. Yaco and Hardy, “Historians, Archivists, and Social Activism.”
37. Community Archives Development Group, “Impact of Community Archives.”
38. For example, the report found that 50% of community archives in the UK receive funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. While we lack formal statistics in the US, very few community archives in the US receive support from the federal government. Ibid.
39. Punzalan and Caswell, “Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice,” 34; Cifor and Lee, “Towards an Archival Critique”.
40. Nicholson, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries”; Buschman, “Talkin’ ‘Bout My (Neoliberal) Generation”; Beilin, “Promoting and Resisting Student ‘Success’”; and Cope, “Neoliberalism and Library & Information Science.”
41. Eisenhower and Smith, “The Library as Stuck Place,” 314.
42. Seale, “The Neoliberal Library,” 40.
43. For a critique of what has been termed ‘the nonprofit industrial complex,’ see: Mananzala and Spade, “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Trans Resistance.”
44. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?” 75.
45. For a more thorough discussion of community archives and power, see: Caswell, “SAADA and the Community-based Archives Model.” For a discussion of ‘identity-based community archives,’ see: Caswell, “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries.”
46. L.A. as Subject, “Archives Bazaar.”
47. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30.
48. A pseudonym is being used to protect this subject, who is an undocumented immigrant.
49. Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez, “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing,” 57.