Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice

Abstract

Archives as memory institutions have a collective mandate to document and preserve a national cultural heritage. Recently, American archives and archivists have come under fire for pervasive homogeneity -for privileging, preserving, and reproducing a history that is predominantly white and further silencing the voices and histories of marginalized peoples and communities. This paper argues that as such, archives participate in a continuing amnesty that prevents transitional and restorative justice for black Americans in the United States. Using the history of lynching in America as a backdrop, this article explores the records and counter-narratives archives need to embrace, in order to support truth and reconciliation processes for black Americans in the age of #ArchivesForBlackLives. 2Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and never will.-Frederick Douglass

Commemoration as reconciliation: Indigenous history and Canada’s heritage designation system

“…In 'Archival Amnesty,' Tonia Sutherland (2017) highlights how archives in the United States that attempt to be 'neutral' intentionally turn away from documenting injustices against Black Americans. The HSMBC operates in a similar fashion, as their refusal to acknowledge the nation's hu-iJournal, Vol 6, No.…”

Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

“…Such critical work would benefit highly from mutual dialogue between these disciplines. Critical archival science has been pivotal in questioning archival praxis through the lenses of feminist, queer, post-, and decolonial studies, drawing attention to affective responsibilities in archival practice, the often invisible labour of archivists, the materiality of digital archives, the ethical challenges of archiving sensitive material, the need for collective work with marginalised and vulnerable communities, and the relevance of archives for human rights, social justice, and care (Caswell and Cifor 2016;Cifor and Wood 2017;Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017;Sutherland 2017a). These critiques of archival reason and practice can be mobilised towards a critical analysis of big data's repositories: they show that the piecing together of information is not a neutral pursuit, both capture and exclusion have important ethical consequences, and archives are always contested sites of power, knowledge, possibility, and aspiration.…”

Social Media and the Black Travel Community: From Autonomous Space to Liberated Space

“…Over the past five years, a growing body of scholarship has addressed the unique uses of social media platforms by ethnic minorities and other marginalized populations, examining the ways that these groups use and adapt social media platforms and other digital tools to communicate, form identity and community, and subvert cultures of oppression. Some scholars have addressed the broader racial politics of social media [1,19], while others have specifically considered the use of social media platforms by marginalized communities, addressing online discourse and cultural performance [4,5,12,13], online racialized identity construction [14,20], racialized violence in online spaces [18,21], and social media activism and dissent [2,8,9,15,22]. This study offers an intervention at the intersection of these concerns, examining how identity-based social media communities subvert the architecture of internet and other digital tools to evolve autonomous spaces into spaces of liberatory potential.…”