Diversity’s discontents: in search of an archive of the oppressed

ABSTRACT

Australian and US-based archivists have recently begun to confront their complicity in a documentary landscape that excludes and erases the voices and views of minority, oppressed and poor communities. Archival professional organisations in both countries attempt to confront this issue by focusing on the homogeneity of the profession, specifically through using the discourse of diversity. Thus, this keynote address, delivered at the 2017 conference of the Australian Society of Archivists in Melbourne, explores the following question: how, if at all, does diversity form part of the solution for dismantling the white supremacy of archives? It begins this inquiry by recounting the author’s participation and experience with diversity projects of the Society of American Archivists, before speculating how archivists might transition away from the language of diversity and towards the language of liberation through the concept of an archive of the oppressed. The central argument of the address is that dismantling white supremacy in archives requires archivists abandon the neoliberal discourse of diversity and adopt an archive of the oppressed, or a cooperative approach in which oppressed peoples are positioned as subjects in our own liberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• oppression
• neoliberalism
• archival profession

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. M Caswell, ‘Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives’, Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 87, no. 3, 2017, pp. 222–35.

2. JM Drake, ‘In Defense of Offense’, 2017, available at <https://medium.com/on-archivy/in-defense-of-offense-3ff6251df9c0>, accessed 19 February 2018.

3. Society of American Archivists, ‘Call for Proposals and Presenters: The Liberated Archive Forum’, 2017, available at <https://www2.archivists.org/am2017/program/call-for-proposals/liberated-archive-forum>, accessed 14 February 2018.

4. S Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, p. 53.

5. Society of American Archivists, ‘Equal Opportunity/Non-Discrimination Policy’, 2009, available at <https://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/appendices/app_a/EONDP>, accessed 26 September 2017.

6. M Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New Press, New York, 2012.

7. P Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum, New York, 2005, p. 48.

8. ibid., pp. 72–7.

9. JM Drake, ‘RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description’, 2016, available at <https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archival-description-568f133e4325>, accessed 19 February 2018; V Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, Archival Science, vol. 2, nos. 1–2, 2002, pp. 63–86.

10. S Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14; MJ Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2016.

11. V Suominen, ‘The Problem of “Userism”, and How to Overcome it in Library Theory’, in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007, paper colis33.

12. H Zinn, ‘Secrecy, Archives, and The Public Interest’, The Midwestern Archivist, vol. 2, no. 2, 1977, pp. 14–26.

13. A Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, Berkeley, CA, 1984, p. 112.

14. Freire, p. 54.

15. CR Collective, ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement’, in B Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2000, p. 264.

16. C Cohen, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437–65.

17. G Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006, pp. 68–9.

18. JS Allen, iVenceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2011, pp. 111–12.

19. I Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2018, p. 143.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jarrett M. Drake

Jarrett M. Drake is a PhD student in social anthropology at Harvard University and an advisory archivist for A People’s Archives of Police Violence in Cleveland. His lines of inquiry converge on issues of justice, state violence, accountability and memory work. Prior to Harvard, Jarrett spent four years as the Digital Archivist at Princeton University. While there, he volunteered as an instructor in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) Consortium through the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative, teaching preparatory and introductory college composition. Jarrett is a graduate of Benjamin Banneker Achievement Center in Gary, Indiana, USA.