Urgent Archives

Enacting Liberatory Memory Work

Michelle Caswell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Bibliotheks- & Informationswissenschaft

Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description.

Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the book explores how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell explores the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present.

Urgent Archives extends the theoretical range of critical archival studies and provides a new framework for archivists looking to transform their practices. The book should also be of interest to scholars of archival studies, museum studies, public history, memory studies, gender and ethnic studies and digital humanities.

Chapter 1

A matter of time

Archival temporalities

Writing on June 11, 2020, in the midst of an international uprising for Black lives that brought protestors to the Smithsonian’s front doors, Lonnie G. Bunch, III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, tweeted, “We must collect today for tomorrow.” Through that tweet Bunch announced a new coalition of Smithsonian and community-based curators to ensure adequate and robust documentation. The attached press release asserts, “The Smithsonian Institution is collecting today so that the world, in the present and future, can understand the role that race has played in our complicated 400-year history.”¹ Such statements rely on a linear construction of time in which race is seen primarily as a problem of the past (and together with it, racism, one assumes), even as the uprising against ongoing racism is what is being documented in the present.

Bunch’s tweet and the accompanying Smithsonian statement illustrate a common trope for archivists: we preserve traces of the past for the future.² The assertion is our professional elevator speech, how we quickly explain the importance of what we do. Yet this construction relies on a linear temporality that is rooted in dominant 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.

This chapter shifts the moment of archival responsibility, from a singular present to a multiplicity of uncertain pasts, presents, and futures, and posits that archiving traces of ongoing oppression demands a different orientation to time. First, it locates dominant 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 interventions as key components of processes of learning from and improving upon that past. Yet these linear progress narratives are incommensurable with cyclical conceptions of time emerging from non-dominant traditions worldwide, including Hindu, Indigenous North American, Black, and queer temporalities, reflecting what philosopher Charles W. Mills calls “white time.”³ Using 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. It asserts that tropes that position archivists as stewards of traces of the past for the future have become implicit instruments of oppression in dominant archival theory and practice. Most importantly, this chapter asks: Is it possible to liberate archives and records from the “white temporal imaginary”? In questioning notions of historical, political, and cultural progress, this chapter builds on assertions from critical race theory and queer theory that “it” indeed does not necessarily and inevitably get better, and repositions archival roles in response to ongoing and cyclical repetitions of oppression.⁴

Cyclical temporalities

Across a great swath of the world, many people have not historically and do not currently see time as a linear progression. As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel plots out in Time Maps, time can be visualized through a wide range of models, including unilinear and multilinear, zigzag, corkscrew, and circular, each model rooted in and reflective of a particular worldview.⁵ By briefly exploring some nonlinear temporalities, we can uncover the temporal assumptions embedded in dominant Western archival theory and practice and begin to generate new theories and practices that better represent non-dominant cultures and communities.⁶

In Hinduism, for example, time is cyclical, a “Mobius strip” as Wendy Doniger describes it.⁷ Events happen, and then they happen again. There are four yugas, or epochs, within each cycle of time, the longest lasting 1,728,000 years and the shortest lasting 432,000 years. Social conditions get progressively worse as humans go through each age. The first epoch is characterized by truth and unity and humans live to be 100,000 years old. Then human virtue devolves through the ages, each epoch worse than the prior one, until you get to the Kali Yuga, which is characterized by greed, ignorance, war, environmental degradation, and poverty. In this age, people only live 100 years maximum.⁸ This is the age we live in now by Hindu estimations. At the end of the Kali Yuga, the god Vishnu comes as Kalki riding a horse, killing evildoers, and destroying the world. But then, the whole thing repeats itself ad infinitum. One thousand of these cycles happen in just one day in the life of Brahma, the creator, and he lives to be 315 trillion years old. Even then, there is dissolution for a while, but then the whole things start up again, endlessly.⁹

Hinduism does not present the only ontological challenge to linear temporalities. Although the diversity of Indigenous North American cosmologies and ontologies render broad generalizations about conceptions of Indigenous time inaccurate, many Indigenous scholars have written about the ways in which time is layered and relational rather than linear and absolute. Sioux scholar Nick Estes, for example, writes,

Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is our future.¹⁰

Similarly, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, writing about the ontologies and epistemologies of her Nishnaabeg community, places cyclical time as one of many factors that hold people, animals, and land in ethical relationship with each other. “Our stories have always talked about the future and the past at the same time,” she writes, asserting, “rhythmic repetition is at the base of Nishnaabeg intelligence.”¹¹ Drawing on these philosophies, literature scholar Mark Rifkin writes,

Indigenous duration operates less as a chronological sequence than as overlapping 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 process.¹²

He writes,

Rather than approaching time as an abstract, homogenous measure of universal movement along a singular axis, we can think of it as plural, less as a temporality than temporalities. From this perspective, there is no singular unfolding of time, but instead, varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms.¹³

Writing about what they call “historical unresolved grief,” in Indigenous communities, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Lemyra M. DeBruyn assert, “The connectedness of past to present to future remains a circle of lessons and insights.”¹⁴ Time is overlapping circles of relationships, not a straight causal line of events.

Settler colonialism seeks to obliterate these cyclical temporalities in its ongoing quest for extraction. Pushing back against linear progress narratives, Rifkin asserts that these multiple temporalities are “not equivalent or mergeable into a neutral, common frame—call it time, modernity, history, or the present.”¹⁵ To force such merging is an extension of settler colonial violence. Instead of squashing such temporalities into a “settler time,” that denies, flattens, and/or colonizes Indigenous constructions of temporality, Rifkin advocates for a “temporal multiplicity,...