Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Foreword
- 1 Community Archives and the Creation of Living Knowledge
- 2 Disorderly Conduct: the Community in the Archive
- Part I Storytelling, Co-Curation and Community Archives
- Part II Citizens, Archives and the Institution
- Part III Disruptive and Counter Voices: the Community Turn
- Index
15 - Locating the Black Archive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Foreword
- 1 Community Archives and the Creation of Living Knowledge
- 2 Disorderly Conduct: the Community in the Archive
- Part I Storytelling, Co-Curation and Community Archives
- Part II Citizens, Archives and the Institution
- Part III Disruptive and Counter Voices: the Community Turn
- Index
Summary
There is a definite desire and determination to have history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.
Schomburg, 1925: 215I hoped that my relatively insignificant memories would provide a starting point for developing a collective memory and cultural archive to which other people who knew Olive [Morris] could contribute. I felt that those of us who had known Olive needed to make sure that we passed the memories on.
Obi, 2010: 7We have it if we look for [our history]. It's in the oral history testimonies, it's in the oral tradition, it's in sculpture, it's in music. It's always been there in culture, but it's also in the record offices, it's in the cemeteries, it's in the hard documented evidence. So we want to combine those kinds of tangible and intangible heritage and start to tell fascinating stories through this archive.
Paul Reid, Director of Black Cultural ArchivesIntroduction
Reflecting on Stuart Hall's Constituting an Archive (2001), we embrace the concept of the ‘living archive’ that he describes as ‘present, ongoing, continuing, unfinished, open-ended’ (Hall, 2001: 89). This affords us the space to practically and theoretically comprehend ‘how heterogeneous a practice collecting and archiving is’ (Hall, 2001: 91) and to interrogate the concept of archives and archival practice, outside traditional frameworks. Perhaps more importantly, we are cautioned against accepting the burden of a tradition whose tenets construct the archive as a ‘prison-house of the past’ (Hall, 2001: 89) and to broaden our view on what ‘constitutes’ archival practice in the African Diaspora.
Taking this concept of ‘living heritage’ as a starting point, we will show the ways in which focusng on tangibility and intangibility, the formal and the informal, can be used to stretch the concepts of archival practice. We understand archival practice in its broadest sense to include not only traditional documentary practice, but also song, dance and the digital. Throughout this work we highlight the intellectual framework(s) within which we are working; the intellectual forebears who have guided our thinking as well as those whose work we have written about.
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- Information
- Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices , pp. 207 - 218Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020