Archival Imaginaries and the Politics of History in South Asia
The past decade has seen the proliferation of ‘citizens archives’, ‘picture libraries’ and ‘memory projects’ dedicated to the history of South Asia. I first encountered these platforms, which mobilise visual and material artefacts, and range from purpose-built websites to Instagram handles and Facebook groups that spill over into exhibitions and coffee table books, whilst researching the development of amateur and domestic photography in the subcontinent. Images that had hitherto been stored in albums and trunks or tucked away in letters were suddenly available online, annotated, animated and reconfigured by the efforts of family members, artists, designers, entrepreneurs, volunteers and audiences both local and global.
My new project grapples with this apparent archival abundance, this traffic in ‘pictures’ and ‘memories’. I probe the logics and logistics that have brought these materials to the surface, and the work that goes in to keeping them there. I also look at the persistence of older, institutional and activist modes of retrieval and representation. In pursuing an ethnography of archival imaginaries and agents, I hope to better account for how history is flattened into and fashioned out of everyday matter, and how it takes political shape.