“It's a Trap”: Complicating Representation in Community-Based Archives

Abstract

This article contributes to ongoing discourse that highlights oppressive institutional attitudes and approaches toward archiving materials that document the lived experiences of historically marginalized and minoritized people and communities. Through analyzing focus groups and interviews with members of minoritized communities about community archives, this article outlines four key tensions that exist around representation: holding conflicting desires of how to honor older generations; navigating methods of respecting privacy and cultural values; acknowledging the importance of preserving community history versus individual histories; and developing strategies for protecting the community. Together, these tensions illustrate the nuances of representation in archives: how members of minoritized communities navigate complex, often conflicting, affects within archival materials and how they protect themselves and future generations through visibility and invisibility. The authors introduce the concept of representational subversion, which they define as the ways in which historically minoritized communities balance and respect both their representation and erasure in society and archives, working through the tensions of honor, cultural nuance, individual value, and community protection. Representational subversion emerges among minoritized people/communities when they use their agency to protect themselves and the communities in which they find a sense of belonging. In explicating four tensions that mark representational subversion, the authors acknowledge a minoritized community's rights to be forgotten/forget (alongside their right to be remembered), to self-preservation, and to self-determination, and demonstrate the reach and perpetual threat of white supremacy in archives.