Archives and the Dynamics of Power
Overview
Final Project for Professor Mumford's class
Introduction
Over the course of this semester, our class has discussed various methods of analyzing power. Through the lens of race, class, sexuality, the state, and several others, we have investigated how domination and supremacy are ongoing processes that rely on the preservation of systemic power imbalances. Archives play a vital role in shaping how societies understand the trajectory of those power imbalances because the materials within an archive are the resources historians have to contribute to what society knows about history. As a result, people in power commonly use the archive to strategically destroy or exclude information from an archive, thereby often erasing the history of marginalized groups and people.
However, as much as archives have the power to support the construction of public memory around power imbalances, they also have the ability to deconstruct power imbalances. This type of recentering work is defined as critical archival studies. Critical archival studies as those approaches that explain what is unjust with the current state of archival research and practice and posit practical goals for how such research and practice can and should change. Ultimately, the goal of critical archival studies is to transform archival practice and society at large. As an academic field and profession, critical archival studies broadens the field’s scope beyond an inward, practice-centered orientation and builds a critical stance regarding the role of archives in the production of knowledge and different types of narratives, as well as identity construction.
At its core, critical archive theory provides an analysis of power in the archive in all its forms. Understanding that analysis is crucial to understanding the context of record creation, of archival functions, of the formation of archival institutions, of archival outreach and use and advocacy, of who becomes archivists and how and why, and of how we define and teach and practice core concepts. Within the discipline of archival studies, three topics I am particularly interested are the process of racialization in archives, the function of oral history in queer archives, and the sustainability of community archives. By exploring these facets of the archive, it will build on conversations we have had throughout the semester and help inform my ongoing investigation into the development of queer archives.
Racialization in Archives
Throughout this semester, we discussed the importance of collective memory and how archives contribute to the formation of collective memory. Archives as memory institutions have a mandate to document and preserve a national cultural heritage. However, through the processes of privileging, preserving, and reproducing a history that is predominantly white, producing racist and anti-Black metadata descriptions of archival materials, and discrediting alternative methods of record keeping, archives perpetuate the harmful effects of racialization and silence the voices and histories of marginalized peoples and communities.
One article that interrogates the ways that American archivy, both in theory and in practice, implicitly endorses offenses against Black Americans is Tonia Sutherland’s “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice.” Sutherland’s article focuses on the creation of master narrative around violence against African Americans. She argues that American archives’ consistent failure to collect and preserve items related lynching has created a historical narrative that portrays African Americans as agressors of violence, forgives perpetrators of violence against Black Americans, and limits the ability of Black Americans to seek and receive transitional and restorative justice for these acts. To redress the gaps and vagaries in the existing archival record, Sutherland calls on LIS practitioners, professional archivists, and community-based archivists to collect stories documenting violence and injustice in vulnerable Black communities so that records of human rights abuses against Black Americans can be used in the service of justice.
Sutherland’s article is relevant to our class conversations around racialization because she explains how archives, through determining what counts as culturally significant material, has a profound racial impact on what endures as valued historical research. Furthermore, Sutherland’s article is pertinent to my research areas of interest because it serves as useful framework for analyzing how queer archives have been simultanesouly complicit in perpetuating master narratives that racialize people of color and transformative in how they adress omissions regarding queer people in the existing archival record.
While Sutherland’s work focuses on gaps in the historical record, Anna Loewenthal’s master’s thesis “Comparing Representations of Race in Finding Aids Over Time'' examines how metadata often supports racist structures inherent in archival description of underrepresented and marginalized groups. Loewenthal’s study compared two sets of finding aids about the same set of collections, written in the early 1990s and updated in 2011, in the University of North Carlolina’s Southern Historical Collection. Instances of race terms, particularly as relating to black people, were compared between the finding aids to discover how representations of race have changed over time. The results of the study revealed that when UNC archivists updated the finding aids, they made significant adjustments to the words they used to describe black people in collections. While the word “negro” fell heavily out of use, “African,” especially as part of “African American,” increased greatly. Meanwhile, the word “slave” continued to be used at a relatively similar frequency and was the word most often used in both old and new finding aids. Additionally, the use of “white” decreased from the old to updated finding aids. In fact, “white” was not used to describe race very often, and, when it was, it was usually while also discussing people of color and describing white people in contrast. Ultimately, Loewenthal aruges that while it is important for archivists to modernize their language use when updating metadata, they also need to ensure they are not losing representation of the contents of the collections with updates to finding aids.
Lowenthal’s research is relevant to my work because it shows how metadata and the way archivists describe materials have just as much power to racialize people as the type of materials they collect. Archival description shapes whether and how collections are discovered, navigated, and understood. A similar idea is explored in Jane Anderson and Kimberly Christen’s “Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion,” in which the authors provide a structural critique of attribution as it is figured in colonial practices and ongoing settler-colonial logics that form the basis for creating, circulating, and sharing knowledge through research practices, methods, and platforms. In relation to my research interests, these articles raises some important questions to keep in mind when analyzing the finding aids of queer archives, such as: How often are people of color hidden in finding aids, not indicated or signified? Are these histories lost due to using “white” as a default a gap in the knowledge of current archivists? Is this collection just lacking in representation of people of color in general? By seeking answers to these questions, it will help me understand how queer archives describe their materials, how they can improve their archival descriptions, and how those descriptions impact the accessibility of their records.
In addition to misrepresenting records’ bibliographic information, another way archives contribute to the racialization of people of color is through undermining non-written records. This critique is explored in Jennifer O’Neal’s “‘The Right to Know’: Decolonizing Native American Archives,” which examines the historic and current policies regarding Native American archives and the activism surrounding the proper care and management of Native American archive collections at non-Native repositories. Throughout the article, O’Neal tracks the challenges Indigenous communities have encountered trying to find and present historical records regarding their sovereignty, legal rights, and self-determination. Ultimately, O’Neal aruges that the main hurdles Indigenous people face in trying to find these legal documents are 1) up until the mid-twentieth century many tribal communities produced few written records and 2) American Archives hold much of the physical archival collections that document Native American history in far removed repositories outside of tribal communities. Thus, through delegitimizing the credibility of Indigenous record keeping and decontexualizing written documents created by Indigenous people, archives perpetuated the belief that Native American communities were disappearing as a people and a distinct culture.
O’Neal’s arguments connect to my research because it shows how archival sources narrate how authorities in the academy, medicine, and government defined and sought to control marginalized groups but are often ignorant on how those groups defined themselves and organized their lives. Additionally, O’Neal demonstrates how Indigenous people are developing tribal archives in an attempt to define their history using their own sources. Similarly, my research investigates how LGBTQ+ people developed archives in an attempt to define themselves and preserve their history. Cultural domination inevitably produces cultural resistance. Using this throughline, I can add another layer to my analysis of queer archives by analyzing the extent to which their development was influenced by cultural resistance versus community activism.
Although all three of these articles provide important perspectives on the different methods archives contribute to racializing people, the article that I am most interested by is Jennifer O’Neal’s article. Beyond analyzing how archives collect and exclude information, O’Neal investigates how traditional archives discredit sources of information in order to create a specific narrative about a group of people, in this case Native Americans. Her argument highlights how and why archives centered around marginalized people get created. Connecting that idea to my inquiry of queer archives, O’Neal’s article provides me with useful tools of analysis of queer archives.
Bibliography
Anderson, Jane & Christen, Kimberly. “Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion.” Journal of Radical Librarianship 5, (2019): 113-52.
Loewenthal, Anna B. “Comparing Representations of Race in Finding Aids Over Time.” MA Thesis, University of North Carlina at Chapel Hill, 2019. https://doi.org/10.17615/xjty-ya81.
O'Neal, Jennifer R. “‘The Right to Know’: Decolonizing Native American Archives.” Journal of Western Archives 6, no. 2 (2015). https://doi.org/10.26077/fc99-b022.
Sutherland, Tonia. “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42.
Oral History
Over the course of the semester, a question we have continually returned to is how do gaps in historical knowledge contribute to the development of power imbalances. From the articles presented in the Racialization in Archives section, it is clear that gaps in knowledge exist within the archival record just as much as they exist in the historical record. Whether those gaps are the result of purposeful exclusion of information to inaccurate, racialized metadata, controlling access to information, they erase the history of marginalized people. One method of remedying those absences is oral history. Oral history is the collection and study of historical information using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. Although oral history work is common across many fields of history, it has special significance within the discipline of queer studies due to the often personal nature of the interviews.
In addition to generating new modes of communication, the bodies of knowledge that queer narrators and researchers often contend with during their collaborations can be painful or uncomfortable in unpredictable ways. More so than is the case for nonqueer narrators, women and men who experience samesex desires or transgender identities risk opening up themselves to vulnerability or trauma during an oral history exchange. As a result, oral history can be an especially apt tool to document the relationship between trauma, activism, and public memory.
One scholar who interrogates the personal relationship of queer oral history work is Daniel Marshall. In Marshall’s “Gay Teachers and Students, Oral History and Queer Kinship,” he argues that an important aspect of queer oral history because it functions as “excess,” moving beyond the grip of institutional control to a place where researchers can collaborate more effectively with narrators toward the goal of knowledge production. He makes this argument through analyzing interviews he conducted with two early gay liberation movement activists from Sydney, Australia about their experiences as gay men in the 1970s and 1980s. More specifically, he analyzes the sinlences in the interviews. Oral history is not only about the transmission of information but also about the respectful tending of relationships. By observing silences, omissions, and gaps, queer oral history research establishes itself as a research method that requires mutual trust, vulnerability, and emotional sensitivity as much as it does actual recollection.
Marshall’s work pertains to my research because it emphasizes the full range of analysis that is required of an oral history. When examining an oral history, it is not enough to analyze the text of the source; it is also necessary to be mindful of what is left unsaid and analyze the emotional subtext behind the interview. As someone who is interested in both conducting and analyzing oral histories, being aware of how to locate historical emotion during an interview and how to interpret these feelings is vital to both making the subject feel comfortable and generating a historical record that questions institutional knowledge by prioritizing people’s memories. Moving forward, I will be able to use Marshall’s work as a framework for paying attention both to the content and the context of oral histories.
Beyond their emotional significance, another aspect of queer oral histories that makes them distinct from other disciplines is the concept of body-based knowing. This concept asserts that the sexuality of the body, and bodily desires, is an important aspect of the practice of doing oral history work. One article that explores this idea more fully is Jason Ruiz and E. Patrick Johnson’s “Pleasure and Pain in Black Queer Oral History and Performance: E. Patrick Johnson and Jason Ruiz in Conversation.” Throughout the article, Ruiz and Johnson explore how the physical presence of sexual or gendered bodies affects the oral history collaboration. While the article itself focuses more on the actual conversation between Ruiz and Johnson than analyzing the interview, the two scholars do reflect on what they’ve learned about sex from conducting oral history interviews and how talking about sex can teach us gay activism. They conclude that although sex is clearly an important aspect of queer social and political life, interview subjects are often reluctant to engage in candid discussions about sex and its meanings. Rather than lambasting this paradox, Ruiz and Johnson argue that bearing witness to this level of vulnerability and turning to the most subjective parts of ourselves to unpack who we are is exactly what makes oral history methods so valuable.
Understanding the role sexuality plays in queer oral histories is important because it adds another dimension to the value of oral histories. While part of the aim of oral histories is to write queer people back into history, it is important to be mindful of the role respectability politics play in archives. For example, if archives primarily preserve materials on community building and legal activism that avoid contextualizing and interrogating how sexuality impacts those activities, then they run the risk of promoting a narrow image of queerness; an image that benefits monogamous, gender-conforming, and upwardly mobile class of gay men and lesbians and maintains that queer sex and queer people that transgress those social norms remain dangerous. Relating this idea to my research analyzing the development of queer archives, it will be important for me to be cognizant of what image of queerness these archives are promoting, how they are promoting that image, and who is benefitting from that image. By acknowledging sexuality in queer oral histories, it allows historians to investigate the power of sexuality on queer people and queer movements.
Although oral histories have the potential to be powerful tools of preservation, there are also difficulties surrounding the use of oral histories in queer archives. These challenges are discussed in Nan Boyd’s article, “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History.” The biggest challenge queer theory poses for oral history is oral history’s dependence on self-knowing. In this case, self-knowing refers to narrators being able to articulate a coherent and consistent representation of themselves as historical actors and historians being able to know narrators' true "selves" through their self-descriptions. The issue with this dependence on self-knowing is that when researchers depend on the voices of historical actors to narrate the history of sexual identities, the narrators’ memories are constructed around historically specific norms and meanings. For instance, if a lesbian woman is being interviewed by a queer historian, the narrator might feel obligated to center all of her experiences her sexual identity, even around questions that do not directly relate to sexual identity. Additionally, the narrator might self-edit stories that center too much around sexual attraction or sexual activity for the sake of making the stories more palatable. Although these types of self-edits tend to stem from the narrator’s desire to say what they think the researcher wants to hear or promote a certain of political visibility for queer people, this self-censoring defeats the purpose of oral histories: to preserve and analyze the truth of the individual. Thus, it is difficult to escape the trap of subjectivity when working with oral histories.
Overall, Boyd’s work is relevant to my scholarship because it highlights the inherently performative nature of oral history work. When historians create and/or analyze oral histories, they must be aware that oral history is not the truth but a truth that is tailored by both the story the narrator tells and the countless stories they choose to forget. Within my work researching the development of queer archives, understanding that all records, including internal records that document the administrative work of archives, are made with a specific purpose in mind and omit information that the creator either does not deem important or does not want the audience to know. It is the job of the historian to look for those omissions and interpret them. As I move forward with my research, it is imperative that I examine my sources with that same critical eye.
Of all the articles that talk about queer oral histories, the one that most strongly resonates with me is Boyd’s article on the challenges of oral history in queer studies. In addition to highlighting the difficulty of analyzing an oral history Boyd’s scholarship sheds light on the role of the archivist in forming and collecting them. Oral histories rely on astute emotional intelligence and establishing a sense of trust and intimacy between participants. For as much as the narrators are in charge of telling their stories, archivists are the ones in control of how interview goes and must their do their best in the formation of their questions, body language, and style of inquiry to ensure that the end result is as honest as the narrator is able to make it. Because my research will involve facilitating oral histories and analyzing oral histories within queer archives, having this insight into how and why queer oral histories are made is invaluable.
Bibliography
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (2008): 177-189. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30114216.
Marshall, Daniel. “Gay Teachers and Students, Oral History and Queer Kinship.” In Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, edited by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, 167-183. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Ruiz, Jason & Johnson, E. Patrick. “Pleasure and Pain in Black Queer Oral History and Performance: E. Patrick Johnson and Jason Ruiz in Conversation.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 2, (Summer 2014): 160-180. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.1.2.0160.
Sustainability of Community Archives
Throughout the semester, we have investigated how institutions of power dominate marginalized people. While we have discussed how mainstream archives perpetuate those systems of power, we have not delved too deeply into the topic of how marginalized communnities use archives to resist domination. Community archives are archives and personal collections maintained by community groups who desire to document their cultural heritage based on shared experiences, interests, and identities. Although community archives are supposed to be for and made of members of the community they represent, oftentimes these organizations are managed by formal archivists. While professionally trained archivists can bring their expertise to community archives, their involvement also runs the risk of alienating the community and replicating power dynamics that are typical of mainstream archives. Thus, one major issue within the community archives field is how to sustain their relevance, trust, and engagement with the community.
One article that examines the factors that impact the sustainability of community archives is Joanna Newman’s “Sustaining Community Archives: Where Practice Meets Theory.” Throughout the article, Newman identifies eleven factors that she considers necessary for the sustainability of community archives and analyzes their interdependencies. Of these eleven factors, the one that had the biggest impact on community archive sustainability was governance. Newman’s research found that 100%-voluntary archives may be essentially unsustainable while those within local government, whether directly or indirectly controlled, have a much greater likelihood of being maintained over the long term. Because of this marked difference in sustainability, Newman advises that in order to preserve their longevity, community archives should associate themselves with an accountable organisational structure, such as a legal council or a museum or library.
Newman’s scholarship is relevant to my research interests because she provides a foundation for how to analyze the development of queer community archives. For the most part, queer community archives were created from the commitment of many volunteers, activists, and archivists in order to collect and protect materials that were unwanted by university, public, and government archives. Given the traditional level of mistrust between mainstream archives and queer archives, did historical queer archives follow Newman’s guidelines and establish an association with existing institutions to maintain order and hierarchy? Or, did queer archives establish as sustainability plan that existed outside of existing power structures and rely primarily on volunteer involvement? By applying Newman’s eleven factors of sustainability for various types of community archives to just queer archives, it will illuminate how the development of queer archives compares to the development of community archives in general and how queer archives position themselves in relation to more mainstream institutional repositories.
In addition to navigating their relationship with other cultural institutions, community archivists are deaing with complex social, economic and political concerns that threaten their sustainability. One study that delves into these concerns is “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.” Written by several co-authors, this article analyzes the significant challenges community archives are facing in terms of short- and long-term sustainability. Of the challenges they investigated, the most difficult obstacle community archives reported was responding to changing demographics in their communities. For community archives, particularly those formed around geographic locations, the physical movements and shifting demographics of neighbourhoods are vital to consider in their collecting practices and engagements with community autonomy and value. For example, when gentrification efforts result in the mass displacement of communities, particularly lower-income people and communities of colour, they not only dislocate people out of neighborhoods, they also dislocate the culture and values of that community. Because community archives are so dependent on community involvement for sustainability, they are forced into a position where they either invest resources they may or may not have into new community building programs or becoming unsustainable.
This article connects to my interests because the two main queer archives I am researching are located in Chicago and Philadelphia, two cities that, among other demographic shifts, have undergone notorious gentrification processes. Using this study as a framework, I can investigate how the demographic makeup of these communities impacted the development of the gay and lesbian archives that were built around them. Were these archives reflective of the entire community they represented? What outreach programs did they develop to become entrenched in the community, and how have those progarms evolved to address changing community needs? What resources do queer archives use to keep tabs on community engagement and public policy governing urban development? Through analzying the community aspect of queer community archives, it will provide insight into how the archive was able to sustain itself during its early development.
While these articles provide helpful frameworks for analyzing sustainability in queer community archives, it is even more useful to have a case study of how queer archives promote sustainability in practice. In the article “Getting from then to now: Sustaining the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a lesbian organization,” six collective members of the volunteer-run Lesbian Herstory Archives reflect on the decades-long success and sustainability of the organization. Although these reflections touch on the organization’s history and practice, activism, community engagement, and processing of special collections, the throughline among the members’ stories is the archive’s dedication to its founding ideals. According to these members’ the success of the Lesbian Herstory Archives is the result of creating inclusive and non-institutional principles rooted in the assumption of sustainability from the diversity, power, and multiplicity of lesbian communities.
Reading the testimony of the collective members and reviewing the principles of the archive, it is clear that they were both aware of the innate power cultural institutions have in defining identity and intentional about deconstructing that relationship so that archive would be inclusive of all lesbian community members. The Archives does not attempt to codify a definition of lesbian, but rather provides multiple points of reference and engagement with lesbian identifiers. The idea of accessibility is even present in the early design plans of the archive, which stated that “the Archives shall be housed within the community, not on an academic campus that is by definition closed to many women.” This insight into the sustainability principles of the Lesbian Herstory Archive is valuable to my research endeavors because it provides a model by which to analyze other queer community archives. Now, when I analyze the founding principles of other queer archives, I can examine how they integrate sustainability into their guidelines compared to the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
Of these perspectives on sustainability in archives, the one that I think will be the most useful to me is the article on the Lesbian Herstory Archives. This piece of scholarship stands out to me because it interrogates the power relationship between community archives and community members. For as much as archives need community involvement, volunteerism, and donations to remain active, community people also need to feel that they are welcomed by the archive to become a part of it. This article also acknowledges the fluidity of self-identified community members. A person’s economic status, education level, and other personal identifiers are subject to change, but their engagement with the archive can remain constant if the archive is thoughtful in its development. As I continue with my research, it will be important to analyze if/how other queer community archives have lived up to this standard.
Bibliography
Newman, Joanna. “Sustaining Community Archives: Where Practice Meets Theory.” MA Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10063/1398.
Smith-Cruz, Shawn(ta), Rando, Flavia, Corbman, Rachel, Edel, Deborah, Gwenwald, Morgan, Nestle, Joan & Thistlethwaite, Polly. Getting From Then to Now: Sustaining the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a Lesbian Organization.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 20, no. 2 (2016): 213-233. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1083827.
Zavala, Jimmy, Migoni, Alda, Caswell, Michelle, Geraci, Noah & Cifor, Marika. “‘A Process Where We’re All at the Table’: Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice.” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 202-215. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2017.1377088.
Conclusion
One theme that has presented itself numerous throughout the semester is power. Power figures into every relationship, and it does not travel in only one direction. Power is also dynamic; it can shift over time. While most of our class readings have prompted inquiries into how collective ideas about social identity both support and are subject to imbalance power structures, these articles looked at how the acquisition and preservation of information affects those same power structures. By analyzing how archives control the accession and description of their materials, it conveys how archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the archive. Furthermore, it raises many more questions about best practices, resource-sharing and the value of independence in archives, specifically in queer archives and community archives. As I continue with my research into the development of queer community archives, I hope to explore these issues further and help illuminate the interdependent relationship between archives and the communities they represent.