[mis]representation, [dis]memory, & [re]figuring the archival lens

[mis]representation, [dis]memory & [re]figuring the archival lens

Special Issue Editors: Gracen Brilmyer MarĂ­a Montenegro & Anne J. Gilliland

SPRING 2019 | VOLUME 15 | ISSUE 2

Table of Contents Introduction: [mis]representation, [dis]memory, & [re]figuring the archival lens Gracen Brilmyer, María Montenegro and Anne J. Gilliland .............................................. p 4-10

[mis]representation Speculative classification: Tracing a disputed portrait between the archives of Malvina Hoffman and Sergey Merkurov Marianna Hovhannisyan .................................................................................................... p 12-40 “Useful Information Turned into Something Useless”: Archival Silences, Imagined Records, and Suspicion of Mediated Information in the JFK Assassination Collection Yvonne Eadon .................................................................................................................... p 41-67 Representation, Affect, and the Archives: A Shrine to Lon Chaney Samantha Blanco................................................................................................................ p 68-77

[dis]memory Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes Catherine Czacki .............................................................................................................. p 79-103 Case Number 87-447: An Image Essay in 12 Parts Nick Flessa ..................................................................................................................... p 104-118

[re]figuring Doling out Colonialism: Refiguring Archival Memory of Settler Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands Christina Lehua Hummel-Colla ..................................................................................... p 120-146 Cheryl Sim's Un jour, Un jour: Imagining potential futures in the fragmented archives of Expo67 Patricia Ciccone ............................................................................................................. p 147-166 Spherical Memory: Shaping Immersive Narratives From Personal Media Collections Gabriel Peters-Lazaro .................................................................................................... p 167-169

[real]izing Troubling Accounts of the Archives Michelle Caswell ........................................................................................................... p 171-192 Collecting Contested Identities: The ambiguity of national culture in the Israeli Digital National Collection Yair Agmon and Lihi Levy ............................................................................................ p 193-213 A LOUD response to Zero Tolerance Ruth Livier ..................................................................................................................... p 214-238

About the Cover The photograph displayed on the cover comes from Patricia Ciccone’s article, Cheryl Sim's Un jour, Un jour: Imagining potential futures in the fragmented archives of Expo67. It was used as the promotional image for A la Recherche d’Expo67, taken at the Montréal Contemporary Art museum’s summer exhibit in June 2017. The large photograph, displayed on the side of a cement building, depicts a young woman of color wearing the official blue “hostess” outfit of the Expo, looking down. We chose this image because it represents the layers of curation and interpretation that can happen throughout the life and representation of one document.

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Introduction: [mis]representation, [dis]memory, & [re]figuring the archival lens

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9j13h4zb

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Authors Brilmyer, Gracen Montenegro, MarĂ­a Gilliland, Anne J.

Publication Date 2019

eScholarship.org

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It is perhaps stating the obvious to note that cultural, institutional, familial, and individual memories are temporally and spatially contingent. Less readily apparent may be the ways in which how we remember and forget can be shaped by archival representation. Training a critical lens on descriptive practices and their authors is essential, therefore, in assessing, challenging, and potentially refiguring representation as well as surfacing the ways in which it reflects archival bias and legitimates the authorities and mandates under which archives operate.

Focusing predominantly on visual archives and also the visual nature of archival materials, this special issue has its origins in presentations given at the Kenneth Karmiole Symposium in Archival Studies, which was held at UCLA’s Information Studies Department in January, 2018.

Both the symposium and this special issue brought together individuals from a range of academic, artistic, activist, and other backgrounds whose work addresses some conceptualization of the Archive or archives (Caswell 2016). More specifically, it highlights how each of the authors endeavors through their work to explore, reimagine and emancipate the representation of the voices and agency of those who are the subjects of archival material, who have historically had limited to no ability to influence how they are portrayed in either archival description or indeed in the archival material itself.

The professional field of archival science has historically been at pains to distinguish how its practical as well as theoretical approaches to archives and the work of archiving are different from those of fields such as history and anthropology that have traditionally seen the archives either as the locus of their archival work (i.e., as the places in, and the data upon which their research is based), or as the place where they deposit their data. Today in light of the so-called “archival turns” (Ketelaar, 2017) in many fields in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this distinction seems a little passé given a growing degree of proximity not just in vocabulary, but between the intellectual preoccupations of all of these fields. This is incontestably evidenced by the range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds of the authors writing for this special issue, and the ways in which their critical preoccupations have coalesced, almost unbidden, around certain rubrics. But inasmuch as we might welcome and celebrate this convergence and the new consciousness it displays pertaining to archives as place, material and process (Pearce-Moses 2005), we should not congratulate ourselves too much. Archives remain saturated with the power relations and bigotries along all of the axes that have divided and subordinated societies, generations, and practices; and even though, by-and-large, they know better, both archival professionals and scholars and the infrastructures within which they function are still predominantly responsible for this status quo. Forty-five years ago, American historian William T. Hagan exhorted archivists, historians and anthropologists to consider and alter the roles they played in representing those whose lives, cultures, beliefs and freedoms were contained within archives: “think of the damage we can do to the Indians. The historical Indian may be the captive of the archives, but the key to those archives is in the hands of the non-Indian historians and

ethno-historians.” (138) In 1989, in her article “Who Owns the Past: Aborigines as Captives of the Archives,” Australian Indigenous rights activist and academic Henrietta Fourmile picks up Hagan’s argument, illustrating not only the structures of control non-Indigenous people continued to exercise over Indigenous materials but also the ways in which seemingly “neutral” archival practices such as “institutional language” creates barriers to access.

This special issue explicitly identifies how interpretations created by archivists through descriptive practices, curators through exhibition practices, artists through creative and aesthetic practices, and scholars through methodological and narrative practices have rendered and continue to render subordinated and subaltern people archival captives; and suggests some ways in which the effects of such structures and practices might be critically exposed, prevented or countered. The issue addresses several critical questions relating to representation in archives, including but not limited to the following: How can archiving practices [re]produce contestable narratives? How can we [re]think polyvocality in forms of representation that are created for archival materials? How might we [re]imagine authorship and subjecthood within archived records? How might we acknowledge and dissect the power inherent in visual archival materials and [re]purpose it towards social justice? Reflecting the structure of the symposium as well as the topics of the resulting articles, the issue is organized under four rubrics: ​[mis]representation​, [dis]memory​, ​[re]figuring​, and​ [re]alizing​. These rubrics begin with problematizing and disentangling concepts of representation and then move towards potential interventions.

The concept of ​[mis]representation​ considers inaccuracies, multiplicities, duplicities and power in archival portrayals. Building upon these aspects, Marianna Hovhannisyan’s piece, “Speculative Classification: Tracing a Disputed Portrait Between the Archives of Malvina Hoffman and Sergey Merkurov”, reflects on the archival collections of ​American sculptor Malvina Hoffman (1885-1966) and Armenian-Greek sculptor Sergeĭ Merkurov (1881-1952), exposing how museum archives produce and re-inscribe indexical absences when their holdings are organized using universal categorization systems. Yvonne Eadon’s “‘Useful Information Turned into Something Useless’: Archival Silences, Imagined Records, and Suspicion of Mediated Information in the JFK Assassination Collection”​, uses the The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection at the US National Archives as a case study to analyze canonical scholarship on conspiracy theories while introducing the new notion of suspicion of mediated information.​ Eadon​ ​critically assesses the effects that such scholarship and ideas might have upon archivists applying two theoretical propositions: archival silences (Trouillot, 1997) and archival imaginaries (Gilliland and Caswell, 2016). Finally, ​in her article, “Representation, Affect, and the Archives: A Shrine to Lon Chaney”, Samantha Blanco engages with visual archival representations of silent film actor Lon Chaney by applying affect theory as a way both to understand how power circulates through records and archives, and to reimagine A.Y. Owen’s ​scrapbook of Lon Chaney––and its racial stereotypes––as a visual “shrine.” Taken

together, these three pieces critically consider the politics and ethics of archival representations when misinformation or lack of context directly affect the documentation and organization of visual archives within institutions. [dis]memory​ addresses how what we can know and remember is influenced through what we witness in archival materials as well as how we might counteract remembering and forgetting.

Catherine Czacki’s “Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes” amplifies how to narrate and perform absences as well as hierarchies through placing historical accounts in conversation with personal storytelling, science fiction, and visual culture.

Vacillating between a wide array of structures, histories and institutions, Czacki analyzes the hierarchies of “authentic producers” of art and culture and the resulting polarities that create conflicting histories. Finally, Nick Flessa, in “Case Number 87-447: An Image Essay in 12 Parts”, visually pieces together a family history. Complicating the official archive—through presenting his mother’s legal work and participation as the Assistant Prosecutor on the 1987 trial of Jerome Henderson, a death penalty case—Flessa brings together public and personal records to reflect on his mother, her death, and his own relations to Henderson. His creation of this “personal archive” complicates history and critically addresses the function of the judicial system and the cultural contexts of mental illness, gender and race in the United States. These articles each address some facet of bearing witness to archival absences, hierarchies, and the affective impacts of conflicting memory, knowledge, and history.

Moving further towards addressing absences, inaccuracies, and partialities, ​[re]figuring​ focuses on reworking, expanding, and reimagining archival foci and futures. ​Christina Lehua

Hummel-Colla, in her piece, “Doling out Colonialism: Refiguring Archival Memory of Settler Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands”, sheds light on colonial archives through examining The Dole Family Papers, an archival fond that documents the family’s history in Hawai’i where they came as missionaries, owned sugar plantations, and one member even held the position of president of the Republic of Hawaii. In addressing the perspective of the papers and how their narratives conflict with those of Native Hawaiian communities, Hummel-Colla identifies ways of re-presenting the Dole Family Papers in a manner that rejects narratives of American imperialism and encourages contending with settler colonialism in relation to Native Hawaiian culture and sovereignty. Confronting the limited and limiting discourses around national identity within the 1967 International and Universal Exposition (Expo67) in Montreal, ​Patricia Ciccone, in “Cheryl Sim's Un jour, Un jour: Imagining potential futures in the fragmented archives of Expo67”, uses the work of curator ​Cheryl Sim as a critical and theoretical tool for understanding media archiving projects. ​Ciccone highlights how ​Sim uses personal records, videos and photographs from her parents’ visit to the Fair to demonstrate how such methods can be used to reclaim the absences of immigrant, indigenous and marginalized communities within the Expo’s archives. Lastly, ​Gabriel Peters-Lazaro takes advantage of the expansive space of spherical, or

VR, video to create an immersive narrative of personal media collections in “Spherical Memory: Shaping Immersive Narratives From Personal Media Collections”. Peters-Lazaro invites readers to witness his reflections on identity formation as well as the blurriness between personal and professional practices of knowledge creation using footage from his video archive—which spans 15 years—and overlaying audio recorded at UCLA in January 2018. Readers are encouraged to download the file for use with a VR headset or simply to open the Vimeo link to click and drag through the immersive visual essay. Collectively, ​Hummel-Colla, ​Ciccone and Peters-Lazaro take us through archival interventions, the theoretical and practical ways in which interpretations can be put in conversation with archival material in order to complicate archives and offer avenues for archival material to be refigured into more nuanced narratives.

Finally, having reimagined archival focuses and futures, ​[re]alizing​ looks to ground responsibilities and accountabilities for archival practices and approaches. Michelle Caswell’s piece, “Troubling Accounts of the Archives” reflects on ideas of incompletion, fragmentation, and imposition that can lead to what she calls ​archival mysteries​. These mysteries are​ ​elicited by the distance of a record from both the context of its creation and the instant in which it is created.

By ​looking at the Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn photo collection held at the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), Caswell reflects on how to read photographic records when little information is provided, and how lack of context and metadata can trouble our senses of agency, and understandings of race, gender and sexuality, defying any easy interpretations of visual archives. In their collaborative piece, “Collecting Contested Identities: The Ambiguity of National Culture in the Israeli Digital National Collection,”​ ​Yair Agmon and Lihi Levy look at the formation and politics of Israel’s National Digital Collection––a digital stewardship project focused on cataloging and digitizing archival materials, and making them accessible––in order to demonstrate how the genesis of the Israeli state, as it collapsed multiculturalism in favor of a new ethno-nationalism for the Jewish People, provided social boundaries that are reflected in the cultural knowledge production of this national collection. Lastly, Ruth Livier ​introduces LOUD, a Latinx-lead grassroots activist group created by entertainment professionals in response to the US Government’s policy regarding asylum seekers and other migrants at the southern U.S. border. In “​A LOUD response to Zero Tolerance,” Livier analyzes the various ways in which LOUD has used ​social media and digital tools to co-create records, thereby exposing the need for more appropriate data collection and records management systems for supporting human rights needs and migrant communities specifically. Taken together, the three pieces address ways in which both community- and state-led archival projects can be examined generatively, suggesting possible tools and solutions for more just and responsible ways of bringing together archival theory and praxis.

The problems that these authors raise are perpetuated through many different kinds of hegemonic systems--law and policy; professional conventions and best practices; education; research norms;

institutional hierarchies, to name just a few. They will need to be tackled simultaneously and critically on many fronts. It is our hope that this volume will not only offer provocative food for thought, but will also encourage important reflexive and generative inter-disciplinary dialog about the political nature not just of archives or of visual materials, but also of the many and varied ways that representation functions as a mediator of our understandings, beliefs and identities.

References Caswell, M. L. (2016). ​’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.​ Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk Gilliland, Anne J., and Michelle Caswell. 2016. “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined.” ​Archival Science​ 16: 53–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9259-z​.

Gordon, A. F. (2008). ​Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination​ (2nd edition). Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Fourmile, H. (1989). Who Owns the Past? - Aborigines as captives of the archives.

Aboriginal History​, ​13​(1/2), 1–8. Retrieved from JSTOR. Hagan, W. T. (2012). ​American Indians: Fourth Edition​. University of Chicago Press.

Ketelaar, E. (2017). Archival Turns and Returns. In A. J. Gilliland, S. McKemmish, & A. J. Lau (Eds.), ​Research in the Archival Multiverse​ (pp. 228–268). Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing.

Pearce-Moses, R. (2005). ​A Glossary of Archival & Records Terminology. S ​ ociety of American Archivists. Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/archives Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe. 1997. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.

[mis]representation:

considerations of inaccuracies, multiplicities, duplicities and power in portrayals

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Speculative classification: Tracing a disputed portrait between the archives of Malvina Hoffman and Sergey Merkurov

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9dq9c7s9

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Hovhannisyan, Marianna

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

In my recent curatorial work, archives play a central role in (re)presenting geopolitical and national identities and at the same time, demonstrating the fluidity and contestations of these constructs1. I experience archives as conflicted sites and my interest, therefore, has been in exploring their inherent anomalies and impressions and in building contemporary narratives out of their historical slippages and indexical absences. In other words, my work attends to what the archives, either willfully or unconsciously, have misrepresented or have failed to address in their content and descriptions.

This paper presents a case study that tries to illustrate how porous the bond is between two different epistemological regimes: the emphasis that is placed on visuality in terms of the art historical collections, and the act of labeling by the archive. In order to show this, I will touch upon collections representing two sculptors, Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966) and Sergey Merkurov (1881–1952) who both passed through the studio of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). I came to this case study through my findings in the archival collection of American sculptor Malvina Hoffman. Housed at the Getty Research Institute (GRI),2 this archive is well-researched due to her body of work produced in the early 1930s for the Hall of the Races of Mankind exhibition3 (1933) at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 4 The Museum, under the 1

This text was initially written as part of the 2017 Getty Consortium Seminar “Art and Anthropology: The Agency of Objects,” led by Professor Susan Dackerman. A version was presented at the 2018 Kenneth Karmiole Symposium “[dis]memory, [mis]representation & [re]figuring the archival lens: A Symposium on Visual Archives & Forms of Representation,” organized by Gracen Brilmyer, Professor Anne Gilliland, and María Montenegro (UCLA Department of Information Studies).

2 The official name of the archive is “Malvina Hoffman papers, 1897–1984” (Hoffman et al., 1897). The actual three-dimensional works are located at The Field Museum of Natural History, also known as The Field Museum, Chicago.

3 This text only reflects on an aspect of this complex commission for the sake of the constructing my arguments about archives. To further explore its context, scientific, aesthetic, and conceptual implications, see prominent contributions by authors and scholars Kim (2006), Kinkel (2011), and Teslow (2014). In addition, since 2016, the Field Museum in Chicago has exhibited fifty of Hoffman’s sculptures under the exhibition titled Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman (Field Museum, 2019).

4 The key museum staff members involved were the museum’s president Stanley Field, the chief curator of anthropology Berthold Laufer, and Henry Field, a junior curator. This initiative had numerous experts

directorship of president Stainley Field and curator, anthropologist Berthold Laufer, commissioned her to model and sculpt “racial types . . . while travelling around the world” (Hoffman, 1936, p. 3). This research-based commission is both complex and controversial in its concept, context and afterlife.5 It developed as a racial exhibit from the type of inquiries associated with the new physical anthropological display, that would be didactic, scientifically accurate and target larger publics. In this regard, the project focused on classical art (sculpture) which would give “the races of mankind a plastic representation” through (Keith, 1933, p. 7).

As Henry Field, the junior curator, writes: It was felt that a display of skulls, charts, casts and photographs, extensive and accurate as they might be, would nevertheless fail to make a clear and lasting impression on the mind of the varying forms and characters which distinguish one race from another. A new and a more satisfactory solution to the problem was sought—and a great artist was called upon. (1933, p. 146)

My interest in the Races of Mankind project concerns its archives, in which the museological and anthropological are joined through the emphasis on art. The digitization of such projects allows slippages to become evident. In this case, the slippage is the assigning of an incorrect or at least misleading keyword or ‘tag’ of a portrait in Hoffman’s archives at the Special Collections of the GRI (which is not a misspelling or a mistagging issue by an archivist). Intended as part of the Races of Mankind, in the archive the portrait is titled “Armenian Jew.”6 That initial title, as well as the current archival description and the lineage invoked through the title, have all been left open and in dispute. As such, the involved, including physical anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith as an adviser (see Peabody, 2013). In the leaflet, Laufer (1933) writes that the project developed in the course of eighteen years: “Plans for a hall to present to the public the biological problems of mankind were formulated in the Department of Anthropology under my direction as far back as 1915” (p.

3).

5 The work began in 1930 and completed by 1933. The exhibition opened in June 6, 1933 with the enormous success. It was planned to coincide with the world’s fair in Chicago (1933-34), A Century of Progress International Exposition (Peabody, 2013, p.120).

6 The date is unknown; it is presumed ca. early 1930s. The research files of the processing history indicate that the initial copper plate was named like that from the beginning. The research files are available at GRI upon request.

unresolved status of this portrait emerges as an anomaly in Hoffman’s archive that tests the limits of her logic of physiognomy and (racial) facial character. My research shows that due to this mistag, the portrait is associated with another set of mislabels and, significantly, it has a direct reference to a completely different work of Hoffman. At the intersections of mistags, mislabels and different visual depictions, I want to invite another reading, in which one of Hoffman’s “Armenian Jew” depictions has a provocative physiognomic resemblance with Armenian-Greek7 sculptor Sergey Merkurov’s first death mask of Mkrtich Khrimian, the Catholicos of All Armenian Apostolic Church (plaster cast, 1907). 8 During the Soviet era, Merkurov became famous for his monumental sculptures of Joseph Stalin, yet his practice of casting death masks of prominent 1917 Bolsheviks, Soviet intellectuals and officials was somehow counter to “Stalin’s views.”9 Today the major part of his collection is located in his house (now museum) in Gyumri, Armenia.

Interestingly, Hoffman and Merkurov’s works split Rodin’s drive for Realism into two opposing regimes— American (democratic) and Soviet (communist), yet they 7

He is usually discussed as a Soviet sculptor-monumentalist.

Sources in Armenian indicate that, despite being registered as a Greek (e.g., Mkhoyan, 2018), he was of Armenian descent rather than Greek.

8 Mkrtich Khrimian was the Catholicos of All Armenian Apostolic Church from 1893 to 1907. He was a prominent teacher and spiritual leader for Armenians, who played an role in sensing as well as warning the international countries and associations about Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire (this is prior to the 1915 Armenian Genocide). He was proclaimed “Hayrik” (Father),” by Armenians and he is usually referred as Khrimian Hayrik. Alternative spellings of his name and surname are Mugurditch Chrimian or Mgrdich Khrimyan.

9 During his lifetime, Sergey Merkurov was honored by many Soviet titles; he also held bureaucratic positions including he was the director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow from 1944 to 1949. However, discussing his works, it is important to note several factors. Certain of Merkurov’s writings shed light on his approach to death, mysticism, and life. His texts provide insights on revolutionary monumental art in the early years of the Soviet Union and they reference dialogues with Vladimir Lenin.

His collection of death masks was initiated like a personal project of casting the death masks of intellectuals and prominent figures, such as Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Lenin or Sergey Eisenstein. Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, it turned into an official commission-based practice, including from The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. For example, there is a death mask of Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief postwar ideologue and perpetrator of the Great Terror (1936–38.) Various texts and references explain that Merkurov would cast the officials, as a way to maintain a “good relationship” with Stalin.

share distinctive similarities. Both sculptors intended their works to be collected within what can be conceived of as an archive; both insisted on the necessity of sculptural materiality; and both worked with modes of reproduction such as photography and/or plaster casting. Both also understood visuality through the genre of portraiture as conjoining artistic and scientific aims. In the case of Hoffman, these factors merge within the ethnographic preoccupations of 1930s artistic and scientific institutions and connect Realism to categories of geno-, pheno-, or ethnotypes. She searches for a universal “racial type” through an anthropologically legitimized representation of humankind. In the case of Merkurov, a particular form of portraiture—death masks— stood as a simultaneously commemorative, “iconic” and “accurate” record of those individuals who were witnesses to the 1917 October Revolution. While my focus is on the “Armenian Jew” and its porosity between tag-label-visual, this paper also examines the artistic and legitimizing frameworks by overlaying the purportedly rigid representational boundaries demarcating the “universal” and the “iconic” connected to these realist-inspired portrait systems. It is necessary to do so in order to argue that porosity is also a fluidity of visual experience in the archives, particularly when projected on race as “a fixed category.” This position is possible to illustrate now that both collections are located within the archival apparatus, where the notion of porosity can be critically reflected in the type of archival slippage “Armenian Jew” represents.

Construction of Contemporary Archives Before discussing “Armenian Jew,” I want to reflect upon the basic logic of classification systems in major archives such as the Getty, as this sets up the framework for my arguments.

Through categorizing, classifying and digitizing, the classic archival process gradually disassembles and reassembles the materials for “arrangement, description, and cataloguing” (Greene & Meissner, 2005, p. 208).10 This suggests a process of normalization through corrective procedures. For example, an archivist receiving parcels and boxes containing an unordered stack of documents, correspondence or 10

While these processes still dominate, it should be acknowledged that there has been considerable critique in recent years of these descriptive practices that is beyond the scope of this paper to address.

photographs begins with the organization of the materials from the division. Initially, the aim is to regulate “inventory (as a description of the documents in the order in which they are kept) and the catalogue ([…] a selective description of documents according to certain themes including subjects and place names)” (Duchein, 1992, p. 20). As such, processing an archive can be considered in some ways analogous to the dismemberment of a collective body of diverse materials into description, tags, and finding aids. In this scenario, there are two conditions at stake for a user or researcher. Firstly, it is a perplexing task to get the full impression of the body of the archive, including its processing history. Secondly, even if processing an archive produces standards, vocabularies, or generalized tags to aid the researcher, at the same time, it paradoxically complicates the discovery and sometimes contextualization of the specificities of the materials. Thus, each archival item becomes normalized—even those that are an anomaly in the set.11 One contemporary discussion about extending archival apparatuses suggests that archives should also be approached as visual repositories, where materials are addressed in terms of their visuality, such as through Ian Grosvenor’s (2007) proposed notion of the “second gaze.” 12 The latter “moves beyond appearances” (p. 622) and looks for inconsistencies in the materials rather than solely for the given authenticity, unity, or simply facts. The notion of inconsistencies can also be linked to Michel Foucault’s scholarship on biopolitics and the archeology of knowledge, particularly to his reflections on anomalies and classifications (1970/1994). As Paul Rabinow (1984) starts his edited volume of The Foucault Reader: An essential component of technologies of normalization is the key role they play in the systematic creation, classification, and control of ‘anomalies’ in the social body.

Their raison d’etre (emphasis in original) comes from two claims of their promoters: first, that certain technologies serve to isolate anomalies; and second, that one can then normalize anomalies through corrective or therapeutic 11

This unintentional effect can be exacerbated when holdings of an archive are digitized.

12 The author primarily reflects on the photographic record or the use of images in cultural history and diversity discourse. He also refers to a series of scholarly works (e.g. Allan Sekula) that raised questions about the problematic bond between archives and visual field.

procedures, determined by other related technologies. (p.

21)13

What is interesting in the case of the Races of Mankind as a “universal” type portrait-sculpture database is that, once in the archives, two Western categorization systems are overlaid: namely, the Hoffman’s own cataloguing of “races,” and the archival practices of the Getty Research Institute. In reading the former through the latter, mismatches can be registered, that in turn lead to further inquiry, as with the case study of “Armenian Jew.” Commission from the Field Museum: The Races of Mankind In the early 1930s, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago undertook an ambitious global project. In a museum, it attempted to solve the issue of “a true and effective” representation of “a vast assortment of diverse individuals” of the human family (Keith, 1933, p. 7). The nature of the institutional commission was to be understood as one body of work—an exhibition embodying a world database expressed by a unified set of sculptural depictions of individuals (Peabody, 2013, pp. 121–122). Peabody continues: . . .the Field developed a concept for a new exhibition—a Hall of the Races of Mankind that would gather and showcase the physical traits associated with race as they were manifest in different populations by way of the aesthetically pleasing and durable medium of bronze sculpt. (p. 119)

The commission for this project went to Rodin’s former student, realist and figurative sculptor Malvina Hoffman. 14 She 13

He continues that the work of Foucault demonstrates how, under the conditions of bio-power, “the technologies of discipline and confession” aim at but never succeed in eliminating “anomaly” (the delinquent, the pervert; Rabinow, 1984, p. 21).

14 The museum’s massive commission (with the planned sum of $109,000 to $125,000 and with the expenditure of $150,000; Kinkel, 2011, p. 76) surprisingly took place at the outset of the Great Depression (Taylor, 2016). The exhibition leaflet lists the following names of financial supporters and contributors—Chauncey Keep ($50,000), Mr. Marshall Field, Mrs. Stainley Field and Mrs. Charles H. Schweppe (Laufer, 1933, p. 3). In relation to the Great Depression, there is another layer in this institutional commission associated with the construction of gendered roles. Art historian Linda Kim (2014) explains that the Depression was a failure of patriarchal labor in the American industrialized society. For the time

traveled worldwide to conduct her fieldwork 15 where “native races are at their purest” (Keith, 1933, p. 7; Teslow, 1998, p.

47). In 1933, the final body of work resulted in “nearly one hundred portrait busts, individual life-size sculptures, and figural group” (Peabody, 2013, p. 120) that opened as an exhibition at the Field Museum titled the Races of Mankind.16 The 1933 leaflet provided the exhibition plan with the list of the sculptures of “races” according to geography and groups, for example, Africa (e.g., “Bushman family, Kalahari Desert, South Africa”), Europe (e.g., “Mediterranean, French type”), Asia (“Vedda, Ceylon, Age 28…”), America (“Blackfoot Indian…”), Oceania and Australia (“Hawaiian riding on a surfboard, Polynesia…”) The Races of Mankind, 1933).

As mentioned, the Field Museum wanted such figurativebased representations because of their association with the classical, “timeless” permanence ascribed to bronze or marble sculptures. It was felt that by having only one artist execute the whole project, the resulting figures could convey a collective, shared character. The hard, polished surface seemed to stand firmly for visual resolution of any contentious issues related to merging different forms of observations and impulses that might be at work. Such observations and impulses might include, importantly, a subjective focus on human nature rendered through aesthetic principles by an artist, and an objective focus on an organic and political matter (the body) as deduced by the kinds of measurements period, the commission uniquely renewed the social and professional status of Hoffman as a White upper-class woman sculptor. The fact that a woman could imagine pursuing a career, could travel to the colonized lands with her husband Samuel Grimson, who was the expedition photographer and took various films—“all [these] required Hoffman to find ways to conform her femininity to heterosexual and patriarchal norms” (Kim, 2014, p. 105).

15 The Field Museum sent Hoffman for the research trip without an accompanying anthropologist (Kinkel, 2011, p. 69). During her fieldwork, Hoffman used various ethnographic and anthropological techniques, such as photo-documentation, anthropometric measurement, or video recordings. The photos of her travels and models would serve to report and get an approval from the Field Museum. For example, see Field (1931, April 24).

16 The Field Museum’s (n.d.) website informs 104 sculptures, which comprised of 27 life-size, 27 busts, and 50 heads. Marianne Kinkel (2011) reports the sculptor created “nearly all of the ninety-one sculptures”(p. 1).

Kinkel also points out that in 1934 a room was added in order to produce “the more scientifically oriented room filled with charts and samples” and break the sculptures’ “interpretive ambiguity” (p. 19).

and data sets used to provide scientific support for racial theories that were being advanced in the 1930s.17 In the scope of the commission, two faces of Western institutional, hegemonic inscriptive practices overlap. The first is associated with anthropology as a disciplinary field, which in the 1930s was a young science that had its own limitations (Laufer, 1933, p. 4). Specifically, anthropology promoted ideas that have subsequently fallen into disrepute or have been rejected outright. Although, at that time, this field had produced racial classifications based on the skin color, the chief anthropology curator Berthold Laufer claimed that it did not pass “beyond the stage of common experience” and “a solid technique for the study of skin color and its nomenclature has not yet been developed” (p. 4). In this regard, the variations of colors were “almost infinite and no one is either strictly white or yellow or black or red” (p. 4).

However, Laufer also viewed “race as breed” (p. 6) or “an exclusively biological concept” (Teslow, 2014, p. 88), stating, for example, that “as a biological type our Negros belong to the African or ‘black’ race and will always remain within this division . . . ” (Laufer, 1933, p. 4). The second face is that of museological practice and the politics of display. The Field Museum acknowledged how “the white man’s expansion” jeopardized the “primitive tribes,” (p. 6) which also inferred the disappearance of cultural traditions (i.e., “race” is also linked to behavioral types). Thus, these two practices came together with a humanistic urgency through an ideological exhibition where “many a vanishing race will continue to live only in the statues and busts displayed. . . .” (p. 6).

Prior to the commission, Hoffman’s talents were already acknowledged in terms of having been a student of Rodin.

They were also evident in certain work such as “Pavlova Dancing the Gavotte” (bronze statue, 1915) that represents the “aesthetic purity” and expressiveness of the legendary Anna Pavlova’s dance. Hoffman had already travelled alone to North Africa and the Field Museum recognized she could handle their goal of introducing a travel-based commission to depict “plastic representation of races” (Keith, 1933, p. 7).

She was selected as “a great sculptor who lavishes her art in 17

Please refer to the dissertation work of Lind Kim (2006) for the study of the prevailing racial theories and figures linked with the Races of Mankind. Moreover, the exhibition leaflet also provides a bibliography, including the names of anthropologists and racial theorists such as William Zebina Ripley, Alfred Kroeber, Aleš Hrdlička, Franz Boas, or an institution (British Museum), just to name a few.

the service of anthropology” able effectively to catch “the essential traits of race” (pp. 7–8). Hoffman, for her part, saw the commission as a challenge to discover new vistas in foreign lands, to imagine the unknown and the mysterious, and to collect evidence, referring to herself as a “headhunter” or a “globe-traveler” (Hoffman, 1936, p. 251). 18 In terms of the Races of Mankind exhibition-project, Hoffman as artist proposed another set of inscriptions derived from the Western art historical canon. Firstly, she retained the traditional sculptural materials of bronze and marble (sometimes referred as stone), which inevitably ended up reinscribing Western scientific racial definitions through her use of bronze for black, patina for brown and marble for white (Field, 1931). Secondly, even though Hoffman acknowledged the grand art historical problem of portraiture, namely that “no human beings are ever alike” (Hoffman, 1936, p. 13) she sculpted her subjects in an artistic subjective reading of a moment when “one represented something characteristic of his race, and of no other” (emphasis in original) (Hoffman, 1936, p. 12). Taken together therefore, these inscriptions produce a problematic lack of differentiation between “scientific” ethnotypes, cultural clichés and visual stereotypes.

I turn next to consider one commission for the “racial category of ‘Armenoid’” from The Races of Mankind exhibition-project. In the archives it appears to have been assigned multiple and disputed titles: “Armenian,” “Armenian Male: Armenia,” “Armenoid Race,” “Rabbi: Djerba from Africa,” and “Armenian Jew.” These various titles are emblematic for the slippages in the archival categorization, and more so with the addition of the connected visual records and the act of labelling. My reading of this particular entry in the archive allows to explore and question the commission’s prevailing frameworks of artistic (Malvina Hoffman) and institutional legitimization (The Field Museum, 2019).

18

In her book Heads and Tales, Hoffman claims to have understood the crisis of humanity and thought about the notion of race during war in the Balkans—a perception, which some authors state (Nygard, 2016) is depicted in the central sculptural group of the Races of Mankind called Unity of Man (or Unity of Mankind), a monument representing three main races—yellow, black, and white).

Searching for the “Armenian” Tag During the Getty Consortium Seminar “Art and Anthropology: The Agency of Objects”19 and upon learning that Malvina Hoffman’s archives and research materials, including those of The Races of Mankind, were at the Getty Research Institute, I became interested in seeing how she achieved one single definition of “an Armenian.” In the context of her work in the early 1930s, the definition of Armenian identity was already forcibly ruptured and taking different trajectories: The Armenian Genocide had been committed in Western Armenia by the Ottoman Empire, and in the world, there was already a sense of an Armenian Diaspora. Moreover, the Red/Soviet army had invaded Eastern Armenia, thereby instituting a new ideology and identity.

A cursory search for “Armenian” in the finding aid of Hoffman’s archives returns an additional tag, “Armenian Jew,” attached to a copper plate archived in box 131 (Hoffman, n.d.).20 What visually caught my attention was the style of the portrait inscribed on the plate. The style had less in common with her work created from human life models, and more with the portrait reliefs seen in the British Museum in the exposition rooms of Assyrian Lions Hunt (Assyria (Room 10), 645–705 BC). Contradicting this title, American Sculptors Series 5 book (Hoffman, 1948) devoted to Hoffman’s oeuvre, shows the image of the same head but labeled “Rabbi, Island of Djerba, Africa, applewood, 1927” (p. 22). The location and date refer to Hoffman’s trip to North Africa prior to the Field Museum commission.

The formal attributes stylistically ascribed to the representations of “Armenian Jew” at the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute have now somehow been extended also to a rabbi in Africa. Similarly confusingly, in the album “Hall of Man, Volume II” that lists the exhibition exponents, a photograph is labelled, “95.

19

“Malvina Hoffman papers, 1897–1984” was introduced to the group of the Getty Consortium Seminar by Professor Dackerman in 2017.

20 The order of this box content is the following: Plate 1: “Senegalese Heroic Head (Hall of Man)”; Plate 2: “Boldini”; Plate 3: “Samoan Male (Hall of Man)”; Plate 4: “Hamite (Hall of Man)”; Plate 5: “M. Hoffman with Kiki in Paris Garden”; Plate 6: “Male Javanese Dancer (Hall of Man)”; Plate 7: “Bali Woman”; Plate 8-9: “Corner Design Woodcut for Grand Central Gallery Catalogue,” 1929; Plate 10-13: “Bacchanale Frieze”; Plate 14: “Tam-Tam - African Drummer (Hall of Man)”; Plate 15: “Shilluk Warrior”; Plate 16: “Armenian Jew.”

Armenian Male: Armenia (Bust). Not in Field Museum group,” but it shows a completely new portrait and labelled only as “Armenian” (“Hall of Man, Volume II,” circa 1933).

Furthermore, this same portrait in profile is printed in the 2011 book, Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman by Marianne Kinkel (2011, p. 77) but titled as “Armenian Jew.”

Figure 1. Malvina Hoffman, Armenian-Jew (copper plate), Malvina Hoffman papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (850042). Photograph by Marianna Hovhannisyan.

Reproduced with permission.

Figure 2. Malvina Hoffman, “Rabbi, island of Djerba, Africa,” applewood, 1927. Source: Hoffman, M. (1948).

Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Figure 3. Malvina Hoffman, 95. Armenian Male: Armenia (Bust), Malvina Hoffman papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (850042). Photography by Marianna Hovhannisyan. Reproduced with permission.

Having accidentally raised a perplexing set of clues from these visual and labeling entanglements, I move on to a factbased reading. One of the Field Museum’s initial contracted commissions to consider the “Armenoid” racial category (Kinkel, 2011, p. 77). At the end of the nineteenth century, “Armenoid race” was more considered within the anthropological history of Asia Minor [it includes Western Armenia] to be the second most important racial type after the Mediterranean or Iranian type and a subtype of Caucasian race, which “covers nearly every physical type and family of language of the Eur-Asian content…” plus Semitic (Ripley, 1899, pp. 443–444). 21 The late 1930s further refined this perspective by clarifying “types” such as Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians or Jews, in relation to the geography of Anatolia, Transcaucasia, Iran, and Mesopotamia (Coon, 1939).

Hoffman’s diary from her world trips in 1930–31 lists all of the “racial types” that were initially commissioned and their main descriptions. In it, she observes: “Asia Minor will never yield to any real order: it is such a polyglot of Semite and Semitic mixture that the ‘Semite Type’ is to be discerned in almost every group you encounter” (Hall of Man data, n.d.). As a side note worth exploring further: the understanding of “Armenoid” that was under examination by Adolf Hitler’s racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther was defined as a “Near Eastern Race” (Ihrig, 2016, p. 305). It was on the basis of such observations that he asserted that Jews were not Aryan, but instead were descended from non-European, secondary races, i.e., of “Armenoid” type, thereby “equating Jews, Greeks and Armenians” (p. 306). In the leaflet, the Field Museum clearly and openly refuted the 1930s definition of “Aryan” as a race (Laufer, 1933, pp. 5–6) and yet it chose to use the “racial” and problematic subcategory “Armenoid” to include in the display.

Author Marianne Kinkel (2011) provides a detailed account of Hoffman’s work. She tells the story of how, even after the opening of the exhibition, the chief curator of anthropology (Berthold Laufer) was unable to classify some of the works in terms of their appearances, as well as of Hoffman’s failure to produce complete geographic provenances (Kinkel, 2011, p. 76). Such confusion was also 21

I am not an expert in Western racial theories and my intention with these references is to establish certain definitions informing the time period, while acknowledging that the idea of such racial theories is refuted as well as outdated. References to the work of Ripley also appear in the bibliographic notes in the Races of Mankind leaflet and/or in the Hoffman’s papers.

conditioned by the fact that Hoffman submitted some samples as “substitutes for the types called in the original contract,” which she believed to be the original type (p. 76). “Armenian Jew” emerges from such a situation, when Hoffman “believed [it] represented a typical Armenian Jew” (p. 77) for the commissioned “Armenoid” category. 22 Unintentionally, this substitution led to several slippages in an already dubious system of categorization within the commission. According to Kinkel, the planned “Armenoid” was initially problematic as a museological issue. It concerned where to display it, which as a Near Eastern/Caucasian/Asian Minor type, (my phrasing) belonged neither to Europe nor to Asia (Kinkel, 2011, p. 77).

Slippage is also evident in the scientific realm and research. In the first plan of the Field Museum’s commissioned list of the racial types, dated 1930, a bust is listed as “ArmeonoidArmenian” [sic.] under the heading of Europe, while in the second plan of 1931, a bust is listed as “Armenoid male” under Asia (Hall of Man data, n.d.).

Kinkel continues that upon receiving Hoffman’s new name, the Field Museum’s curatorial/anthropological and directorial bodies disputed her act of reducing the initially listed race of “Armenoid” to “Armenian Jew.” I would add that interestingly, such racial labeling did not follow the intention of the commission’s worldview—one sculpture, one “racial ethnotype.” Kinkel writes that Laufer also argued that the Chicago-based Armenian and Jewish communities would criticize the Field Museum, as the portrait “is hardly the representative of all Jews and Armenian Jews might protest and insist on adding other Jewish types” (Kinkel, 2011, p. 77).

Thus, there would be no longer an inclusion and unity of ethnotype but instead it would introduce an exclusion. The Museum’s directorial bodies proposed labeling the portrait only as “Armenian,” only if it scientifically represented a typical Armenian (Kinkel, 2011, p. 78). Kinkel (2011, p. 78) continues: “Hoffman was purported to have replied, ‘Even if you call him just an ‘Armenian’, even if you call him a Presbyterian, his face still proves his family name is Shylock.”23 Judging by this statement, Hoffman’s ideal of pure facial character—now connected to her use of a derogatory term for “Jew”—collapses any supporting arguments of artist’s 22

Kinkel (2011, pp. 76–81) provides a detailed account about the disagreements between Hoffman and the museum bodies, as well as other examples having such slippages.

23 The original source is Hoffman, M. (1934, January 6).

neutrality, impartiality, and an objective scientific, anthropological gaze onto “race” relations. The Field Museum went on to display the portrait but by 1937, the portrait was permanently removed from the museum display (Kinkel, 2011, p. 78). The portrait remained unlisted in the Museum’s official registry, only emerging quietly in a Christie’s (2005) auction under the title “Armenian Jew” (it can be viewed here).

My search for an “Armenian” tag exposes the fallacies inherent to the Field Museum’s claims for a neutral, scientific worldview and to Hoffman’s role as an artist and observer.

The commission requires Hoffman to take “empirical scientific observation” and data to capture racial, individual expression.

But it also requires to work with the classical genres of figurative arts, as portrait, bust, or full figure. The premise sets up a flawed logic: this form of portraiture format serves to recognize singularity of the individual—as person and personality—yet, contradictorily, the commission also demands to focus on a scientific representation of category, as if only the expression of a “racial type.” In addition, the sculptures appear bound to their materials signifying classical art (i.e., bronze and patinas). This kind of art calls up notions of universal values, mythos, or “timeless” permanence, especially in Western museum contexts. Therefore, in the early 1930s, such an approach could not recognize, let alone translate, the complex fluidity of subjectivities, cultures, and geographies. 24 Realism and Auguste Rodin’s Atelier At this point, I want to elaborate upon an essential discussion regarding a period of Realism in the arts that is connected to Auguste Rodin’s atelier. Rodin’s implementation of Realism aligns to the concept of a beauty in “truth”: a beauty expressed through body, aesthetic spirit, and ideals of correct anatomical proportions. His Realism also importantly 24

These slippages are the result of an uneven interaction between the classificatory types of geno-, pheno- and ethno-, which a significant body of work refutes. In the 1980s, professor and plant scientist Alain Corcos (1984, pp. 1–9) argues that, historically, the misunderstanding about “race” emerges from the conviction “that humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics,” (emphasis in original) i.e., phenotype, and “these characteristics are transmitted through blood,” i.e., genotype, and both “are inherited together,” meaning ethnotype and cultural traits, i.e., social interactions, communities, historical nexus, etc.

applied modern manufacturing methods to the sculptural work. For instance, after his death, Rodin left to France not only his entire estate, but also “all of the rights of its reproduction, that is, the right to make bronze editions from the estate’s plasters” (Krauss, 1986, p. 151). Today, therefore, there are multiple The Thinkers produced during and after his death. Art historian Rosalind E. Krauss examines another layer about Rodin and Realism. The core of his work was not bronze sculptures, but rather his plasters or casts that manifest the “ethos of mechanical reproduction” (p. 153). Art historian and curator Catherine Lampert (1986) provides examples of multiple life-sized limbs, torsos, heads, and legs reproduced

by Rodin. She elaborates on his relationship to Realism and reproduction of the hands, for example, as the “constitution of the Romantic treatment of fragments as self-sufficient units” (Lampert, 1986, p. 231).

One of the rarely cited series of Rodin’s works 25 helps us to understand the profound connotations between racial depictions, gender, choice of material, and Realism in arts.

Rodin worked with Japanese actress Hisa Ōta, known as Hanako, who danced during the Colonial Exhibition in Marseilles in 1906, where he saw her for the first time. Her dance was described by the 1914 London Sunday Times as “the power of the primitive” that sets the viewer thinking (Pronko, 1989, p. 210). Between 1907/8 to 1911, Rodin produced around 50 busts, heads, and masks of Hanako (Lampert, 1986, p. 232): I have made a study of the Japanese actress, Hanako. She has not a particle of fat . . . . Therefore she has an anatomy totally different from that of Europeans, but is exceedingly beautiful in its unique strength . . . . Beauty is character and expression. The human body is, above all, the mirror of the soul, from which the greatest beauty comes. . . . (Gsell, 1911, p. 152)

Rodin’s obsession with Hanako reflects on what art historical discourse has made clear today––that there is a racial fetishism component to the Western appreciation of the so-called “primitive beauty.” Because the quest of a sculptor for the accuracy of body proportions and its reproducibility are based on the worldview of “an anatomy totally different from 25

Hanako.

I want to thank Professor Norman Bryson for the reference to

that of Europeans,” it exposes a hegemonic inscription based on racially filtered measurements. 26 Auguste Rodin’s Atelier and Two Sculptors As already discussed, Rodin’s Realism resulted in two different approaches being espoused by his students. One is exemplified by Hoffman’s oeuvre, which depicts “universal” types, based upon by the accumulation of scientific data and measurements, as “truth.” The other can be exemplified by the work of the Armenian-Greek sculptor, Sergey Merkurov, which offers an interesting counterpoint to that of Hoffman.

Merkurov began studying in Zurich in 1902 with Swiss sculptor Adolf Mayer.27 There he also met Vladimir I. Lenin for the first time and got inspired by his ideas. In 1905, Merkurov (1953) went to Paris in order to visit museums and explore Medieval and Classical arts, including those exhibited at the Louvre Museum (pp. 23–28). His self-education brought him to Rodin’s studio in 1906–07. Unlike Hoffman, he did not develop a long-term relationship with Rodin. Nevertheless, his meetings with Rodin, and visits to his studio, as well as his own study of Rodin’s works, tremendously influenced his practice (Merkurov, 2011, p. 10). In 1907, Merkurov returned to Eastern Armenia, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. The reason for his return was a commission from the Etchmiadzin [main] Cathedral in Armenia to cast a death mask of Mkrtich Khrimian, the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Merkurov is one of the few sculptors who succeeded in the worlds of both pre- and post-October Revolution. Perhaps, this explains his two contradictory practices during the Soviet era: casting death masks28 to commemorate Soviet post-1917 26

One of the reviewers of this essay proposed that such a reading of Rodin should also imply that the fetishization of a woman’s body is generated from his gendered and sexualized perception. In other words, this is a relationship between “a great” man-artist and a low-class and/or middle-class woman-model. See a critical reflection on this topic by Higonnet (1993).

27 In 1901 Sergey Merkurov graduated from Tiflis Real School, then he entered the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, from where he was expelled for participating in workers’ rallies. Then he graduated from the Zurich University Philosophy Faculty. From 1903 to 1905 he studied at Munich Academy of Arts. See Merkurov and Merkurov (1986, p. 48).

28 Thinking about representation, Revolution, and death masks, it is worth mentioning that they historically converge at the events of the

intellectuals, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries; and becoming the main sculptor of Socialist-Realist monuments to Joseph Stalin, Lenin and other Soviet officials. This contradiction is evident in his understanding of Socialist Realist sculptures where “the individual disappears, in order to become a type” (Merkurov, 1953, p. 39), but the death mask is “a historical document of an extreme importance” (Merkurov et al., 1986).

For example, he states that “I must preserve and pass on to the centuries the features/traits of Ilyich [Lenin] on his deathbed.”

Figure 4. S. Merkurov’s death mask collection, S. Merkurov Museum, Gyumri, Armenia, 2016. Copyright by Sergey Merkurov’s House Museum, 2016. Reproduced with permission.

Unlike Hoffman’s scientific registrar of types, Merkurov’s death mask portraits can be considered as a project symbolizing his identification with other comrades (including Lenin and avantgarde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky 29). It is a French Revolution. Wax sculptor Anna Maria “Marie” Tussaud was commissioned to create death masks of the guillotined aristocrats from the former monarchy, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. See further reflections about cruelty, display, and materiality of wax by Bryson (2000).

29 Please refer to the article of Leah Dickerman (2001) who presents the 1920s context in the Soviet Union, when Lenin’s death mask

body of work—a commemorative archive—constituting revolutionary people in the Soviet times. At the same time, the October Revolution opened up new vistas for monumental sculptors such as Merkurov to create a new style of propaganda expressing the revolutionary ideas of the time.

Later, in the context of Stalin’s repression and control, this monumentality would reproduce the figure of the cult (Merkurov & Merkurov, 1986, p. 48). In this regard, Merkurov articulates his choice of basalt and granite in monumental sculptures as being the classical materials of ancient cultures, such as in Assyrian and Egyptian art. According to Merkurov, those materials allowed him to create a general character: “they do not give me the possibility to get to the details” (Merkurov, 2011, p. 41). This is an interesting observation.

He sculpted Stalin in granite or basalt as this served the Stalinist aesthetic, which required only fixed heroic features to be depicted. However, in the case of his death masks, it is the 1:1 analog measurement of matter itself by means of the plaster cast—which preserves the particular sense of individuals, as it allows for their transformation into “icons.”

Here, it is worth returning to Hoffman, who has a different position about the relationship between material and representation.

In reference to the Races of Mankind, Marianne Kinkel (2011) explains Hoffman’s decision to first model heads, figures, and busts in clay and then cast them in bronze: Life casting as a mechanical means [produces] resemblance, and clay modeling [is] . . . a way for the sculptor to create a likeness that represents the inner essence of an individual . . . . [This] enables her sculptures to be perceived simultaneously as individual portraits and as representatives of race. (p. 2)

Searching for “Armenian”: Resemblance Sergey Merkurov and Malvina Hoffman represent two different artistic approaches to the genre of portraiture in which Rodin’s understanding of Realism merges with an empirical reality. As this discussion illustrates, searching for the “Armenian” tag in Hoffman’s archives can only offer a set

by Merkurov became the most reproducible “iconic” and “accurate” face of Lenin. This mechanical reproduction provoked an interesting criticism of LEF, the famous cultural, radical/avant-garde journal of the Left Front of the Arts.

of mislabels. This situation consigns my search to the default emphasis in the art archive on the visual. Provocatively, the image of Hoffman’s anomalous so-called “Armenian”30 (ca.

1930s), i.e., the “Armenian Jew” discussed in the book of Kinkel, and particularly, the visual features of the colorful image of the same head from the Christie’s database appears to share many features with Merkurov’s first death mask of Mkrtich Khrimian (1907). Along these lines, further searching at the Getty Research Institute reveals a video from the Hoffman archives, made by Hoffman and showing Merkurov (Hoffman, 1924). They had obviously met. As Rodin made well known, reproduction (casting copies or photographing) is an important part of circulating the artist’s oeuvre. It is known that Merkurov cast several copies of his death masks afterwards, to be distributed to certain institutions, photographed or shared with his small group of influential peers. All this further informs how porous the relationship between labeling and the visual nature of the archive remains.

While this text tries to present that labeling, visuality and racial profiling— ‘Amenoid’, ‘Armenian Jew’, ‘ArmenoidArmenian’, or even ‘Shylock’—are interchangeable porosities in the archive, there is also the visual experience which can be termed as a visual sliding (glissement).31 This is both a possibility and disruption that echoes with my opening discussion on discovering anomalies in archives.

30

This is the one, which is listed “95. Armenian Male: Armenia (Bust). Not in Field Museum group.”

31 According to Kristen Campbell (1999), in his departure from the Saussurian linguistic theory towards the psychoanalytic field, Jacques Lacan argued that the notion of glissement is the rupture of the interrelationship between the signifier and the signified. The sign is never complete and “the signified constantly slides under the signifier” (p. 137).

In this article, in the constant flux of mislabels and misvisuals, as well as in the instability of meanings, glissement is another possible reading of slippages of the signified, including all misattributions as the new signified.

I want to acknowledge our recent discussion with Professor Norman Bryson, who directed me to this concept.

Figure 5. Sergey Merkurov, Khrimyan Hayrik (the first death mask), plaster cast, 1907, Sergey Merkurov Museum, Gyumri, Armenia. Copyright by Sergey Merkurov's House Museum.

Conclusion It is no surprise that the search-tag for “Armenian” in the archives around the early 1930s is about absences, conflicting visual appearances, and mislabeling. Hegemonic archives reflecting nation, identity, and history are always likely to contain such problematic tag-label-visual relationships. Technological promises of digital fidelity cannot fix this situation.

For example, if archiving Hoffman’s materials re-inscribes a flaw, hidden within the beautiful surfaces of artistry, digitization will further inscribe the flaw.

So too does the auction catalog, where one of Hoffman’s mislabeled scientific commissions for “Armenoid” appears as a liberated artwork, but retaining the wrongly attributed title.

In the case of Merkurov, he himself was by default an eyewitness of something intangible––the death of a revolutionary subject through an art form that draws as near as possible to a scientific artifact. The death mask, with its requisite eyes-closed expression, cannot have the ability to return the gaze of the viewer. Merkurov’s artistic gaze is not concerned with a sculpture portraying the “animate” but to

collect the political meaning and character behind that moment of an individual becoming “inanimate.” This should be understood within the context of Stalin’s political repression from the early-1930s, which suppressed liberal thought, radical institutions and individuals, as well as utopian visions of a revolutionary future.

On the other hand, Hoffman allows herself an agency that evaluates phenotypes, then executes her work to the point that her own self reveals the flaws in such a “science” of observations. Her works serve the institutional legitimation of “universal” archetypes as a world specimen database. The Races of Mankind reduces the depicted individual to an inanimate object with eyes open—the sign of animate life in sculpture. These objects stand for the mastery of her artistry as the global eyewitness who travels the world and develops the “authentic” self. Yet, the conflicting story and example of the “Armenian Jew” tag reveals the reality of the artist’s own prejudices as the vision at work.

In 1984, Merkurov’s collection was turned into a museum in Armenia. His collection was organized and donated by his son. In the post-Soviet situation, Merkurov’s body of work can be seen as an anomaly itself. He achieved a collection that encompasses portraits of both victims and perpetrators that link directly to the implications of the 1917 October Revolution. But after 1991, with the independence of nations from the Soviet history, the locus of conditions that allowed the viewer to “see” these portraits was erased.

In comparison, the purchase of the Hoffman archives coincides with the launching of the Getty Research Institute in 1985, at that time named the Getty Arts and Humanities Institute. Through being archived, Hoffman’s work was reevaluated as part of the Getty’s intention to join the fields of arts with the humanities.

Today, the Hoffman archive embodies three Western systems of classification: a racial classification realised through sculpting; the imposed colonial logic to classify the peoples of the world; and the contemporary archiving system of arrangement and description used by the Getty. The latter is based on the American and British descriptive approach, “More product, Less Process,” whose intention is to improve the economic distribution of an archivist’s labor, by dividing the materials into boxes and folders, and producing cleaner descriptions in

the hierarchical finding aids.32 Searching for the keyword “African” in Hoffman’s finding aids, one finds: “Box: 91: Part I: Portraits of African “racial types” - 26 photographs;” “Box 34, Folder 11: Exhibition of “Daboa” (African Dancing Girl)” or “Box 132, Plate 3: “Mask of African Slave.”

The archival instability between labels and visuals opens up a space of inquiry where different disconnected routes pass. For this text, I selected four that reflect my ongoing interest in collecting indexical absences around the so-called “Armenian” as a contemporary narrative. In each example, the archive is the promise of a portrait-making apparatus that can never deliver a unity.

This means that querying “Armenian” and immediately receiving the so-called “correct tag” paradoxically has an agency. It allows us to recognize that an archive is a transmitter of the flaws contained in its collections, but that those flaws comprise human logic and imaginary states that reflect the “real” embedded in the material. This takes us back to one of the main reasons why my interest developed in bringing together archival, visual, institutional and curatorial practice––such a conjunction allows us to engage the archive as discursive space, thereby accepting that the archive’s legitimizing and representative frameworks are what produce its visual nature through the human errors and inaccuracies they instigate.

Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge Prof. Anne Gilliland for her valuable remarks, as well as Gracen Brilmyer and María Montenegro for their comments. I am also grateful to artist Fareed Armaly, Prof. Norman Bryson, and Prof. Susan Dickerman for their feedback. I would also like to thank Sergey Merkurov’s House Museum in Gyumri and Anthon Merkurov, as well as Virginia Mokslaveskas from the Getty Research Institute for assisting me in various inquiries.

32

I want to thank Beth Guynn, who processed the Hoffman archives at GRI, for her valuable discussion with me on these subjects back in 2017.

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UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title “Useful Information Turned into Something Useless”: Archival Silences, Imagined Records, and Suspicion of Mediated Information in the JFK Assassination Collection

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pv1s9p7

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Eadon, Yvonne

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

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The Kennedy assassination is nearly synonymous with the notion of conspiracy theory.

For those who make it their business to theorize about the events of and subsequent to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the details matter most: Was his brain stolen, or his body swapped, before the autopsy? Was Lee Harvey Oswald a CIA operative? Was the man who killed him a mafia hit man? What about the smoke that appeared on the grassy knoll—could it have been from a rifle, or was it simply from a passing vehicle? The official narrative states that Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy, coming at the behest of the famously fraught investigation propagated by the Warren Commission. Many people do not believe it could be so simple, however—conspiracy theorists latch on to details that seem like evidence of a cover-up (the trajectory of the bullet, Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination while in the hands of police, etc.), and proceed to suggest that Oswald was a Russian agent (or alternatively, a CIA agent) who had to be taken out, for example (Aaronovitch, 2010, p. 129). Countless conflicting unofficial and official narrative explanations of the event exist.

These narratives can sway one another. For example, Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK (which promoted the idea that the CIA, FBI, and the military were involved in covering up the assassination) influenced public opinion to such an extent that legislative action ensued. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992 mandated that all records relating to the assassination be consolidated at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and made available to the public.

The records that could not be declassified immediately—for security and privacy reasons—were to be held in a protected collection at NARA for 25 years, maximum (S.3006 - 102nd Congress, 1992). Almost all of this protected collection was released by or soon after October 26, 2017, leaving roughly one percent of the collection classified.

Some user groups of online government archival databases are more conspiratorially minded1 than others. Such user groups think about and interact with government documents in a unique way—with what I call suspicion of mediated information—which should be thought about by archivists, particularly those working 1 By “conspiratorially minded,” I mean they are inclined to suspect conspiracies, not that they are inclined to perpetrate them.

with collections of high conspiratorial value. The concept of archival silences (established by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and taken up by Michelle Caswell, Simon Fowler, David Thomas, Valerie Johnson, and others), coupled with Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s notions of imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries, provides a conceptual framework for this project by making it possible to talk about the productivity of silences in archives. My case study of the JFKFiles subreddit (/r/JFKFiles) illustrates how users can react to these silences with suspicion of mediated information, often filling them with imagined records.

In the 2017 document release of the JFK Assassination Collection, poor scan quality and lack of adequate searchability function as silences, alongside and within one another, contributing to users’ suspicion of mediated information. Users direct this suspicion towards the originating institutions (FBI, CIA, etc.), NARA, its archivists, or the government in general—anyone who could have possibly interfered with or manipulated the information.

The community also attempts to band together to problem solve. /r/JFKFiles is grappling with the same kinds of problems that archival scholars and practicing archivists are facing in regards to digitization—archivists can learn from this group of users just as the user group could learn from archivists.

II. Literature Review: Scholarship on Conspiracy Theories Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming (2014), who have characterized conspiracy theorizing as a kind of “folk sociology,” argue that conspiracy theorizing is, in some sense of the word, reasonable. But there is a disconnect between this mode of sense-making and the heavily mediated socio-politicaltechnological contemporary world.

This disconnect fosters anxiety and makes conspiracy theorizing seem to be an even more viable way to explain the mysteries of modern life and its layered mediations. In their words, Jane and Fleming argue that: . . . we live in an age in which the vast bulk of knowledge can only be accessed in mediated forms which rely on the testimony of various specialists.

Contemporary approaches to epistemology, however, remain anchored in the intellectual ideas of the Enlightenment. These demand first-hand inquiry, independent thinking, and a skepticism about information

passed down by authorities and experts. As such, we may find ourselves attempting to use epistemological schema radically unsuited to a world whose staggering material complexity involves an unprecedented degree of specialization and knowledge mediation. (p. 54)

Although not cited, this notion strongly evokes Michael Buckland’s notion of contemporary society as a document society (in contrast to the oft-invoked “information society”), in which humans rely on increasingly mediated forms information, often in the form of documents (Buckland, 2017, p. 11). If conspiracy theorizing could be considered a result of the disconnect between Enlightenment attitudes and increasingly mediated information resources, then examining a community of conspiracy theorists in terms of how they relate to information institutions and the resources they provide access could shed some light on how this epistemological disconnect manifests in practice.

In this literature review, I address the history of conspiracy theory scholarship, the difficulty of defining “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” and the gap between scholarship on conspiracy theory and information studies/ archival studies, concluding with a brief discussion of how this paper will attempt to bridge that gap.

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, is a seminal text in the study of conspiracy theory. In Hofstadter’s (2008) view, conspiracy theorists see conspiracies as motivating most significant historical events, and the “paranoid style” as a particular mode of perception and expression (p. 8). Hofstadter discusses his theory in relation to secret societies (the Masons and Illuminati), conservative politics contemporary to his time, religion, and nativism. To him, “What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts . . . but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events” (p.

37). Karl Popper (1974) took a somewhat similar, if rather more extreme, view of conspiracy theories in his work.

Totalitarianism, Popper argues, grew out of conspiracy theories rooted in racist, nativist, and/or generally bigoted ideologies. His “conspiracy theory of society,” suggests that conspiracy

theorizing was a manifestation of exactly the opposite of the aim of the social sciences—to discover truth (pp. 94–96).

Jovan Byford (2015) takes a similar viewpoint of conspiracy theories, arguing that the term itself is “evaluative,” and necessarily pejorative because of the ideological and political severity of the phenomenon. Furthermore, he claims that the characteristics of conspiracy theorizing tend to remain stable over time, showing that the rhetoric and perspective of contemporary conspiracy theorists is not meaningfully different from those writing in the previous two centuries (p. 5). He goes on to characterize conspiracy theorize as consisting “. . . of a warped explanatory logic that is not amenable to rational debate. This is why conspiracy theories cannot be eradicated either through the creation of a more transparent government, or through any conventional means of persuasion . . .” (p. 155).

Byford here presents quite a narrow definition of what conspiracy theories are and how they function in society. Rob Brotherton (2017) similarly defines a “prototypical conspiracy theory” as “an unanswered question; it assumes nothing is as it seems; it portrays the conspirators as preternaturally competent; and as unusually evil; it is founded on anomaly hunting; and it is ultimately irrefutable” (p. 11). If we define conspiracy theories as Byford and Brotherton do—in terms of their irrefutability, among other cultural characteristics—how can we discuss those phenomena that may not be so prototypical, or do not contain Byford’s particular kind of “warped explanatory logic”? How do we spot a real conspiracy theory, rather than something that might be related to the phenomenon, displaying the same or similar characteristics? Besides, is it indeed true that improving government transparency makes absolutely no impact on conspiracy theorists?

Hofstadter, Popper, and Byford all treat the phenomenon of conspiracy theorizing as a prima facie problem. Scholars such as Lance deHaven-Smith question this stance, asking whether or not this treatment of conspiracy theorizing as all-bad could be damaging in and of itself. Certainly, politicians and others holding seats of power have often used the pejorative nature of the label “conspiracy theorist” to their advantage, by branding critics as such (deHaven-Smith, 2013, p. 9). DeHaven-Smith argues that using the label as a general put-down for individuals and groups of people who are suspicious of government

damages democracy, by solidifying the notion that elected officials never collude (p. 10).

DeHaven-Smith devises an important point—that not all conspiracy theories should be labeled as such or considered on equal footing. The term “conspiracy theory” lumps many different kinds of suspicion and paranoia together, quickly becoming unwieldy.

Matthew R. X. Dentith discusses this very problem from a philosophical standpoint, designating the opposing viewpoints outlined above the generalist versus the particularist.

The generalists—Hofstadter, Popper, and Byford—consider conspiracy theorizing in general to be irrational, believing that conspiracy theories can be assessed as a broad category of phenomena.

On the other hand, particularists—namely deHaven-Smith)—argue that conspiracy theories are varied, diverse, and should be considered on a case-by-case basis. To conduct such analysis, however, it is necessary to have a more general definition of the phenomenon, so that each case might be considered without the pejorative cultural connotations.

At its broadest and most basic, a conspiracy involves a group of people planning something in secret. Dentith (2014) defines a conspiracy along these lines as having three conditions: “1. The Conspirators Condition—There exists (or existed) some set of agents with a plan.

2. The Secrecy Condition—Steps have been taken by the agents to minimize public awareness of what they are up to, and 3. The Goal Condition—Some end is or was desired by the agents” (p. 23).

According to these conditions, anything from a surprise party, to the assassination of a politician, to the plotting of several governments towards a new world order could be considered a conspiracy, as long as all three conditions are satisfied. Dentith goes on to define conspiracy theory as “any explanation of an event that cites the existence of a conspiracy as a salient cause” (p. 30). This is a perfectly general definition, and is indeed devoid of the functional and cultural characteristics associated with conspiracy theories and theorists, as outlined briefly by Byford and Brotherton.

It allows, however, for conspiracy theorists to be discussed in terms of their myriad actions and beliefs, not simply their political, historical or cultural function. It is possible, therefore, to talk about conspiracy theorizing as a phenomenon in and of itself, rather than defining it according to common, if not universal, cultural characteristics.

Quite a few scholars working on conspiracy theories discuss the relevance of information problems in the study of conspiracy theories, but they often fail to cite any kind of information studies literature.

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2009), for example, argue that belief in conspiracy theories is caused by a “crippled epistemology” on the part of the conspiracy theorist, which is a result of “a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational resources” (p. 204).

In addition to the disturbingly ableist terminological choice, this generalist perspective lacks epistemological nuance.

What determines the relevance of an informational resource? Who has access to which resources? What role does epistemology play in such questions of access and relevance? Information scientists have wrestled with and written about these questions for decades—and yet Sunstein and Vermeule cite none of this literature.

Fran Mason’s (2002) exploration of Fredric Jameson’s notion that conspiracy theorizing is the “poor person’s cognitive mapping” is another perspective that skirts the purview of information studies. Breaking down the phrase, Mason acknowledges the strangeness of the use of the colloquialism “poor person’s,” given that Jameson was a Marxist (p. 45), and defines “cognitive mapping,” as such: “a means by which the individual subject can locate and structure perception of social and class relations in a world where the local no longer drives social, political, and cultural structures or allows the individual subject to make sense of his or her environment” (p. 41).

Conspiracy theorizing, therefore, is a particular kind of postmodern cognitive mapping that produces a map of another world—a parallel world perhaps—constructed of misunderstandings of relationships (p. 40); or, indeed, “maps neither conspiracy nor society but provides a map of itself and the subjectivity that created it” (p. 53).

The hegemony implied in the term “poor person’s” references access to knowledge and information, in addition to class and status. Mason (2002) points out that Jameson is necessarily making a distinction between legitimate knowledge and illegitimate knowledge, or knowledge that is “real” and knowledge that is “ideological” (p. 44).

Indeed, within conspiracy theorist culture, knowledge functions as a unique kind of object:

“knowledge” of the conspiracy seemingly gives the subject a position of independence and authenticity outside the domain of the conspiracy and its world of ignorance, control, and inauthenticity . . . . The conspiracist ‘subject-outside-history’ sees him- or herself as free of the information systems controlled by the conspiracy, government, or secret society and sees subjects inside history and society as constructs of “alien” information systems in which thoughts, values, and beliefs do not originate with the subject.” (p. 50)

Here, “information systems” is not used in the informationscience technical sense; rather, Mason’s notion of an information system seems to refer to official stories or narratives, which take on many forms: media articles, collections of government documents, books, etc.

From the conspiracy theorist’s perspective, people who believe the official story become a part of it, and thus are folded into the supposed conspiracy itself, if involuntarily. Indeed, Mason posits that conspiracy theorists don’t view their theories “. . . as narratives, but as histories . . .” (p. 44) returning us to the idea that many people who might be quickly labeled as “conspiracy theorists” do not view themselves as such, but rather think of themselves as researchers and investigators. The emphasis on individuality, the valorization of knowledge possession/ production, and the official/unofficial and legitimate/illegitimate dualities again recalls the disconnect between Enlightenment sense-making and the modern world discussed by Jane and Fleming. Mason points out the immensity of the difference in epistemology between those who are inside the system (sheeple, so to speak), and those who exist out of it (conspiracy theorists). The conspiracy theorist has a kind of meta-viewpoint, which informs all of their information seeking habits and patterns.

The final chapter of Stacy Wood’s (2016) dissertation, “Making Secret(s), The Infrastructure of Classified Information,” addresses one conspiracy theorist community, ufologists, and the possibly forged Majestic-12, or MJ-12 documents that purport to be documentary evidence of the 1947 extraterrestrial incident in Roswell, New Mexico.

Addressing conspiracy theorists’ relationship to evidence, Wood argues, “The enactment of conspiracy theory culture revolves around an almost fever like excitement around the accumulation and presentation of

evidence, and typically an attempted adherence to the aesthetics and style of argumentation of widely accepted rhetorical standards” (p. 138). In such a way, evidence takes on a particular kind of significance within conspiracy theorist communities. Searching for it, finding it, and presenting it as a method of convincing skeptics all figure prominently in many conspiracy theorists’ agendas. Wood also addresses, directly, the relationship that many conspiracy theorists have with classified information-as-evidence: “Classified information is a sanctioned break in the provision of evidence, leaving space for alternative narrative building and the development of new evidential paradigms that stem from new data or no data” (p.

144). I similarly argue in this paper that silences, particularly in government archives, affect how archival user groups prone to exhibit suspicion of mediated information, and/or other kinds of conspiratorial thinking, receive declassified information.

Wood’s dissertation is some of the only work that touches on conspiracy theory scholarship from an evidence-centered archival/information studies perspective. Many scholars who study epistemology as it relates to conspiracy theorizing fail to engage with information studies issues, despite their applicability: Jane and Fleming touch on something akin to Buckland’s document society; Sunstein and Vermeule come close to discussing what constitutes access and relevance; and Mason, through Jameson, tackles the notion of the legitimacy of certain kinds of knowledge. Beyond the stated thesis of this article, my goal is to bring conspiracy theory scholarship and information studies scholarship into conversation with one another, so that they might inform archival praxis and theory.

As this literature review has shown, conspiracy theories/ists are complex, both rhetorically and epistemologically. So as to concentrate on the epistemological aspects of conspiracy theorizing, and to attempt to avoid the rhetorical pitfalls pointed out by deHaven-Smith (2013), I will be using “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory” sparingly 2— instead, referring to suspicion of mediated information. Here, I use “suspicion” as a step below paranoia; something we are all 2 When I do discuss conspiracy theories directly, I will be using Dentith’s definition of a conspiracy theory, which will allow for discussion of conspiracy theories free enough from cultural and political associations so that each theory might be considered individually, on a case-by-case basis.

capable of feeling in the day-to-day. Coupled with “mediated” and “information,” however, the term evolves.

“Mediated information” refers to any form of information (particularly information-as-thing, which denotes objects, like data and documents, that have the quality of being informative [Buckland, 1991]) perceived to have been interfered with, duplicated, copied, or at all otherwise changed from its original form.

Mediation as referring to perception of interference is significant —for, it could be argued that all information is mediated and that original forms do not exist.

I will also be drawing on Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman’s (2008) model of paranoia, which they define as “acts of interpretation gone awry” (p. 109). Freeman and Freeman argue that paranoia exists in a kind of pyramid, with negative feelings about oneself and others being the foundation (Fig. 1). I disagree with Freeman and Freeman that conspiracy theories belong only at the very top of the pyramid—in the implied most paranoid section (or indeed, that low self-esteem always results in paranoid thinking). Rather, I believe that conspiracy theories can be thought to exist on a spectrum parallel to and informed by the paranoia hierarchy. This is exploratory work, and thus the spectrum of conspiracy theory is in very early stages; for the purposes of this paper, suspicion of mediated information exists towards the bottom of the pyramid; reasonable in its own way, but also a potential building block to other forms of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing. Introducing and deploying the concept of suspicion of mediated information will foreground epistemology in my analysis of how archival silences and imagined records function in the JFK assassination collection.

III. Thinking Through the Framework of Silences All archives contain both available records and archival silences. Silences can manifest as gaps within a collection, barriers to access, redactions, classified documents, etc.

Particularly within collections of conspiratorial significance, like the JFK assassination collection, such silences can engender suspicion of mediated information among user groups and individual users. That is, even the documents that are available become subjects of suspicion. Within collections of conspiratorial significance, therefore, archival silences take on a particular

weight, as they can affect the ways in which users perceive extant, especially recently declassified, documents. This section will first look at silences as they relate to history-making, and subsequently as they relate to archives, in particular, government archives.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1997) introduced a framework for thinking about silences in his seminal Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Silences, he argued, enter historymaking at four critical points: “. . . the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” (p. 26). These four silences could be said to exist on different levels of mediation, the fourth silence being the most highly mediated—original documents having been mediated by the archivist, the archival institution, and further synthesized by the historian. Silences corresponding with levels of mediation in such a way is not inexorable and depends on the collection. Indeed, Trouillot emphasizes that the framework itself is not all-inclusive, and should not be mapped onto all means of historical production uncritically; instead, the four silences “. . . help us understand why not all silences are equal and why they cannot be addressed —or redressed—in the same manner . . . any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly” (p. 26). This recalls the particularist approach to conspiracy theories, that it is often more productive to address a specific conspiracy theory (or, in some instances, a group of conspiracy theories) in terms of its unique characteristics, rather than the as a general group of phenomena.

Recall, too, that Mason (2002) asserts conspiracy theorists do not think of their theories as theories, or narratives, but rather as histories (p. 44). Chronology, the primary organizing principle of history, has been critiqued continuously in the twentieth century; but Marine Hughes-Warrington (2013) suggests that chronology is only limiting if we see at as singular. HughesWarrington contends that histories and revisions to histories must be thought of as simultaneous, rather than sequential. She argues that histories can be stopped, redirected, reversed—

indeed, history can go in several directions at once, and is “many things at the same time” (p. 119). Furthermore, framing history in terms of the reasonableness or rationality of its writers does not always affect how such histories are received or put to use in different contexts: history-making is always an ethical activity.

Indeed, she states, “Professional training does not mean that audiences will listen respectfully, and reasonableness does not always silence those of ill will. There is never a definitive word in history making; there is only the tumult, dynamism and troubles of a textual world in which the unrelenting, merciless demands of decision making rest with us” (p. 120). But the “demands of decision making,” rest not only with the historian, but also with the archivist—whose territory is not the fourth of Trouillot’s silences (the making of history), but rather the second (the making of archives), third (the making of narratives) silences, and sometimes even the first (the making of sources), as we will see.

Silences can enter the archive when records are destroyed, never created, kept secret, forged, appraised or de-accessioned out of a collection. In the words of David Thomas, Valerie Johnson, and Simon Fowler (2017): “. . . it has become accepted that archival silences are a proper subject for enquiry and to view the absence of records as positive statements, rather than passive gaps” (xx). Importantly, too, we know that archives are not complete, preserved, static portraits of history.

Sue McKemmish (2016) suggests that records are physically stable, but their potential to be pluralized, or, brought into new contexts, shifts over time and is interminable.

Scholars and legislators alike have suggested that the declassification of the Kennedy records may be the only way to “restore the people’s trust” in the American government (President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act, 1992).

Not only does this attitude ignore marginalized groups of Americans who have never trusted their government nor felt protected by it, but it also oversimplifies and fails to recognize the power of conspiratorial (and other) narratives to pluralize official records and their silences. Recall that, according to Byford, declassification almost never has a significant impact on the patterns of conspiratorial thought, even when it might challenge some accepted narratives. In the article “Records and their imaginaries,” Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell (2016)

argue that the declassification of the JFK assassination collection will not quell conspiracy theorizing, citing the power of mistrust in government and the enduring influence of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Caswell and Gilliland introduce the concepts of imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries. Imagined records “can function societally in ways similar to actual records because of the weight of their absence or their aspirational nature” (p. 53); impossible archival imaginaries are “archivally impossible in the sense that they will never result in actualized records in any traditional sense unless they are drawn into some kind of coconstitutive relationship with actualized records” (p. 60). Due in part to the long-term silence of their 25-year classification, the JFK records have already been imagined, and these imagined records pluralized, in myriad ways prior to declassification. In such a way, doppelganger counterparts to the declassified records exist and are mapped before they are ever released.

Their existence is imbued with a particular significance, and it seems almost natural that users would react to the declassified collection—different from its archival imaginary, often in a disappointing way—with suspicion of mediated information.

As Wood argues, classification constitutes a major source of silence in government archives. Government secrecy has the potential to constrain knowledge production, and to create and maintain deep power imbalances (Aftergood, 2009). Simon Fowler argues that unchecked classification “damages the institution of the archive. Archivists and users need to be vigilant to ensure that as many documents as possible are available for public access. The worst Silence of the Archive is secrecy” (Thomas et al., 2017, p. 29). Although, arguably, classification is not the absolute worst kind of archival silence, Fowler’s point—that secrecy upends the way that archives function—remains salient. The principle of “More Product, Less Process,” also known as MPLP (Greene & Meissner, 2005), has a similar thesis and has had an enormous impact on archival praxis as a whole. Greene and Meissner suggest that, to combat the problem of enormous unprocessed collection backlogs, archivists need to sacrifice some degree of quality to process and make collections accessible more quickly.

However, declassifying documents too quickly poses privacy issues, while digitizing documents too quickly can pose problems of legibility and searchability.

Furthermore,

declassifying large caches of documents at once has aroused suspicion in some online conspiracy theorist communities. For example, a thread in the subreddit /r/conspiracy discussing a cache of declassified CIA documents about telepathy and clairvoyance, consisted of some users calling into question the size of the cache of documents. One user wrote, “Oh great, a 90,000 page disinformation campaign to keep people focused on magical nonsense instead of what’s real.” Another responded, “But, what if it’s both? Holding a grain of truth, and only now just released to indeed distract the masses from a bigger thing.”

Declassification, which may initially seem to be the opposite of archival silence, is turned on its head by this particular research community’s suspicion of mediated information; the suspicion here being that the government (and the archivist-mediators that did the declassifying) is using declassification of a particularly interesting or weird collection as a tool to distract or detract from a different—more important, and more conspiratorial—event or subject.

Declassification thus itself poses a challenge to conspiracy theorist communities, as they try to make sense of the practice in the context of what they tend to see as threatening and subversive motives on the part of the declassifying institution.

Indeed, Kalev Leetaru (2008) suggests that it is much more valuable to consider the number of times poorly scanned documents show up in a collection, rather than putting too much emphasis on “anecdotal discovery” of one example. This does not take into account the way that conspiracy theorist user groups work. A single anecdotal discovery of a poorly scanned document can be a significant occurrence for a community of conspiracy researchers like those on the JFKFiles subreddit.

Considering the epistemological differences between user groups matters: one group may react with no surprise at an anecdotal discovery of a poorly scanned document; a more conspiratorially minded group may see it as suspicious. Declassifying institutions and their archivists should familiarize themselves with the audience of a given collection, in order to assess whether or not that audience may be prone to suspicion. Decisions about how to declassify can be informed by such familiarity with a user community.

The JFK assassination can be considered what HughesWarrington (2013) has called an historical “bright-spot” (p. 119)

—it is, and always will be, highly contested and continually analyzed and re-analyzed.

In general, the system of classification and declassification found in U.S. government archives disrupts the taken-for-granted dominance of chronology in history-making—new information contained in declassified documents almost seems to necessitate revision. For my case study, it initially seems as though declassification should put into motion a revision of the manifold imagined histories around the assassination.

But because of the proliferation of archival silences, and the ease with which imagined records fill such silences, the burden of truth, proof, and trust is put on the materials and the archivists who arrange them and make them available. Although the amateur JFK assassination researchers of /r/JFKFiles can access documents immediately, many levels of mediation still exist in the online environment. Indeed, each of Trouillot’s four silences exists on a different level of mediation— more and more silences do indeed enter history making as primary sources are mediated further and further. The suspicion of mediated information that arises from the peculiar mix of entrenched impossible archival imaginaries and inevitable archival silences blooms easily in this collection, even at the first two levels of silence. As we will see, any aspect of the collection that proves challenging or acts as a barrier to access may function as an archival silence.

IV. Method This project is a case study that explores how members of a specific community of users on a small subreddit (a forum section of the bookmarking site “reddit.com”) interact with, use, and collaborate around NARA’s 2017 record release. Although documents continue to be released in batches, I will be concentrating on NARA’s October-November 2017 release of 31,334 digitized documents that were previously classified in full or in part, and the accompanying discussion on the subreddit.

The subreddit—titled “JFK Files”—consists of about six thousand Reddit users. I quote directly from the subreddit, but I do not include usernames, and I have changed key words to keep users as anonymous as possible. The data from the subreddit were collected in October and November 2017.

V. Data and Discussion I will focus on two digitization problems faced by JFKfiles users: difficulty reading the documents (legibility) and difficulty searching the documents (searchability).

These digitization problems constitute archival silences at the moment of fact assembly/ the making of archives. Both creating new digital documents through scanning, and arranging these documents in an online database are a kind of fact assembly, although one could argue for document scanning as a kind of fact creation.

With each of of Trouillot’s four existing on a different level of mediation, it follows that, reacting to the silences in the online collection, the /r/JFKFiles user group exhibits suspicion of mediated information.

Poor scanning is a silence that, like Trouillot predicted, does not fit neatly into his framework. It functions both at the moment of fact creation/ source-making and the moment of fact assembly/ archive-making. The digitized document is a new and separate entity from its paper counterpart, which itself may be a copy of a copy of the original document. From that perspective, the illegibility of scanned documents seems to constitute the first kind of silence, at the moment of fact creation/source-making.

However, is not the purpose of scanning a document and remaking it in digital form to create a collection of such digitized documents, to be made available online? The silence of poor scanning exists somewhere in between the first and second of Trouillot’s silences.

Discussions of illegible documents are frequent in the JFKFiles subreddit. One commenter presented figures 2 and 3 as an example of a heavily redacted document, stating, “nice way of redacting a document without actually redacting it: make it illegible. On the official NARA website, the most important documents (marked ‘Formerly Withheld In Full’) are mostly totally illegible.

All of them are just awful photocopies.

Deliberate?” In this instance, the commenter draws a connection between the import of the document and its lack of legibility.

The silence of illegibility becomes suspicious when coupled with metadata that indicates that the document in question used to be classified in full, especially when this pairing occurs with multiple documents, as the commenter here implies. Perceived importance, coupled with a perceived pattern, turns into

suspicion of mediated information here: the commenter openly suggests that this silence of illegibility was intentional, rather than a result of the size of the collection or lack of adequate staff (which other commenters do argue could be the reason behind poor scanning).

Other users, in different threads, make similar arguments.

A user posted Figure 4, commenting: “Why scan so many film negatives after they were indecipherably photocopied into uselessness?” Another user responded, “They’re pretending to be transparent, while actually releasing worthless information.

Useful information has been turned into something useless.” To the quoted users’ minds, it is quite possible that the archivists and the agencies that created the documents conspired to make them unreadable, but not officially redacted. As predicted by Gilliland and Caswell, declassification by itself—as a generalized action—did nothing to stop suspicion directed towards NARA or the originating agencies. The silence of illegibility as it manifests in a particular document thus plays a part in fostering both suspicion of mediated information and the continuation of an imagined JFK assassination archive. As long as silences exist within the JFK assassination collection—as they always must— imagined JFK assassination records will live on, through the triggering of suspicion of mediated information in conspiratorially minded users. Suspicion of mediated information casts doubt on the originating institutions, NARA, the archivists and/or other personnel involved with the collection, their motivations, and their actions and choices made when scanning and arranging the collection.

These users, as we have seen, rest some of their suspicions on what Leetaru (2008) would call “anecdotal discovery” of something that appears anomalous. Freeman and Freeman (2008) highlight the importance of what they call “anomalous experiences,” which they argue can, for some people, trigger paranoia—anomalous experiences are “odd and unsettling feelings” that result when we “don’t understand what’s happening to us” (p. 90). Experiencing anomaly, even if it is not a direct “anomalous experience,” can be emotional. Rob Brotherton presents the umbrella man, a well-known part of the JFK conspiracy theory canon, as an emblematic anomalous detail. The umbrella man is a figure, visible in a few frames of the Zapruder film, who held a black umbrella open and aloft as

President Kennedy’s motorcade passed. Once he was noticed, theories proliferated about what he was doing there: many speculated that he could be the second shooter, and there was a gun hidden in his umbrella. Years later, the umbrella man himself testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and it was found that he was in fact protesting Kennedy’s father’s support of Neville Chamberlain, who tacitly supported Hitler (Chamberlain was known for carrying a black umbrella). Errol Morris’s (2011) short film about the umbrella man puts forth the notion that any detail of an event can appear anomalous—even suspicious—when scrutinized deeply. With so many JFK assassination records having already been imagined, even just one poorly scanned document may take on a similarly anomalous sheen, triggering suspicion.

Users of the JFK Files subreddit also frequently discuss how to search the files. As of October 2018, NARA has not yet provided a searchable database of the 2017 documents, nor have they indicated any plans to do so. Confusingly, they do provide a searchable database for other parts of the JFK assassination collection, most of which is not digitized. The newly released digitized documents are presented in an online spreadsheet-style database, made up of item-level descriptive metadata, visible in Figure 5.3 Documents can be sorted according to any metadata category, ascending or descending.

When a user clicks on the metadata category they want to sort by, the spreadsheet automatically sorts the entries in ascending order, so that blank or ambiguous entries will come up first. Not only does this arguably make the experience of exploring the collection confusing, it presents users exploring the collection immediately with anomalous entries. Indeed, the way that the user who pointed to Figures 2 and 3 discovered the pattern of illegibility in previously classified documents could easily have been by sorting by the metadata category “Formerly Withheld” (whose values are “in full” and “in part”). The way the collection is arranged, therefore, is itself an archival silence, squarely on the second level, that of fact assembly/ archives-making. This silence hinders usability, highlights other silences and anomalous details (in this example, illegibility), and ultimately cultivates 3 I am using Jeffrey Pomerantz’s (2015) definition of metadata as a “statement made about a potentially informative object.”.

users’ suspicion of mediated information.

In the JFKfiles subreddit, the users have turned their suspicion of mediated information into something productive—in attempting to gain control over the documents in the collection, some users in fact begin to mediate information themselves. /r/JFKFiles users often discuss how to make the documents textsearchable. One user created a text-searchable database using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The user admits it “gets a lot wrong, but should help navigate the archive.” 4 Admitting to an imperfect system, the user who created the tool effectively removes responsibility from himself as a mediator.

Any suspicious documents found on his website (AssassinationFiles.net) are a result of either the poor legibility of the documents or the imperfection of OCR as a tool. Rather than recommending it as an alternative to the database accessible on NARA’s website, this user presents AssassinationFiles.net as a tool to be used alongside or in conjunction with NARA’s database. Another user similarly combined the tools provided by NARA with his own by downloading the metadata database and then changing some of the values, in order to increase subjectsearchability. The users in this subreddit appropriate the tools they find useful from NARA, and discard those that are not useful.

Their suspicion towards the institution becomes productive for their own goals.

In a different, earlier, thread, another user proposed that, because of the difficulties in OCR-ing the documents, post-OCR transcription would be preferable for accuracy’s sake: “There’s really no substitute for a good old-fashioned combing through the whole thing, proofreading what the OCR did and fixing it . . .

It’s an enormous undertaking but it either has to be done the right way or not at all.” Such a project would harness collective intelligence from within the /r/JFKFiles community, keeping the mediation internal and thus making it more trustworthy than outside, unseen mediation. Illegibility seems to be outside of the control of this community, but they act as though searchability might be something they can understand and potentially control.

In the words of David Aaronovitch (2010), “Conspiracy 4“AssassinationFiles.net - OCR/Full-Text Search of 2017 Declassified Files. r/JFKFiles.” Reddit. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/JFKFiles/comments/7ipz6y/assassinationfilesnet_ocrf ulltext_search_of_2017/

theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility” (p. 169). In part because the silence of poor searchability exists on the second silence level of fact assembly/ archive-making, users are able to usurp control over the documents to some extent, appropriating the tools made available by NARA for their own use. The silence of illegibility, however, existing as it does somewhere in between the first and second levels of silence, is more difficult for users to gain control over. In both instances, suspicion of mediated information in and of itself constitutes a kind of control, as it is a subversion of the accepted narrative and the powerful institutions from which it originates.

VI. Conclusion Suspicion of mediated information, as we have seen, is one kind of user reaction to an encounter, especially an anomalous one, with an archival silence(s). It is made significantly more likely by the notoriety, over-analysis, and conspiracy-theoryladen historical narratives of the JFK assassination and its aftermath. Silences, like records themselves, are pluralized and take on different meanings in different contexts. Every archives creates silences, but the silences in the JFK Assassination Collection are of a particular ilk, immersed as they are in a history of secrecy and conspiracy theory. Digitizing documents and making them available online increases access, but also creates more layers of control and mediation. Each layer of mediation—copying documents, scanning documents, and arranging them online—engenders one or more of Trouillot’s silences. With the addition of suspicion of mediated information, such silences can in turn be pluralized into imagined records imbued with conspiratorial significance.

Indeed, when a collection has been classified for so long and so many impossible archival imaginaries inform its existence, every impediment to usability and understanding functions as a silence, and may seem to users like a thinly veiled strategy for maintaining secrecy while feigning openness. The unique reasoning and research style of conspiratorially minded researchers, characterized by trust in their own community and skepticism towards and suspicion of institutions, is significant and should be considered critically by archivists and archival scholars alike.

Collections of such conspiratorial significance as the JFK assassination collection are rare, but other collections exist with some measure (those having to do with UFO sightings, for example).

As we have seen, conspiratorially significant collections have implacable impossible archival imaginaries associated with them, and these inform how silences are received by users, often stimulating suspicion of mediated information.

Although I would not necessarily advise that archivists attempt to minimize silences (for how exactly would one do that, when they are inevitable?), I do encourage working towards awareness of how a collection might be received, decontextualized, and recontextualized according to a user’s suspicion. I encourage archivists to seek out communities like /r/JFKFiles that are relevant to their collections: the needs such communities discuss and creative solutions they devise could be informative as archivists consider how to improve online collections. This could be a first step towards more frequent communication between users and archivists online, which could also assuage some of the suspicion directed towards archivists as individuals, if not the institutions for which they work.

Suspicion of mediated information is only the bottom of the nascent pyramid/continuum of conspiracy theories, so understanding how it relates to information-gathering practices can potentially shed light on the phenomenon of conspiracy theorizing as a whole.

References Aaronovitch, D. (2010). Voodoo histories: The Role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

Aftergood, S. (2009). Government secrecy and knowledge production: A survey of some general issues.” In Government secrecy: Classic and contemporary readings.

Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Brotherton, R. (2017). Suspicious minds. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Sigma.

Buckland, M. (2017). Information and society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 42(5), 351–360.

Byford, J. (2011). Conspiracy theories: A critical introduction.

Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

DeHaven-Smith, L. (2013). Conspiracy theory in America. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Dentith, M.R.X. (2014). The philosophy of conspiracy theories.

New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Freeman, D. J., & Freeman, J. (2008). Paranoia: The 21st century fear. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Gilliland, A. J., & Caswell, M. (2016). Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined. Archival Science, 16, 53–75. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9259-z Greene, M. A., & Meissner, D. (2005, Fall/Winter). More product, less process: Revamping traditional archival processing.

The American Archivist, 68, 208–263.

Hofstadter, R. (2008). The paranoid style in american politics. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays.

New York, NY: Random House: Vintage Books.

Jane, E. A., & Fleming, C. (2014). Modern conspiracy: The importance of being paranoid. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

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http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2 101/2037f Mason, F. (2002). A poor person’s cognitive mapping. In P. Knight (Ed.), Conspiracy nation: The politics of paranoia in postwar America. New York: NYU Press.

McKemmish, S. (2016). Recordkeeping in the continuum: An Australian tradition. In A. J. Gilliland, S. McKemmish, & A. J. Lau (Eds.), Research in the archival multiverse (pp. 122– 160). Clayton, Australia: Monash University Publishing.

Morris, E. (2011). The umbrella man. www.nytimes.com, November 11. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001183275 /the-umbrella-man.html Pomerantz, J. (2015). Metadata. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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S.3006 - 102nd Congress (1991-1992): President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. n.d.

Retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/bill/102ndcongress/senate-bill/3006 Sunstein, C. R., & Vermeule, A. (2009). Conspiracy theories: Causes and Ccres*. Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2), 202–27. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679760.2008.00325.x Thomas, D., Johnson, V., & Fowler, S. (Eds.). (2017). The silence of the archive. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Trouillot, M.-R. (1997). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Appendix

Figure 1. Daniel and Jason Freeman’s Hierarchy of Paranoia (Freeman & Freeman, 2008, p. 80).

Figure 2. Document 104-10271-10414.

Figure 3. Document 104-10271-10414, detail.

Figure 4. Film negatives; detail from document 104-10292-10007.

Film

Figure 5. Screenshot of the NARA 2017 JFK Files website, captured November 2017.

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Representation, Affect, and the Archives: A Shrine to Lon Chaney

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b63t9hn

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Blanco, Samantha

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

Oh Lon Chaney What's to hold you back?

The Wolfman's1 dead And the oldcc black cat is gone Like a memory faded from your past You look so sad With a face of stone Just skin and bonez You're all alone With a hunchback's eye you live —“Lon Chaney” by Garland Jeffreys (1973) A scrapbook, a celebrity shrine, and an archive all deal with the question, “how do we remember the past?” They can act as conduits that allow the living and the dead to communicate, building a bridge so that the past, present, and future may collide. In Fall 2017, I created a shrine to silent horror movie star, Lon Chaney, based on A.Y. Owen’s Lon Chaney scrapbook collection at UCLA Library Special Collections.

Questions emerged, such as what does it mean to learn about someone through an admirer’s scrapbook? How is a person’s story crafted when the creator most likely never met the person they admire?

What kind of affective engagement emerges for archival users who encounter such a scrapbook? What does it mean to make art based on such archival material? What do archival records tell us about the past, about ourselves, and how power manifests in the archives? Reimagining A.Y. Owen’s Lon Chaney scrapbook collection to make art provided a creative space to critically engage, explore, and understand affect, representation, and memory’s relationship to power in the archives.

An important component of this creative research process was the affective experience. In applying affect theory to the archives, Cifor (2015) uses affect as a “culturally, socially, and historically constructed category that both encompasses and reaches beyond feelings and emotions” (p. 10). There is a very important connection between the sensory experience of touching and viewing the scrapbook as an affective force that influenced how I understood Lon Chaney’s memory and how I came to reimagine the scrapbook as a shrine. Reflecting on my 1

Fun fact: Lon Chaney did not portray the Wolfman. That was his son, Lon Chaney, Jr.

own affective response to this project helped me understand how power circulates through records and archives.

The Lon Chaney Shrine

Figure 1. The Lon Chaney Shrine.

The shrine was created as a final assignment for Kathy Carbone’s class on Archives and Art-Making in UCLA’s Information Studies Department. The course was designed to critically engage the “archives as both place and trope for artistic inquiry and art-making” (Carbone, 2017, p. 1), while providing students with the opportunity to “create a visual, performing, or literary artwork” (Carbone, 2017, p. 1) utilizing archival materials from the UCLA Library Special Collections (LSC). The center piece of the shrine is a mobile made from a sewing hoop, decoupaged tissue paper, and yarn. Hanging from the yarn are pictures of Lon Chaney’s characters. The mobile hangs above a vintage Samsonite toiletries case that represents Chaney’s

makeup case. Inside the case are the kinds of greasepaint, powders, and pencils that he recommended for movie makeup as well as photos of Lon in the process of getting into character. On the case’s mirror are taped more images of Lon’s characters. In front of the case are two folding mirrors. One mirror is covered with a photo collage of Erik from the Phantom of the Opera (1925) and the second mirror is collaged with pictures of Quasimodo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Since the movies were based on literature, I took a quote about each characters’ desire for love and acceptance from each novel and placed them on the inside cover of the mirror. The mirror, which was originally intended to be cracked, represents the distorted view the world has of Erik and Quasimodo. Surrounding the makeup case are additional Lon Chaney photos scattered about loosely, on a candle and in picture frames.

A handmade cardboard billboard with “The Man of a Thousand Faces” is also off to the side. There is a folder that contains copies of articles taken directly from the scrapbook as well as four paper puppets I found on the internet. A copy of the introduction to A.Y. Owen’s Lon Chaney scrapbook and the Encyclopedia Britannica (1929) article on motion picture makeup written Lon Chaney are among the scattered photos.

A.Y. Owen’s Lon Chaney Scrapbook Collection A.Y. Owen’s Lon Chaney scrapbook collection consists of ephemera, glossy stills, loose paper clippings, a scrapbook, and a 198-page photocopy of the scrapbook. A.Y. Owen (1915–1991), an Oklahoman freelance photographer for Times, Inc. Publications, spent over 60 years making the scrapbook with materials from 1920 to circa 1989 (Introduction). At eight years old, Owen became a fan after seeing Lon Chaney portray Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Not long after, he started his first scrapbook at nine years old. Owen shared a strong desire to get at the man behind the makeup.

Pages are filled with articles and images cut from magazines and newspapers covering his career, two marriages, his immense talent with makeup and pantomime, rare interviews, life philosophy and his untimely death.

I spent about seven weeks meticulously combing through the collection, leaving no page unturned while taking photos and

notes. I was moved not just by what I read, but by the sensory experience derived from seeing and touching the scrapbook’s crumbling, yellowed pages. I appreciated how much time, labor, and care it took to find, cut, and paste decades of material prior to the birth of the internet. While Lon Chaney was notoriously private, a portrait of the artist emerged. As a prolific silent horror character actor, he made 157 films between 1912 and 1930, with 100 of them considered to be lost films (“The Films of Lon Chaney, Sr.”).

Lon Chaney was often portrayed as a humble, hardworking, and thoughtful man. Much of his large salary was donated to charities (Crane, n.d.), and he chose to live like a clerk (Thomas, 1930b). Fan mail was discarded unless it was from a prisoner—then he would write back. The famous movie star was also a card-carrying union member who looked out for the extras and crew members on set, even giving career advice to beginners (Crane, n.d.).

The choices he made can be connected to his experience of adversity growing up. Born on April 1, 1883 in Colorado Springs to deaf parents, Lon Chaney was the second of four children. They struggled to survive. His mother suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that limited the use of her hands (Waterbury, 1927). In order to get by, Lon dropped out of the fifth grade to help manage the house.

Not long afterwards, he began to work.

Known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for his talented character makeup, he was rarely on screen without it. Instead, he dedicated his career to portraying disfigured social outcasts with empathy, depth, and complexity. He claimed that he acted with the genuine belief “that no matter how bad or distorted the man portrayed may be, he is fundamentally good.” (Crane, n.d.).

He wanted to remind people that those that exist on the fringes of society “may have the noblest ideals.” (Crane, n.d.). Lon Chaney stated, “Most of my roles since The Hunchback, such as The Phantom of the Opera, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unholy Three, etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories I wish to do” (Konow, 2012, p. 12). To portray these characters required a great deal of sacrifice from himself as well. He often went to such extreme lengths on his character design that he put himself in pain to achieve a desirable effect. As Quasimodo, he wore 73 pounds of rubber on his back and chest in order to get the hunch and

twisted limbs for which the character is famous (Parsons, 1930).

In The Penalty (1920), he devised a way to walk on his knees to portray Blizzard, a double amputee gangster with a grudge (Thomas, 1930a).

This care for the underdog seemed to genuinely carry through to his private life.

By the end of the scrapbook, the many pages with articles announcing Lon Chaney’s death by throat hemorrhage on August 26, 1930 at 46 years old left me feeling bereft. I felt the sharp pang of sadness and loss before I became aware that I was grieving. The expression of collective grief and loss in the articles announcing his death affected me deeply. It felt like I lost a good friend. I developed an intimacy with Lon Chaney’s memory, and I came to identify with him.

Reflections on Power in the Archives During the research process, I was confronted by Lon Chaney’s lack of agency and control over his own narrative. It was not Lon Chaney telling his story, but A.Y. Owen. I felt I knew Chaney, in part because of the way in which Owen curated the scrapbook. However, it was easy to forget the constructed-ness of the scrapbook and accept the scrapbook as an authority on Lon Chaney’s life. My acceptance of the scrapbook as the truth was largely due to its association with the archives and its ideals of neutrality, objectivity, evidence, and authenticity.

In comparison, Schwartz and Cook (2002) have argued: Archives and records, in their creation and use by their makers and in their appraisal and use by archivists, will always reflect power relationships. Archives . . . are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed. By extension, memory is not something found or collected in archives, but something that is made, and continually re-made. (p. 172)

Owen was like an archivist, imposing order and control over Lon Chaney’s memory, affecting how the present and future will understand this person’s past. Lon Chaney was a private person who withheld many details about his personal life. We will never know how he would have felt about having all of these records amassed together. In particular, we can never know if he would

approve of a fan including a consensus record, his first marriage license, or photos of the house and street where he grew up in a scrapbook. For a scrapbook, I found the inclusion of those records to be an invasion of his privacy. In spite of Owen’s attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of Lon Chaney’s life, the scrapbook, like most archival records, will only ever be a sliver of the social reality and documentary record (Harris, 2002, p. 64). Ultimately, the scrapbook, and by extension the shrine, is not just about Lon Chaney, but about how Lon Chaney made A.Y. Owen and I feel. It is our affective relationship to his memory that is on display.

Uncomfortable Discoveries in the Archives Sometimes, we find things we do not like during archival research. While looking at the scrapbook, I had to come to terms with depictions of early-twentieth century racism and ableism. In 1929, Lon Chaney wrote the first Encyclopedia Britannica article on motion picture makeup. While groundbreaking, he describes in the character makeup section how to do yellow face and black face. He has also portrayed Chinese immigrants in films, most notably in Shadows (1922) and Mr. Wu (1927). Furthermore, ableist language was predominantly used by writers of the time to describe his characters’ appearances and disabilities. As a mixed-race person from a diverse Southeast Asian family, I felt disappointed.

It made me reflect on the years of Asian caricatures perpetuated by Hollywood and the connection between media racial stereotypes and experiences of racism by members of my family. The Encyclopedia Britannica (1929) article and Chinese movie characters contribute to the history of symbolic annihilation of Asian Americans in the U.S. The notion of symbolic annihilation derives from Feminist Media Studies to describe how marginalized groups are trivialized, misrepresented, or are absent in various media platforms (Caswell, 2014, p. 58). In Archival Studies, Michelle Caswell (2014) adapts the term to describe the same kind of misrepresentation and absence within the archival record and the impact that it has on marginalized communities (p. 27). It was ironic to see how Lon Chaney’s characters made certain

kinds of “others” visible and sympathetic while further marginalizing other groups.

When I made these discoveries, I had to make a decision about how I would handle these representations for my art project. I found it best to take a nuanced point of view that acknowledged the historical context they were created in. I neither wanted to excuse the racial misrepresentations nor sanitize the historical reality by ignoring it either. In the shrine, I included a few collages of various characters with Mr. Wu included. In one collage, Lon Chaney demonstrates the facial characterizations of four characters without any makeup on.

They are amazing examples of his skill, but he is pulling back his eyes in an impression of Mr. Wu. I love the three-character portrayals, but I hate the Mr. Wu’s portrayal. I kept these photos in the shrine, because I wanted to portray the complexity of Lon Chaney’s career by not separating the good from the bad. It was also my attempt to question the way we remember people, especially the way the media sanitizes historical figures for mass consumption.

Conclusion The most important lesson I learned is about the affective nature of archival research. We bring our whole selves to the archives. As we work in them, we can develop emotionally resonant relationships with the physical archival record, the record subject, its creator, and even with the archivists in attendance. This relationship is, of course, context dependent.

Because I was looking for something to make art with, my approach was more affectively-motivated. As a result, my shrine became more personal and complex than I expected as I began to identify with different aspects of Lon Chaney and his characters. My shrine to Lon Chaney embodies my love affair with weird, dark, and unusual characters. In the end, the shrine is not only for Chaney, but to the ghosts of his characters that haunt us, the outcasts who love and want to be loved.

References A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Caswell, M. (2014). Seeing yourself in history: Community archives and the fight against symbolic annihilation. The Public Historian, 36(4), 26-37. doi:10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26 Carbone, K. (2017). Archives and Art-Making [Syllabus]. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Information Studies Department.

Cifor, M. (2015). Affecting relations: Introducing affect theory to archival discourse. Archival Science, 16(1), 7–31. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9261-5 Chaney, L. (1929). Motion picture make-up. In Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed., vol. 15, pp. 864–865). New York, NY: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Crane Wilson, I. (n.d.). Last interview reveals Lon Chaney's philosophy. [Newspaper] A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Harris, V. (2002). “The archival sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa.” Archival Science,2 (1-2), 63-86. doi:10.1007/bf02435631 “Introduction.” A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Konow, D. (2012). Reel terror: The scary, bloody, gory, hundred-year history of classic horror films. New York: St. Martins Griffin: 12.

Lon Chaney [Recorded by G. Jeffreys]. (1973). On Garland Jeffreys. Record Plant.

Parsons, L. O. (1923). In and out of focus. The Morning Telegraph, September 2, p. 11. Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/MorningTelegraphlouellaParsons Septemberdecember1923/TelegraphParsonsSepDec1923#page/n1/m ode/2up/search/lon chaney

Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19. doi:10.1007/bf02435628 The Films of Lon Chaney, Sr. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.lonchaney.org/filmography.html Thomas, D. (1930a). “Hideous makeups which made movie fans shudder caused Chaney great pain.” A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Thomas, D. (1930b). Lon Chaney lived like a clerk because he hated life of movie idol and publicity.” A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Waterbury, R. (1927). The True Life Story of Lon Chaney. A.Y. Owen's Lon Chaney scrapbooks (Collection PASC 246).

UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

[dis]memory:

counteracting remembering and forgetting

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Logical Horses: Or Several Historical, Aesthetic, Allegorical, and Mythical Vignettes

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wj2s3dh

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Czacki, Catherine Erica

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

INDEX un-designated Part I __ rustles/gestures leaving notes, echoes melting, sinking, sifting.

Liquid Languid: folds, the catastrophic Validation Machines connoisseurship, genius, exceptionalism designated Part II (because the sequence demands a line) Gulliver’s Travels allegory of otherness: conquest, “Sausages and Champagne” History from

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heathens, barbarians

*cacophony, science fiction, ^ The Great Chain of Being ~ "Metaphysical Pathos" Our Debts / Alternative To: fragile puddle forms, gummy tendrilled support networks The impulse to explore and learn is to colonize, curiosity’s sinister side. New planets discovered––lit by the soft salmon glow of a smaller, slower sun. These are real and metaphorical planets. Empirically discovered, yet distant enough to project theoretical fantasies onto, too far for immediate sensual experience. The supposed outside that can be gleaned from, distant potential utopias. Like Gulliver, we risk crushing what we encounter that is smaller and more fragile than we are. We risk being annihilated by that which is larger and denser than ourselves. Hallucinating a potentially snail-like unfolding lifespace in the cosmos, while having a hard time creating this unfolding within intimate phenomenological environments.

Touching the rocks, touching the things, collecting, sifting, holding. Watching the snails move. Bending matter for the will of some, at the expense of others, earthly demons.

rustles/gestures A continuation (or is it pre-amble?) of Aesthetics.

Authority. Sureness. Validation.

During the 2017 College Art Association conference, I participated with Suzanne Herrera Li Puma, Cara Benedetto, Natalie Beall and Michelle Ty, in a panel titled rustles/gestures on the political potential and implications of subtle moves.

Here is the description we wrote for the CAA about our panel: How does one avoid dominating matter while still lightly touching it, inhabiting it, arranging it? In this Open Panel session, we will discuss how abstaining from grand scales and gestures might inaugurate a different relation between aesthetics and politics.

Slight rustles or minimal gestures made by thinkers and artists often resist interpretation. By investigating the minor force of apparently silent things, we hope to discuss makers and thinkers working within marginalized and/or minimal zones, and ask how these light moves can have a larger impact, contesting more visible or dominant historical narratives. We are interested in thought / art practices that seek negotiation with the compulsion to arrange or possess matter, as we address why cultural producers choose to arrange material and language in subtle ways.

The panel will consist of artist presenters who find strategic ways to resist scale and dominance via light gestures and subtle moves––in their aesthetic and linguistic practices––aiming to counter power not with power, but with the persistence of the minor or small. In assembling this panel, we follow a maxim offered by artist Cecilia Vicuña, who has suggested inhabiting an aesthetic of “maximum fragility against maximum power.” Our panel format will consist of a set of three conversations across speakers, followed by discussion with the audience. We suggest the format of the conversation as a radical opening toward critical engagement.

We wanted to question the sureness of disciplinary categories, revealing spaces of movement within architecture, language,

aesthetics. The anti-monumental hides and leaves notes, sifting through the realm of overt authority and material power.

Michelle Ty, in her presentation Canto for the Supernumeraries, called for a consideration of the validity of seemingly silent players, of the non-expert amateurs that are necessary to the full unfolding of an operatic story, of the “movable furniture,” as they are sometimes called within the theatrical world because of their non-acting/non-singing movements across the stage. After the conference, she told a side story about how a man at a party replied to her attempt to describe the presentation to him with “oh, so you are giving voice to the voiceless.” This wasn’t her aim at all. Instead she urges we listen to the “silent” as silence, rather than to recreate situations of hierarchy based on imposing language on the nonspeaking. She hoped to reveal the super necessity of the supernumeraries. Not singing or acting, still crucial to the working of the narrative. Tremors of Enlightenment ideology betray the position that forces action or speech, we all must rise, phoenix-like, into a progress-fueled future. As suggested by The Great Chain of Being, reaching for an ideal transcendental level, rather than sifting and shifting on the low level. Climb the Ziggurat to reach the sun god, to become it. There is little room allowed for beings or creatures that move through space without trying to dominate it.

My own presentation that day, Light Moves, Haunted Histories, co-authored with Natalie Beall, started by invoking Francis Ponge (1974): Ideas are not my forte. I do not handle them with ease. They handle me instead. Give me a queasy feeling, nausea. I don’t like to find myself thrown in their midst. Objects in the external world, on the other hand, delight me. They sometimes surprise me but seem in no way concerned about my approval: which they immediately acquire. I do not question them. (p. 93)

Suzanne Herrera Li Puma provided me the introduction to Ponge several years ago, influencing my thoughts, writing, and art ever since.

Ponge expresses his uneasiness with polemics, the authority of language over the world of things, a language that he himself feels compelled to speak and write in. In this spirit of Ponge, our presentation deviated from the polemical, consisting

of vignettes of poetry and short stories in tandem with images describing material encounters and their attendant haunted social/historical relationships.

Herrera Li Puma and Cara Benedetto’s presentation, “shuffling, shifting, sifting, folding,” addressed printmaking as a visual/tactile extension of the idea of the echo. Herrera Li Puma has described Spivak’s contributions to the discourse: Spivak’s argument is finely wrought, a complex lacework of critique, but I am distracted as I read it by a more basic shock. I am shocked to remember that Echo really only repeats. It is an allegory of repetition, of speech being mouthed (or is it even mouthed?) by an only ever extremely spectral Other, who is Echo. The myth is also therefore about the way in which—what do I call it—“we,” a subject, an “I” a non-I, mouths patriarchal discourse back to itself both keeping and transforming its meaning.

The myth (and its re-readings) opens towards the relegation of the role of listening, of repeating as a lesser than position to the authority of stating, or talking. Herrera Li Puma would like the “echo as the repetition” to be validated, not simply as a mirror/void position––but as an acknowledgement that nothing about Echo’s repetition is empty (note: Echo is the female counterpart to Narcissus male personage). Narcissus is more interested in his own reflection than he is in the listening nymph before him. As Herrera Li Puma and Benedetto evocatively describe––each copy bears shifts and changes, like a fingernail scratch appearing on a printing plate ensuring that subsequent prints bear the marks of time and process.

Trauma lives in architecture, it lives in words. Trauma lives where we cannot reconcile the ideas we hold solid/rigid, with the ideas of others. In the days before the panel, Suzanne and I reflected that one of us addressing these topics alone, in the manner of address we preferred could possibly be met with hostility. But together, we form a small and quiet force field, with simmering ripples underneath constructed of historical trauma we witness/have witnessed.

Our panel recounted experiences of oppressions, of witnessing oppressions, of feeling angry about oppressiveness as it is expressed through hierarchies and binaries (e.g., Supernumeraries and the Narcissus/Echo paradigm), of hauntings sometimes visible and

other times subsumed through time, desiring instead of a rising or transcendence, an allowance to be, to sift and shift at these slower smaller temporal scales. One description encapsulates the complexity of trauma: “all she can do is double each last word, and echo back again the voice she's heard” (Ovid, 2008, p.

64).

A melting sifting sinking creature comes across a wall. A monument. A building. An edifice. The melter cannot liquify in the presence of this authoritative monolith. This structure is for some a commemoration of a past nostalgic historic time, for others a site of ancestral trauma that elicits fear and aggression.

Remembrance’s double edge. The structured monoliths that are handmaidens to oppression––claimed to be historical remnants that we preserve as a shared past. But that past was not experienced the same by all, is not experienced the same by my/our ancestrally haunted bones. When the liquid comes up against the solid, the desire is to go around and underneath, but the solid makes this difficult in its persistence/insistence.

Sometimes the solid forces the liquid into a contained shape. I feel this fear at the foot of certain buildings, we feel fear at the continued presence of certain monuments.

The continued realization that violence is not a pre-existing condition––it is a bubbling bursting forth due to encounters, traumatic forces and the authority of some forms/states over others. The radical/fundamental. The sensitive empath is taken in, taken over. When agency is ripped from a being, that being sways with the panicked anxiety of hopelessness. A state of reversal, where the oppressed becomes oppressive. The projection of an afterlife is the solace for some of what cannot be achieved in this realm, the projection outside into the interstellar. Away from the swampy earthy mess. I/you/we cannot pass, I/you/we cannot melt. Fear gasps outward intensity. Burning an object or a structure is a destructive act. No doubt. When is that burning a deletion of history, when is it a negotiation, when is it a letting out of trauma in a puff of smoke, like entropy that allows for new growth.

What do we learn from fragments and remains/remainders. When is burning, destroying, pulling down and tearing up a survival response. Pushing smoky density up to the cosmos in honor of what can be done and what cannot be known. When is folding not enough, when does the fold repeat the trauma without actually destroying or altering the underlying

structure. What is reclaimed in the ashes of something that should never have existed, that existed at the expense of the multiple for the benefit of the singular.

Figure 1. Beverly Buchanan notebook image used with permission from Monica Park and the Brooklyn Museum. From “Beverly Buchanan Ruins and Rituals.” By Czacki, 10/21/2016–03/05/2017.

We visited Beverly Buchanan’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum later the day of our panel, encountering another force field.

Her writings and sculptures approach entropy and monumentality, honoring ingenuity as it seeps through the fissures. Ripples made by ghosts, a materiality of the available and accessible. Swampy rock objects that could be altars to some ritual past, structures harkening to the DIY architecture of plantation extremities. Speaking to a longer temporality, to unreconciled pasts, where all things that humans see as solid melt back into the earth. Bottle trees, memory ware, clothing, smallscale replicas of shelters, little monuments. She was concerned the dolphins might be watching her while she did one of her outdoor projects.

She knew the materials, no matter how seemingly innocuous and basic were haunted.

Buchanan’s concrete structures are filled with little bits of sea-shells.1 Buchanan’s work is a physical representation of a hope for a side-temporal future that negotiates trauma with a measure of beauty, letting the haunting seep through, resuscitating the vibrant life of doing what one can with availability. Titles of her works allude to chronic illness, notes and small objects together make a grander arc statement about all the things we touch with bodies and make with hands. There are few objects, the scale is small, many cast off and remnant things. Deep underbelly meanings sneak through the materials and the language attached. The non-monumental, the covered over with moss and seashells, little bugs slipping through the cracks and temporal unfoldings revealing that we are not only witnessing negative entropy, but the curious nature of time and regrowth that seems to both move forward and cycle back. Making due with the materials at hand, “survivances” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, p. 146) 2 1

Natalie tells me this is a common building material in the South, indicative of the troubled history of plantations. Buildings constructed on the margins of slave-owners properties were frequently made of this stuff.

2 “Celebrating survival is a particular sort of approach. Non-indigenous research has been intent on documenting the demise and cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples. Instead it is possible to celebrate survival, or what Gerald Vizenor has called “survivance”–– survival and resistance. Survivance accentuates the degree to which indigenous peoples and communities have retained cultural and spiritual values and authenticity in resisting colonialism.

The approach is sometimes reflected in story form, sometimes in popular music and sometimes as an event in which artists and story tellers come

managing to carve out vibrant little swampy existences congruent to the more powerful, visible hierarchies.

Turtles all the way down, until the turtles reach the base.

That absent turtle shelled underbelly where there is no luxury, just soft and precarious parts in danger of being punctured or boiled into soup. Underbelly underthings.

Liquid Languid (Responses) Lauren Cramer, Derek Conrad Murray and Alessandra Raengo addressed the concept of liquidity as related to blackness during a panel titled Black Sentience at the priormentioned CAA conference.

Liquidity is both a state of survivance and a description of how bodies move through aesthetic spaces. The panel stemmed from a research group Liquid Blackness, a collective (of which the panelists are members) that seeks to engage the way aesthetics are produced and perpetuated as “transnational artistic and intellectual flows.”3 Liquidity is a state assumed and projected, perceived as less solid yet capable of viscously pushing through cracks and fissures––though fluid, still visible.

One of the most compelling features of this panel came during Cramer’s presentation, where she performed a mathematical demonstration with a sheet of white paper, illustrating catastrophe not as a rupture but as a fold, her use of the concept is based on René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory. The catastrophic, as I understood from her presentation, was the folding of the flatness of a single plane into an overlapping form, curves that confound and create a ripple effect that extends throughout the structure.4 These fissure spaces, created by folds, render the “stability” of a plane questionable. Flatness is then the state where things disperse evenly, while the folding creates unpredictable results, defying uniformity or easy together to celebrate collectively a sense of life and diversity and connectedness” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, p. 146).

3 Liquid Blackness, March 08, 2017, accessed June 21, 2017, http://liquidblackness.com/research-projects/.

4 See also Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being for a discussion on how the catastrophic as a current form of everyday life has historical roots in transatlantic slavery.

prediction of outcomes. As Cramer put it, this is the act of overturning but not of breaking. If breaking happens, then there is actually no “ground” to start from, but if it is simply a matter of folding, the structure hides corners. This is a version of catastrophe that hides its catastrophic-ness.

Appearing unbroken but bent, structurally unsound, unquantifiable according to mathematical rules. Cramer described the “joints” of architectural spaces, components evocative both metaphorically and actually, concrete ways of “holding” things together, that aching space that serves the larger apparatus via connection.5 It is in this jointed space that things happen, things shift. Potential becomes available in the very movement of the parts. Architecturally, these could be hallways and accidental closet spaces––places to hide or just breathe, undetected to those unaware of the joints. Places that defy the hegemony and control of the larger project of architecture and resist total visibility.

The Critic/Connoisseur (or, Validation Machines) In her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Sally Price discusses the power the art connoisseur held in the dissemination of modernist aesthetics.

Essentially, the connoisseur supports some artists being elevated, others remaining anonymous. Anonymity is required of the latter to retain the mystique desired of certain types of objects. The critic/connoisseur decides what art is craft, what art is high, what art is authentic or inauthentic, who is included and who is excluded. Arguments regarding authenticity, validation, good versus bad art continue to reveal how aesthetics follow similar social rules as other human constructed ideologies. Forms of taxonomy, illustrated by the naming of artists by categories: outsider, indigenous, female, other. Additional is the socioeconomic factor, an artist who does not have property or money, will thereby have less control over how their work is seen, circulated and preserved or not––decisions having little to do with their desires to bury or monumentalize their ouvres. The 5

Lauren Cramer, e-mail, June 20, 2017. Cramer clarified in an email correspondence that her particular approach to the catastrophe in architecture comes from the collection of essays by Greg Lynn: Folds, Bodies, & Blobs.

designation craft when talking about the production of objects by artists outside of gallery, museum, and academic contexts is a categorization that sets apart makers of things. The collector, museum curator, or art historian is the authoritative entity that rescues the objects from daily life, transforming them into objects of high culture.

In turn, careers in these institutions are gained through canonizing particular artists, elucidating the merits of one biography versus or in relation to another, an act of discovery and reframing that validates the artist and the persons and institutions attached to the artist. The poor or marginalized are accused of not caring for their objects properly. Altruism on the top hides the depths of judgment of the actions and aesthetics of others. The cultural drive, on the part of institutions, is to rescue the objects from their entropic doom at the hands of their makers. If they take their objects back to the woods and melt them all down, is that not a valid and real thing to do? And what about radical redistribution? A significant shift in global-cultural aesthetics would occur, if all of the holdings in all of the world’s ethnographic collections were returned to makers or their descendants and communities.

There are aesthetics that happen in hallways and hidden spaces, objects and people who interact in space and time other than in galleries and museums. This may sound like I’m saying that these spaces are all artificial, but they are part of real life too. Galleries, museums and archives just happen to uphold a real life of division, inclusion/exclusion, property and possession.

Inside/outside. And we are implicated in the system, I am implicated in the system every time I write about artists, present at conferences, teach a class picking one over another maker to illustrate a complete history. The preservation of cultures isn’t possible simply by recording them and placing their objects in collections, preservation requires care and understanding of how that culture sees itself and its aesthetic/social contributions–– allowing space to grow rather than dictating/predicting the outcome. The decisions of preservation versus letting go––to be decided by makers and their communities, in their hands.

Culture evolving in fluid moves, life spans and cycles––sideways temporal moves.

Part II: Gulliver’s Travels Colonial logic trips over itself, falls into itself. Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century Gulliver’s Travels is an allegory on many levels––for slavery, for human mastery over animals, for otherness as an impassable gulf of subjectivity, for dichotomizing of logical and illogical ways of being in the world. Gulliver travels to lands where he is the outsider. In one land he is a giant in another he is miniature. There is a land populated by horses and humanoid beings––the horses are the bearers of “culture” and “civilization,” while the humanoid beings are categorized as savages. The laws and cultural practices of each new country seem strange to his European mindset. Reading the preserved, not updated for readers of modern English, version of the text is disorienting. Many capitalized words, as was the style of the time. A language-rift showing the distance of then-language from now-language, annotated editions correct the temporal shifting. In the final section of the book, he falls in love with what he eventually describes as his Master. This Master, by all descriptive language, is a horse. Gulliver’s love for him is based on the logic he sees the horse culture possessing. He returns home whinnying and galloping, imitating the horse culture. In the land of Yahoos and Houyhnhnms the humans are the savage other seen by the horses as not having reason, logic, order. He becomes indebted to the order and reason of the horses. This debt is the debt of love. A love that is uneasy in its asymmetry, its possession/possessiveness, the captive falling for the charisma of the captor, the seemingly superior logic of the one deemed above. Convincing the conquered to want what is offered by colonial ideology. Meritocracy, progress, new things, big things. Purchasing into the system. Gulliver returns from his adventures with possessions, valuable things, collections and accumulations.

The preface of the book takes the form of a letter where Gulliver describes how language is a slippery thing that can both serve as a tool for communication and aid dominance––or, in the case of encountering other cultures or species, language can only be a mis-communication. In his retrospective, nostalgic account of his adventures, he says that he loves the horses the most of any culture, including his own, because in two years they taught him how not to lie. He sees their culture as bearing truth

through logic and order––“Europeans are masters of deceit” (Swift, 1999, xix).

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Figure 2. Phone Screenshot of Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day Service. From “Heathen,” by Czacki.

The allegory of otherness is evidenced in historical literary examples. Homer’s Odysseus calls the Lotus Eaters “heathens.”

They are said to have no concept of time. Seen as a-temporal, non-historical, pleasure seeking and lacking logic.

The accusation of barbarism bestowed on one human culture from another is constituted by acts of judging via logic, beauty, temporality, all systems of ordering.

Barbarian is a name bestowed by the colonizer on the so-called outsider (even if that outsider was there first).

Naming the other a barbarian/outsider/other makes acts of violence permissible, domination possible. Comparing religious beliefs, superstitious customs, social organization, aesthetics in the service of relegating said systems to a lower strata. The name given to the other is an insult. “Barbarism,” a patterned cycle of domination.

Travel to other lands in the name of military conquest or gathering of resources or establishing cheap labor becomes a

routine practice of situational judgment of others, based on the distance from what is known to be true and good and right as established by the colonizer. Checking in, taking over, checking out. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, asserts that all cultures create systems of order. She was accused for decades by the discipline of anthropology of being overly universalizing–– however, her work serves as a poignant acknowledgement that colonized societies are/were not without order, they simply had different systems of ordering. What her examples reveal, is that each culture reaches a consensus about what is taboo, establishing social rules and codes based on a relationship to purity/impurity.

This difference of ordering is a means of denigrating the other, whomever the other happens to be in a particular context. Barbarism is an accusation related to cultural concessions––definitions of barbarian/barbarism include: “1. etymologically, A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker’s, ‘3. a. A rude, wild, uncivilized person,” 6 the “absence of culture and civilization,” and/ or “extreme cruelty or brutality.”7 A presumed generalized absence of culture and an assumption of a predisposed penchant for violence. Accused/assumed heathen-hood.

“Sausages and Champagne” In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx (2008) accuses the proletariat, particularly soldiers, of being easily plied to fight any war with “sausages and champagne,” desiring these delicacies instead of standing for social change (p.

107).

His criticism is comically discomforting, and telling.

Disquieting, like the revolting body language that convulsively springs from the body of the tickled. Walter Benjamin (2006) suggested that the joke, or the resultant fit of laughter, is a rupture in logical everyday ordering––it looks to “nearness” and opens up a space unseen prior. The logical security of a wellbehaving body is subsumed by seizures of laughter. The joke boils up a something-else response from within that cannot be contained.

It is revulsion.

The joke reveals of itself the 6

Oxford English Dictionary, accessed June 21, 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/15380?redirectedFrom.

7 Google definition search, accessed June 21, 2017, https://www.google.com/#q=barbarism.

parameter required of its working mechanism to elicit laughter–– that it is an accusation, that it is at the expense of someone.

Jokes, or unintentionally comedic assertions, leap through a text, make the reader/recipient uneasy because the joke reveals tensions in the social realm.

In this case, the comment about “sausages and champagne” that caused me to laugh with discomfort, which I read as if it was a joke, was a rupture. It interrupted an otherwise authoritative description of the shapes and structures of revolution. Those who rise to power, even in progressively termed paradigms still judge others, rib them for wanting the luxuries they don’t have. The phrase reveals problems regarding material/social inequity as it imports into the contemporary social milieu.

Under the veneer of humanism, socially constructed systems of altruism and judgment require the poor and those in structurally unequal positions to reveal and perform their inequity in order to receive aid in a decidedly rigged system of divvying resources––prostrating before the state to obtain services such as welfare.8 Telling and re-telling stories of poverty and trauma to get the scraps. To “sing for their supper.”

Those seen as living in the absolute margins are stated as not being able to rise above, without much discussion about how colonialism is one of the factors deeply rooted within the distinctions of developed versus underdeveloped, the very force which creates categorizing terms.

History From Cedric Robinson and Jodi Byrd address the problem of “logical horses,” from within academic disciplinary fields.

Revealing that even the most coherent explanations or histories frequently produce gaps that require future investigation. A “cacophony” of cultural forms of gathering and transmitting 8

As Robin D. Kelley points out in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, welfare is not redistribution. Redistribution could be, and would require an even more radical alternate model that considers how many in contemporary structurally unequal positions are there because of a lack to inherited resources, as well as the historical ramifications of slavery that still haunt everyday life. Redistribution wouldn’t be based on implicit judgment of those needing assistance as being “lacking,” reparations would need to be free of systems of judgement to counter historical racism, sexism and ableism.

knowledge (Byrd, 2011). Robinson (2000) asks us to question the sway Marx has over the ideas of the left in his book Black Marxisim. Though he holds the sway critically, he is also clear to advocate for Marx’s important contributions. He is asking us to address our wholehearted reliance on an economic theory that was created from a primarily Eurocentric viewpoint. Robinson points out how irrevocably tied the history of slavery is to capitalism, and how this haunting ghost is sometimes all too briefly footnoted, quickly passed over, or altogether left out in written histories and analyses of economic history––an avoidance of acknowledging what capitalism required to get started, the bodies of others. (e.g. profits obtained by Caribbean sugar plantations that allowed for the rise of the English Bourgeoisie, or gold extraction in Côte d'Ivoire, Colombia and Ghana that merchant capitalism depended upon, particularly in France, but also in the rest of Europe; Boahen, 2012). Marx’s founding economic critique reiterates the colonial language that classifies enchanted ways of dealing with the world, placing animism and fetishism in the negative. Even if unintentionally, this results in lasting classifications of the aesthetic/artistic/social/ritual/material moves on intimate, personal as well as larger cultural levels.

Byrd, in The Transit of Empire, addresses the tensions between diaspora and indigeneity unfolding through global imperialism and Empire, calling this tension “cacophony”(Byrd, 2011, xiii), the inherited space of contemporary “biopolitics” where representations and belief systems compete. Byrd asserts that challenging dominant narratives of continuity could create a space of interplay, working with the cacophony. An oscillation between things and ideas, concepts and materials, logical empiricism, enchantment and myth. A balancing that could constitute changes in ways thinking and gathering knowledge used as forms of recuperation, even if reconciliation is impossible. Byrd gives the example of the transit of Venus as a scientific marvel in terms of empirical observation that ushered in specific ideas about the ordering of the world. This transit is an interstellar metaphor for the continued movement of colonial encounter, transition not fixedness––an excuse for Enlightened conquest, to “civilize” and alter cultures (Byrd, 2011, xxi).9 9

Byrd uses transit based on the event of Venus moving, as it “served in 1761 and 1769 as global movements that moved European conquest

Tying together all the loose threads, temporalities, histories. Byrd and Robinson voice challenges to how history has been written in the past. The pressure to make linear and disciplined that which sometimes defies linearity, disciplinarity.

Accepted histories written from narrowly-grouped subjective standpoints. They point out what should be the obvious, and urgent to contemplate terms of engagement between selves and others, personhood and the material world, including the problem of freedom being written about and pontificated upon from above. By subjects who wish to explore moral issues, but who can do so from a relatively secure social position. Their analysis addresses continual penury, subjugation and exclusion of particular subjectivities, the colonial logic that stumbles over itself again and again towards progress. One of Byrd’s strongest examples ties the threads to aesthetics, describing the writing of Guyanese (now London based) writer Wilson Harris. His novels defy linear narratives in style and content. Characters become other selves, time seems to push and pull rather than unfold in a line, making it hard to read his works as straightforward novels.

Byrd discusses the critiques launched against his work, as relegating cultures engaged in “myth” to a temporality of “pastness,” exotification of the “noble savages” of non-western cultures. Despite these criticisms, Byrd sees his body of work as opening conciliatory space. Harris brings the rendered absent into the present.

By dealing with semi-subsumed histories brushing up against authoritative historical accounts, the troubled factuality of history as a discipline is laid bare. Pulling at loose threads that many subjectivities must pull to unravel a very tight ball.

towards notions of imperialist planetarity that provided the basis for Enlightenment liberalism. The imperial planetarity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist articulations of freedom, sovereignty, and equality touched four continents and a sea of islands in order to cohere itself.

At its center were discourses of savagery, Indianness, discovery, and mapping that served to survey a world into European possession by transforming indigenous peoples into the homo nullius inhabitants of lands emptied and awaiting arrival. As I use the term here, transit as a concept suggests the multiple subjectivities and subjugations put into motion and made to move . . .”

* Joanna Russ (1993), writing across the disciplines and genres of Science Fiction, Feminism and Literary Criticism, revealed additional parameters of the accusation “you are doing it wrong,” particularly through the dichotomous lens of male/female in her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing. I extend this idea from writing to how individuals and communities judge any form of aesthetics: storytelling, music, art, daily workings in life (including what is necessary for survival: e.g. shelter, food). It is significant that Russ uses science fiction as a polemical tool. Allegories need not only be in the past, and are less beholden to the apparatus of truth as related to power.

Russ’s (1977) science fiction narrative The Female Man describes multi-temporal time travelling through the past, present, and future, by sometimes amorphously or gender bending/gender non-conforming characters. Stories overlap and shift similar to those of Wilson Harris. One character, from a future, has retractable fangs and claws; another hails from a fantasy feminist lesbian utopian farm world, a third is a familiar historical figure, a woman from the 1970s who works as a librarian. We return to old cycles, they shift each time, hitting road-blocks.

The peoples of different time periods push against each other’s belief patterns of what it means to be a woman, to be a part of a socially patterned environment.

They have difficulty communicating due to their temporal incongruence. The timetraveller moves across terrains of subjectivity within veils of acculturation, patterns of social behavior, and changing systems of ordering that relate to language and aesthetics, style and representation. Cyclical renewals, letting go’s and hiccoughs.

More sideways temporal movings.

^ A hierarchical system for judgments of possessing logic and agency comes to us from The Great Chain of Being, a system devised in the Middle Ages that places white/male/European subjects at the highest apex closest to God, with women, others, animals, vegetables and minerals beneath in several layers.

Avery Gordon (2011) suggests that we perceive haunting as an “un-reconciled” event or part of history, the story not quite told or visibly coherent, the stories of the oppressed or “disappeared.” The Great Chain of Being does not need to haunt, because it is the base criteria, though it is haunted by those pushed beneath. It is what empirical sciences are based upon, otherwise known as taxonomy. Though modern science hopes to distance itself from a taxonomy that categorized humans within these layers, the categorization of states of animacy given to material life is still prevalent. Arguably, by basing our structures on it, we can’t escape the poisoning effect on human cultures––no matter how badly we try to relegate the problematic to the distant past. The “mimicry” of power as Robin D. Kelley points out, is a danger Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire warned about. Through trying to gain freedom via old models, we risk becoming “colonial masters” or “new jack American corporate rulers” (Kelley, 2002, p. 180).

The animal/mineral/vegetable/female/other gets sifted to the bottom. Dancing and doing and living, hiding in pockets and corners, sometimes refusing to do what they are told.

Sometimes met with resistance, other times allowed a little bit of wiggle room in the caged house of logic/patriarchy/colonial domination. Dancing with all the categories seen as illogical, beneath, or outside. We are culpable, I am culpable, too.

Mimicking the master, not only in language––via acts of domination, to get a little foothold. Falling for logical horses.

Upholding categories dictated by the root of the structure, the occasional veneer of equality providing a smokescreen. New paint can be applied, something else is always underneath if you know to scratch at it. Some scratch from within structures and disciplines, following rules strategically in order to create spaces where cracks and fissures show through.

~ “Metaphysical Pathos” To speak of aesthetics is to speak about how we choose to believe in one idea over another. Our philosophical leanings piggyback on our visual predilections.

We choose our

philosophy, ethics, moral positioning, gravitating towards that which speaks to us. As Arthur Lovejoy (1936) posited in lectures delivered in 1933, later published as The Great Chain of Being, this is “metaphysical pathos,” a concept suggesting that a person will find most authoritative or true messages delivered in ways that are already familiar and trusted. His lectures trace the history of empirical knowledge as interwoven with the way we see truth. The irreconcilable disagreements based not only on content, but style of delivery. Visual and verbal messages are likely to land the hardest with audiences already primed for their arrival. Our systems for understanding the metaphysical and physical world are irrevocably tied to the stylistic sureness of an argument.

We seek what we already know. We search for what we expect to find. When incongruity arises we become uneasy. In I Swear I Saw This, Michael Taussig (2011) notes that if we have our “eyes open” as we gather knowledge––sometimes the sureness of our assumptions or arguments or logic will come under question. It’s risky to allow oneself to follow a trail with an unknown outcome, to let the threads lead the way. This is not how discipline or aesthetics is supposed to work. Taussig points out that we are not separate from that which we witness.

Witnessing is a form of experience, experience is not separate from the subjectivities we touch, that touch us, lightly or with force. The tragedy of miscommunication is happening before the utterance dares to escape our throats.

Allegory creates temporal confusion. A present-ness is cast to the past. In science fiction, the future. Storytelling is a space of access, like poetry, disciplinary lines shifted. Language can fly its freak flag. Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler packaged their critiques in allegory and science fiction. They have an oracular feel because of the illuminations in their writing, being keen observers of the social pasts and presents that they satirized into futures.

Familiar fogged messages available to those who are attuned to a facet of acculturated “metaphysical pathos.”

The difference between myth and allegory is that myth tells stories from the inside. Reflections of how things happen and attempting at a grander why. Allegory presents idealized scenarios for moral teaching.

Magic and enchantment are

dangerous within the structure of Enlightenment based thought, because they are superstitious orientations, acknowledging unseen and uncontrollable forces.

Superstitious orientation requires a direct engagement with chance, the obscure, as the world of the unseen can yield potentially harmful results that are not always controllable. Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony, describes the dichotomizing of reason against myth and fable.

This contrasting act means that societies with alternative epistemologies are seen as un-reasoning, and un-reasonable with, as “originaire” and “uncapable of uttering the universal,” or so called Western logic (Mbembe, 2015). Each allegory, truth, fable, myth, fact is tied to the particular form, style of metaphysical pathos that a group of people, a culture, agree upon, as a truth or something close enough. That which lies outside is rendered false.

Reason and myth both become dangerous through scale, or the wielding of either as tools for domination.

To be unsure is to supposedly lack a position. But what if being unsure is to be open to the validity of many positions?

When is this unsure-ness a benefit, and when is it a detriment?

When is unsure-ness a position of apathy, backing down––and when is it an act of kindness towards difference? Who do we believe as the authoritative creators of social/political/aesthetic messages? Who do we believe and why do we believe?

No text is ever totally rigid. At least I hope not. Or it shouldn’t be. This is what publishing does, renders thoughts and ideas solid, imposes linearity on ideas that ephemeral conversation does not. The record becomes concrete. But it does and can change through revision because our interpretation changes, our opinions change with exposure to other things. Our languages change, the meanings of the words change. The printed word can communicate or alternately miscommunicate intentions. We can continue to think through hierarchies and debts and try to sift. Following Ponge, I try to understand the ways in which “ideas handle us,” how we fall to their power.

Our Debts / Alternative To Refusal, redistribution, intimacy, shared accolades––the boundaries could shift. I perform this boundary making, I can try to change it. Focus on the narrow, the very small, the everyday,

the less than, the underneath. Seeing process and outcome, making new processes all the time. Slowing the pace that requires instrumentalizing others, knowing that regardless of speed, we will always be calling in favors.

Consider dependencies and what depends. Watching disparate things push up against each other, intertwine into “cacophony.”

Collecting rocks. Feeling their smoothness, hiding them in pockets for later re-discovery. Holding them, massaging them, without classifying them or attempting to remember their provenance. Understanding what it means to want to possess them, that even the small gesture of putting a rock in one’s pocket and taking it home to put on a shelf is an act of possession. Glean from their material silence, non-speaking, the lack of words, advice for the future. The rocky terrains they inhabit and disperse from, the years it takes for water to wear down their forms, shaping.

Think about science fiction fantasies manifesting in the now time, instead of distant planets with salmon colored soft lighting and slowly unfolding species. Refuse the logic of ASAP, remove it from the collective vocabulary, create spaces to see what is front of us obscuring truths and falsehoods, or letting either the true or the false be designated too quickly. Toss things around on the tongue for a moment and taste before swallowing. Ride uncertainty like a wave, engage the help of others. And also, do it yourself. Question how genius requires exploitation or exceptionalism to uphold a one magical being that creates without influence or help from the minds and bodies of others. Promote multi-facetted many non-geniused forms.

Think about what is it that we are sitting on, touching or eating at any given moment. If we want to think about how to use exception, have it be a way to empathize, care outside of the very immediate-of-one selfhood. Face the hidden by scratching at the surface, face culpability. See many avenues and shapes.

Communicate through small circles, rather than imposing large systems from a hierarchical position (Graeber, 2004). Instead of falling in love with the logical horses, seeing into the right here, right now. All the horses. In Donna Haraway’s (2016) words, “staying with the trouble,” whatever that trouble may be.10 10

Haraway suggests moving away from the term “Anthropocene” towards an interlinking of human/nonhuman as a way of thinking through troubled ecologies/histories/futures.

Being nomadic, being stable, being parasitic, being “together in homelessness” and having “positive debts” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 96). to communities, lovers and other species and material forms, creating debts alternative to capital, while becoming comfortable to saying no to what feels wrong.

Because “refusal” is not “inactivity.” Redact, retract, burrow down and in. Not giving up, but slowing it down. Soaking in small intimacies, focusing. Aware of what close forms of contact mean. Still present mammals that burrowed during the dinosaur apocalypse (however it actually happened or is happening still), waiting for their time to emerge and feel the sun again on their fur. Strategically and softly collecting what is needed. Insisting and persisting that being outside, on the edges and on the margins is not suicide, it is living. Alternative to.

Favor of a collective of fragile puddle forms, sinking deeper into each other's sea spines making tendrilled networks of support.

Gummy multi-legged pathos webs adjusting to collective precarity. Paddle through steamy veils of viscous muddy softness. Feeling the gooey insides. Dealing with the need to liquidize, consume, cannibalize––negotiating what dominance means. Accepting that total, permanent, or sure solutions are evasive, careful survivals will return. Refusals echoing forth from alternative temporalities, firm and edgy corners of inhabited universes, in the company of microbes and species and lovers and friends. Particularly the rocks we listen to in their silence. (*Additional thanks for editorial work and general as well as particular idea sharing to Lauren Hanson, Lev Kalman, Lauren Cramer, Suzanne Herrera Li Puma, Michelle Ty, Josh Kline, and Carolyn Lieba Francois-Lazard.)

References Benjamin, W. (2006). Surrealism: The last snapshot of the European intelligentsia. In H. Eiland & M. William Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Boahen, A. (2012). Topics in West African history. London, England: Longman.

Byrd, J. A. (2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, A. (2011). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist anthropology.

Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. New York: Minor Compositions: Autonomedia.

Herrera, S. (2016). Print echoes. In C. Benedetto (Ed.), Contemporary print handbook (pp. 69–85). New York, NY: Halmos.

Kelley, R.D.G. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Lovejoy, A. O. (1936). The great chain of being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Marx, K. (2008). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Rockville, MD: Wildside Press: 107–123.

Mbembe, A. (2015). On the postcolony. Johannesburg: University of Wits Press.

Ovid. (2008). Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ponge, F. (1974). The voice of things, trans. Beth Archer Brombert. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book.

Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Russ, J. (1977). The female man. Boston: Gregg Press.

Russ, J. (1983). How to suppress women's writing. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1993). Echo. New Literary History, 24(1), 17–43.

Swift, J. (1999). Gulliver's travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Taussig, M. T. (2012). I swear I saw this: Drawings in fieldwork notebooks, namely my own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Zed.

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Case Number 87-447: An Image Essay in 12 Parts

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Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Flessa, Nick

Publication Date 2019

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In 1987, my mother, Janna Flessa, served as the Assistant Prosecutor on the trial of Jerome Henderson in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Henderson was sentenced to death by electric chair. That death sentence has since been reduced to a life sentence, due to evidence of a racially biased jury selection process. During the trial my mother was pregnant with me; she retired from the Prosecutor’s Office after I was born. Jerome Henderson shares my birthday. It seems beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of murder, but was himself victim to an overzealous prosecution team that wanted to push the death penalty. This trial was curious to me because of what I saw as deeply personal and poetic resonances regarding the way in which the United States judicial system serves as a tool of white supremacist domination, and the degree to which my family history intertwines with this function. My mother passed away in 2010, and I am left with only documents to piece through this historical inheritance.

Along with examining public court case records, I have developed an institutionally structured personal archive of my mother’s writings, drawings, paintings, journals, and other media, which I used for a solo exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive in 2018. In this exhibition, I constructed a poetic overview of certain aspects of my mother’s life, using her archive as a space to address issues of race, class, gender and mental illness, through suggestive arrangements of the objects she left behind. I am in the process of finding ways to merge elements of her personal archive with the public court records, and to find parallels between her life and the life of the man she helped sentence to death. Both Janna and Jerome show signs of struggle with undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, albeit in vastly different social contexts.

With these twelve images I propose the personal archive in relation to the public archive as a generative space for creating a more critical historical vision regarding the function of the judicial system and the cultural contexts of mental illness, gender, and race in the United States. I am interested in the connection between my mother’s poetry and the way that language manifests itself in public record on behalf of the state.

The combination of these chronologically disparate objects and texts juxtaposed against one another brings out their relational complexity, creating a new space that suggests underlying

connections.

Figure 1. Janna Flessa's closing statement in the trial of Jerome Henderson. 1987.

Figure 2. Manuscript of “My Third 5K.” Poem by Janna Flessa.

2003.

Figure 3. Excerpt from Janna Flessa Running Journal. 2004.

Figure 4. Excerpt from Janna Flessa Running Journal. 2005.

Figure 5. Partial Manuscript of Untitled Poem by Janna Flessa. 1980.

Figure 6. Police lineup from Jerome Henderson investigation. 1986.

Figure 7. Portrait of Janna and Nick Flessa. 1989.

Figure 8. Manuscript of “Prisoners.” Poem by Janna Flessa. 1983.

Figure 9. Transcript from jury selection in trial of Jerome Henderson.

1987.

Figure 10. Excerpt from Janna Flessa Running Journal. 2006.

Figure 11. Charcoal Drawing by Janna Flessa. Date Unknown.

Figure 12. Charcoal/Gel Pen Drawing by Janna Flessa. Date Unknown.

[re]figuring:

reworking, expanding, and reimagining archival focus and futures

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Doling out Colonialism: Refiguring Archival Memory of Settler Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22z146n6

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Hummel-Colla, Christina Lehua

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

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Following indigenous protocols of recognizing the lands’ original inhabitants, I would like to begin by acknowledging the Tongva peoples, whose lands in the Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands I have lived on not only during the development of this article, but through-out my life and education. I pay my respects to Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders), and ‘eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present, and emerging.

In the spring of 2017, I boarded a plane to attend my grandfather’s funeral and visit my maternal family on Oahu for the first time in ten years. The trip was bittersweet, a mourning occasion that nevertheless offered an opportunity to reconnect with family – an opportunity I had grown to yearn for as I reflected on both mortality and my ignorance of our cultural heritage and history. For although I grew up knowing that I was Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) on my mother’s side, I was born in Los Angeles and had not learned much beyond the most basic of facts. Like David A. Chang (2016), I am he malihini maoli, “a Native stranger” born far from the shores of Hawai’i and raised with limited contact with Kanaka Maoli communities (xvi–xvii).

Returning to Los Angeles with a small collection of books that my grandmother allowed me to take from her personal library, I began to work toward addressing my own ignorance, starting with a copy of Hawai’i’s Story by Hawai’i’s Queen by Queen Lili’uokalani. This autobiographical narrative includes Queen Lili’uokalani’s testimony regarding the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i by primarily United States citizens and an appeal for justice. As I read this account, I reflected on historic and contemporary attempts to silence Kanaka Maoli voices, Kanaka Maoli resistance in the face of historic and ongoing injustices, and the general apathy and ignorance most Americans demonstrate regarding the destructive effects of settler colonialism. Continuing my studies through conversations with family, the writing of Kanaka Maoli scholars, and explorations of Hawaiian history, I began to more fully understand myself and my family history. For the first time, I saw my own identity not as a misshapen puzzle piece that could not quite fit, but as part of a bigger picture encompassing multiple generations and hundreds of years of history.

In the fall of 2017, I began my graduate work in Library and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

There, I began to more thoroughly explore and understand settler colonialism in a broader sense, the particularities of its impact on other indigenous peoples, and the implications of imperialist legacies for how indigenous individuals and communities interact with and access archival collections relating to themselves and their histories. During this time period, I also discovered the Dole Family Papers collection that is held by the Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens, which I felt compelled to investigate considering my ongoing studies of both Hawaiian history and archival theory.

Numerous members of the Dole family and their activities contributed to the physical and cultural destruction that accompanied the process of U.S. settler colonialism in the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Perhaps the most widely recognized is James Dole, famously known for Dole brand pineapple. However, it was Sanford B. Dole, James’ cousin, who played the most politically significant role in the destruction of Hawai’i’s sovereignty—first as president of the Republic of Hawai’i from 1894 to 1900 and then as the first governor of the Territory of Hawai’i from 1900 to 1903.

Having begun my studies of Hawaiian history with the 1893 overthrow, I was most intent on continuing to examine this time period and learn more about Sanford B. Dole’s role in it. Since the finding aid for the Dole Family Papers indicated a high volume of material relating to Sanford B. Dole, along with Queen Lili’uokalani and the 1893 overthrow, my research and discussion focuses on these figures and the ways they are represented within the archival sources. 1 In the pages that follow, I discuss my research with the Dole Family Papers at the Huntington Library and argue that the Papers’ positioning within an elite institution that strictly regulates access to collections vitiates their capacity to evidence injustice and speak to historic and ongoing issues of colonization that Kānaka Maoli face. Drawing on the works of archival professionals and Kanaka Maoli scholars alike, I make recommendations for how the Papers could be utilized to contribute to a digital archive of linked resources that would support decolonizing aims and better serve Kanaka Maoli communities. Such a digital archive would evidence United 1

In an archival context, the term “finding aid” refers to a tool the purposes of which include facilitating access to a collection and contextualizing the materials contained within (Pearce-Moses, 2005).

States imperialism and its effects on Kānaka Maoli, demonstrate indigenous resistance and survival, and disrupt hegemonic narratives of Hawaiian history that support settler futurity in Hawai’i.

Decolonizing Archives Archives and other collecting institutions have and often continue to play a significant role in imperialist processes, contributing to the classification and study of Indigenous peoples, the forced separation of heritage materials from source communities, and the perception of Indigenous peoples as dying out or extinct (O’Neal, 2015, pp. 4–7). These historical processes have carried on into the present, contributing to the invisibility of numerous Indigenous issues and further denying Indigenous claims to self-determination, cultural survival, and social justice.

In the words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012): It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples’ claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our own environments.

In order to redress historic and ongoing processes of settler colonialism, imperialism, and injustice, scholars and activists alike have advocated for a process of decolonization in order to restore Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and modes of being and living in the world. Within archival contexts, decolonization is enacted through a range of methods including repatriation of materials, digitization projects, and increased collaboration between collecting institutions and indigenous communities. In this section, I conduct a review of some of this literature aimed at decolonizing archives to contextualize my later discussion of the Dole Family Papers and to inform my recommendations for utilizing the collection to create a digital

archive that could better serve the needs of Kanaka Maoli communities.

While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) enacted in 1990 provides a legal framework for addressing issues of repatriation for cultural artifacts, there has not been a similar legal framework for addressing the same issues in archival contexts. The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, first drafted in 2007, work to fill this gap by identifying best practices for culturally responsive care of Native American archival materials and for developing mutually respectful, sustainable relationships between archival institutions and Native American communities.

The following major issues inform the protocols: ● The recognition of the sovereign governments and associated rights of Native American communities. ● Issues in the collection, ownership, preservation, handling, access, and use of American Indian archival resources. ● The importance of building relationships, balancing different approaches to knowledge management, and mutual respect. ● The need to expand the nature of the information professions to include Native American perspectives and knowledge.

(First Archivists Circle, 2007)

The Protocols themselves elaborate on the various conceptual tools and strategies necessary for providing more culturally responsive care for Native American archival materials, including the need to strive for balance in content and perspective, issues of accessibility and use, and the need for context. Archivists must strive for diversity in collections by including resources created by rather than solely about Native Americans, by providing Native American communities with increased access and control over their information resources, and by contextualizing resources using appropriate language and additional information (First Archivist Circle, 2007). Although professional communities have been slow to accept the Protocols, the Society for American Archivists’ long overdue endorsement in August 2018 indicates a growing awareness of the need for professional best practices for more culturally responsive care of Native American archival materials (Society of American Archivists, 2018).

While the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials present a broad set of best practices for decolonizing archives, many works by other archival professionals and theorists demonstrate how decolonizing principles and methods may be implemented in more specific projects and contexts. One major recurring theme is the potential of digital technologies and digitization projects to provide enhanced access to archival sources for indigenous communities.

McKemmish, Faulkhead, and Russell (2011) discuss their work with the Trust and Technology project and the utilization of reconciled research, which they define as a methodology emphasizing the importance of research as a collaborative, cocreative journey producing knowledge accessible to a broader audience rather than a narrower, academic one (p. 220). One high-priority need they discovered was that of having opportunities to disrupt hegemonic historical narratives expressed within archives. Indigenous research participants wanted to challenge the contents of “official” archives and “set the record straight” by incorporating their own narratives into archival systems (pp. 223–224). One outcome of this research was the proposition of system specifications for a Koorie Annotation System, which would link web-based digital records generated by Indigenous individuals, families, and communities to separate systems housing records available for annotation.

This proposed use of web-based technology will allow for the creation of a shared space in which archival institutions and Koorie communities and individuals may work collaboratively to create a more equitable digital archive (pp. 232–233). Thus, McKemmish et al. demonstrate how decolonizing methodologies and digital technologies may be utilized to enact the decolonization of archival materials.

Ellen Cushman (2013) also discusses the use of decolonizing methods and digital technologies, but within the context of the Cherokee Stories and Songs DVD. While Cushman (2013) acknowledges that the possibilities presented by digital archives have captured the imagination of scholars for good reason, she also cautions that care must be taken in order to create decolonized digital archives rather than digital archives that reproduce the colonial power structures that have been and are present in most physical archives (pp. 115–117). Through analysis of a digital story presented on the Cherokee Stories and

Songs DVD, Cushman identifies both the advantages and drawbacks of digital archives and the requirements necessary for producing decolonized digital archives.

These requirements include challenging Western understandings of time as a necessary support for tradition, maintaining artifacts in their contexts of use and meaning, and the centering of indigenous languages (pp. 120–121). These methods serve to challenge and negate imperialist thought and its influence on archival practices, both past and present. Cushman concludes: Digital archives can strive to escape the imperialist legacies on which they are built through being created and maintained by the very people they hope to represent. If this is done, the archive might become a place-based learning center where knowledge unfolds through stories told in and on the people’s terms. (p. 132)

As with McKemmish et al. (2011), Cushman demonstrates the possibility of producing decolonized digital archives. Digital technologies present new opportunities for generating and representing information, while allowing it to be disseminated to broader audiences. Moreover, the literature on decolonizing methodologies demonstrates that decolonization is not simply about the how of carrying out the process, but the who of decision making.

Through community involvement, digital archives may present unique opportunities for Indigenous communities to reframe archival and historical narratives in and on their own terms.

Thus, although the colonial nature of many archival collections represents both historic and ongoing injustices, a significant and growing body of work on the possibilities for decolonizing archives create new opportunities and possibilities to envision and realize a more equitable way of approaching archival work. Documents such as the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials contribute to these efforts through setting new best practices that emphasize collaboration and respectful relationships between collecting institutions and source communities. Case studies, such as those presented by Cushman and by McKemmish et al., demonstrate methods for applying new best practices to working realities, as well as additional considerations for the creation of digital archives and

systems. These works will contextualize my later discussion of the Dole Family Papers and inform my recommendations for utilizing the collection to create a digital archive that could better serve the needs of Kanaka Maoli communities.

Erasures of Kanaka Maoli Identity In 1893, a primarily American group of insurgents, with support from United States Minister John L. Stevens and U.S. troops, overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai’i and its constitutional monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani. Sanford B. Dole became the first and only president of the Republic of Hawai’i, until the United States of America illegally annexed Hawai’i as a territory in 1898 (Sai, 2008). Sanford B. Dole remained in a position of power as the governor of the territory of Hawai’i until 1903. On August 12, 1959, Hawai’i became the fiftieth state in the United States of America. It was not until a hundred years after the American-led coup d’état that the United States government passed a joint resolution, popularly known as the Apology Resolution (1993), formally acknowledging the role of American agents and citizens in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i on January 17, 1893.

Tragically, but unsurprisingly, this formal recognition has not been accompanied with a robust program of action for redressing these historic injustices. To the contrary, the United States government and many of its citizens have continued efforts to erode the rights of Kānaka Maoli to self-determination and recognition as a distinct group of people whose sovereignty was forcibly taken from them – a group of people to whom justice is due. In this section, I conduct a review of some of the literature which discusses various forms of the erasure and marginalization of Kanaka Maoli history, identities, and communities. This review contributes additional context to my discussion of the Dole Family Papers and informs my recommendations for utilizing the collection to create a digital archive utilizing decolonizing methods.

For example, the tourist industry has major political implications for Kānaka Maoli and for any attempts at meaningful discussion of Hawaiian history. Lisa Kahaleole Hall (2005) points to the cultural distortions imposed on Hawaiian culture by global marketing and to the kitsch culture caused by overexposure in the tourist market. The conception of Hawai’i as a touristic

paradise, a place to escape to for the aloha culture, sun and sand, and tacky souvenirs, leaves little room for recognition of the historic and continuing injustices committed against the land and its people. As Hall so powerfully asserts, “A culture without dignity cannot be conceived of as having sovereign rights, and the repeated marketing of kitsch Hawaiian-ness leads to nonHawaiians’ misunderstanding and degradation of Hawaiian culture and history” (p. 409).

This misunderstanding and degradation preclude deeper discussion of the history of settler colonialism in Hawai’i, its lasting impact into the present, and how these issues may be redressed.

Like touristic consumers, members of the educated elite may also contribute to prevailing narratives that prevent Kānaka Maoli from being recognized as a unique Indigenous people seeking to assert their sovereignty rights. Cynthia Franklin and Laura Lyons (2004) critique postcolonial scholars for their roles in reinforcing both the view of Native Hawaiians as yet another multicultural American identity and the false dichotomy of authentic and Indigenous versus inauthentic and hybrid. One example of this occurrence can be understood through looking to the inadequacies of post-national formulations for analyzing Indigenous contexts. The blanket vilification of nationalism and understanding of Indigenous nationalist movements as inherently atavistic mean that, “claims on the part of Native Hawaiians to land or identity are read as attempts to return to an irretrievable past, rather than as contemporary responses to historical injustices and continuing dispossession” (pp. 52–53).

Similarly, postcolonial views on the tendency toward hybrid Kanaka Maoli identities tend not to accommodate authenticity, the uniqueness of Indigeneity, and the ability to hold multiple identities at once. Many of the postcolonial scholars Franklin and Lyons critique fall into one of two categories: those who engage in creating false binaries between the Indigenous and the hybrid and those who conflate the two with one another.

These intellectual frameworks are as two edges of the same sword that cuts Kānaka Maoli off from being recognized as an often multiethnic, yet still unique indigenous people who maintain sovereignty rights and who do indeed inhabit and adapt to the modern world.

Another barrier to the recognition of Kānaka Maoli and their sovereignty rights arises from the erasure of off-island

Kanaka Maoli identities. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (2007) writes on the Kanaka Maoli diaspora, the multi-faceted causes of Kanaka Maoli deracination, and the implications these socially destructive processes have for them as a people. Kauanui argues that this process is related to three linked factors: (a) the invisibility of off-island Hawaiians to each other, to Hawaiians in Hawai’i, and to non-Hawaiians; (b) the appropriation of Hawaiian identity by non-Hawaiians, especially those who were born in or lived in Hawai’i; and (c) the notion that Hawai’i is so ethnically mixed, Kānaka Maoli have become just one more ethnic minority among many (p. 139). The first factor requires a little unpacking in order to understand its scope. While many Kānaka Maoli do live in Hawai’i, at least a third are geographically dispersed outside of their ancestral homeland, due to a variety of factors that include economic hardship, lack of employment opportunities in Hawai’i, civil rights abuses, and the United States government’s refusal to recognize Hawaiian sovereignty.

Despite the historic and continuing presence of Kānaka Maoli in the continental United States, these diaspora communities tend to be under- and unrecognized. This is due in large part to the second factor that Kauanui discusses, the appropriation of Hawaiian identity and the equating of residence in the state with Indigenous identity. Kauanui observes, “Those who misrepresent themselves as Hawaiians perpetrate a form of fraud, while Hawaiians who do not learn hula or speak Hawaiian, for example, are rendered unreal.

Apparently for those that demand a performance, simply being Hawaiian is insufficient” (p. 154).

I can personally attest to this phenomenon based on my experience as a young Kanaka Maoli woman growing up in Los Angeles. Discussing this facet of my identity with other people was always an unsettling experience, since the first assumption most made was that identifying as Hawaiian must mean I was from the state of Hawai’i. This led to the growing awareness on my part that because I was not born in the state of Hawai’i, I must not be a “real” Hawaiian, and that non-indigenous residents of the state of Hawai’i could more readily claim Hawaiian identity than I could. This erasure of off-island Kanaka Maoli individuals and communities makes us seem less numerous, more like a vanishing or dying population, and it inhibits deeper conversations around the lasting effects of settler colonialism.

Thus, although Kānaka Maoli have survived and resisted much, we still face numerous barriers to being recognized as a unique indigenous people who retain sovereignty rights despite the historic injustices committed against us. Tourists’ desire to consume Hawaiian culture and luxuriate in a tropical paradise leaves little room for recognizing the continued legacy of settler colonialism, while the belittling and erasure of Kanaka Maoli identities, and history denies the need to do so before a conversation can even be attempted. Digital archives represent one method for intervening in and confronting these erasures, allowing for more meaningful discussion of our history, the assertion of our sovereignty, and the strengthening of identity by both on- and off-island Kānaka Maoli alike.

The Dole Family Papers The Dole Family Papers is an archival collection held by the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The collection contains archival materials created primarily by and about the Dole family of Hawai’i and includes a range of formats such as transcripts of daily diary entries, family correspondence, documents, photograph albums, and scrapbooks. The collection spans a broad time period, from 1831 to 1944, and relates to many subjects including missionary work, various Dole family members’ activities, and the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i (Black, 2011). While working with the Dole Family Papers, I chose to focus on materials relating to the 1893 overthrow due to the importance of this historical event for asserting the sovereignty rights of Kanaka Maoli communities.

In this section, I discuss my research with the Dole Family Papers and argue that their positioning within an elite institution that strictly regulates access to collections vitiates their capacity to evidence injustice and speak to the historic and ongoing issues of colonization that Kānaka Maoli face. Further, the collection’s finding aid creates an open secret of materials relating to the 1893 overthrow by referring to them but being unspecific as to their location within the collection. As for the contents of the collection themselves, I argue that although materials relating to Sanford B. Dole, Queen Lili’uokalani, and the 1893 overthrow represent an undoubtedly colonial view of these subjects and events, they are capable of evidencing historical

processes of colonization, social and physical violence, and political repression. If linked to other resources relating to the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, these archival materials could form the basis for a digital archive that evidences United States imperialism and its effects on Kānaka Maoli, demonstrates indigenous resistance and survival, and disrupts hegemonic narratives of Hawaiian history that support settler futurity in Hawai’i. Such a digital archive could serve as an educational resource for Kānaka Maoli, on- and off-island alike, and as a way of asserting the importance of our history with broader audiences.

Before conducting my research and envisioning how the Dole Family Papers could be re-configured to better serve Kanaka Maoli communities, I needed to obtain reading privileges to access the collection.

In terms of physical access, the Huntington Library is very restrictive regarding who may or may not obtain reading privileges. Those who may apply for reading privileges include faculty, research librarians, curators, PhD candidates, and independent scholars—but not master’s degree or undergraduate students, community members, or visiting members of the general public (Huntington.org, “Application for Reading Privileges”).

According to the Huntington’s official policies, I should not have been able to obtain reading privileges and conduct in-person research with the Dole Family Papers to begin with.

I was extremely fortunate that the reference librarian I contacted was willing to make an exception for a Library and Information Studies graduate student – although this exception was still sharply limited and allowed me just one day to conduct my research. Despite taking very few breaks and working through lunch, I left the Huntington with the uneasy awareness that there was a great deal I had not been able to cover during my short time there. Nevertheless, the fact I was able to obtain temporary reading privileges is unusual, and colleagues I have discussed this project with have been surprised I was able to conduct my research at all. The official policies and surprise of my colleagues speak to the Huntington’s exclusive approach toward physical access of archival collections within its holdings. This approach is unjust in that it privileges members of the educated elite over members of source communities. It excludes and discourages members of source communities from seeking access to archival materials that may be relevant to

themselves, their identities, and their histories. These policies should be reconsidered and revised to provide and support greater access by a broader range of archival users.

Another access issue I encountered while conducting research with the Dole Family Papers arose when I began working with the finding aid. In relation to archival research, a finding aid provides information about the collection, the collection’s scope and content, and the organization and arrangement of materials within the collection. At first glance the finding aid for the Dole Family Papers appeared reasonably detailed and as if it would be useful in helping me to access the material I was most interested in. However, I soon discovered that while the finding aid referred to materials within the collection relating to Sanford B. Dole, Queen Lili’uokalani, and the 1893 overthrow, it was also very vague as to where these materials could be found. Thus, while the finding aid refers to these subjects and figures in history, it creates an open secret of their presence within the Dole Family Papers by omitting their location within the collection.

The Biographical Note and Scope and Content sections of the finding aid briefly discuss the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, as well as Sanford B. Dole’s role in it and the events that followed. There is also brief mention that three photograph albums and five scrapbooks contain numerous newspaper articles about these and other significant historical figures and events (Black, 2011). However, the photograph albums and scrapbooks are not nearly as well described as the rest of the collection. The description of the diaries includes the author(s) and years, the description of the family correspondence includes descriptions of the sender and receiver and years, and even the box of genealogy information, photographs, and ephemera has detailed descriptions of its contents. In stark contrast, the photo albums and scrapbooks appear as an afterthought at the end of the finding aid, with very basic descriptions to help identify each item, but no indicators as to the contents beside broad date ranges.

One of the only indicators as to the contents of the photo albums and scrapbooks is the note in the Scope and Content section—which still offers no specific details about which items contain information about Queen Lili’uokalani, Sanford B. Dole,

and the 1893 overthrow. Beside the Scope and Content note, a cataloger’s note informs readers: Sanford B. Dole is not indexed as a subject as he is a subject of the majority of the collection. He is the addressee of nine letters, which are listed in Indexing: Added Entries. He is the author of five letters. Other subjects that are not specifically indexed, due to the amount of material dealing with them include: Queen Lili’uokalani, the Hawaiian government, the overthrow of 1893, annexation by the U.S., etc. (Black, 2011, p.

2)

Beyond the fact that deciding not to specifically index subjects due to the amount of material relating to them is more than a little counter-intuitive, the different types of indexing described in the finding aid further confounds matters. A section titled Indexing: Added Entries, referred to in the section quoted above, specifically refers to letters of which Sanford B. Dole is the addressee, while another section titled Indexing: Subjects describes where materials relating to specific subjects of the collection may be located. For example, Daniel Dole, James D. Dole, and the Punahou School are all identified as subjects in the scrapbook identified as HM 76510, while the Punahou School is further identified as a subject in the scrapbook identified as HM 76508. In contrast, a third section titled Indexing Terms, which was used to index the collection’s description, includes references to Sanford B. Dole, Queen Lili’uokalani, and the 1893 overthrow, but without any references to materials relating to them (Black, 2011).

Thus, although the finding aid discusses the presence of these major historical events and figures in the collection and acknowledges them as significant subjects, it continuously fails to locate materials related to them. Not only does this create a barrier to access, but it creates contradictions and inconsistencies within the logic of the finding aid itself. Deciding not to attempt any description of a subject’s location within a collection because of the volume of material relating to it is counterintuitive, while half-finished efforts to describe the scope of certain material types and not others only creates more confusion than it resolves. Further, as I will discuss in more detail below, my research revealed that Sanford B. Dole, Queen Lili’uokalani, and the 1893 overthrow were primarily subjects of

the scrapbooks referred to as HM 76506, HM 76508, and HM 76509. Given that the Indexing: Subjects section identified Daniel Dole, James D. Dole and the Punahou School as subjects within individual scrapbooks, I see no reason why this should not also be the case for other subjects.

When I was finally able to begin work with the physical collection, I quickly discovered that the scrapbooks indeed contain a high volume of materials relating to the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Specifically, the scrapbooks identified as HM 76506, HM 76508, and HM 76509 contained numerous newspaper articles that discuss Sanford B. Dole, Queen Lili’uokalani, the 1893 overthrow, and events related to this time period. The articles were written in English and appeared to originate from either English-language Hawaiian newspapers or American newspapers such as the New York Daily Tribute, the Advertiser, and the Times Herald (Dole Family Papers). Taken as a body of work, the newspaper articles very clearly express support of U.S. imperialism, the American citizens who overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai’i, the annexation of Hawai’i by the United States, and Sanford B. Dole.

Performing research on the Dole Family Papers was a trying experience, not simply because of the high volume of material and time constraints, but because of the emotionally challenging material contained within the collection. As I sorted through newspaper articles whose authors overwhelmingly favored colonization and an end to Hawaiian sovereignty, I recalled the following statement made by Queen Lili’uokalani in Hawai’i’s Story by Hawai’i’s Queen: It is not merely that, with few exceptions, the press has seemed to favor the extinction of Hawaiian sovereignty, but that it has often treated me with coarse allusions and flippancy, and almost uniformly has commented upon me adversely, or has declined to publish letters from myself and friends conveying correct information upon matters which other correspondents had, either willfully or through being deceived, misrepresented.

(Lili’uokalani, 1990, p. 370)

It was as if I was watching the American press silence and otherwise fail to acknowledge Indigenous counter-narratives regarding the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i and later, the issue of annexation to the United States of America, in real time.

I located only two articles in the collection that included statements from Queen Lili’uokalani and her supporters. One was an article from an unidentified newspaper from San Francisco, January 28 which included both a statement from Queen Lili’uokalani appealing to the United States government to reverse the actions of minister John L. Stevens and reinstate her authority and a statement from Minister John L. Stevens recognizing the provisional government in Hawai’i. The other article was from the Hawaiian Gazette, dated January 17, 1893 and included both a brief statement on individuals newly appointed to the Queen’s cabinet and a statement on the possibility of a new constitution: The position taken by Her Majesty in regard to the promulgation of a new Constitution, was under the stress of Her native subjects. Authority is given for the assurance that any changes desired in the fundamental law of the land will be sought only by methods provided in the Constitution itself. (Dole Family Papers, HM 76506).

Finally, I discovered one additional article that featured an Indigenous perspective on political events, but from well after the 1893 overthrow. This article was titled “Home Rulers show their Feeling Towards Dole,” and a handwritten note identified it as having been printed in the Advertiser on March 12, 1902. This article was a reprint of another article from the Kuakoa Home Rula, a Hawaiian language newspaper, which expressed dissatisfaction with Sanford B. Dole both as president of the Republic of Hawai’i and as governor of the Territory of Hawai’i (Dole Family Papers, HM 76508).

Thus, while the Dole Family Papers contains a high volume of primary source material relating to Hawaiian history, particularly to Queen Lili’uokalani, Sanford B. Dole, and the 1893 overthrow, the body of sources undoubtedly favors US settler state interests while tending to suppress indigenous opposition and counter narratives.

Nevertheless, if re-framed, these documents could serve to evidence a historic process of colonization, social and physical violence, and political repression. Linking archival resources from the Dole Family Papers to other archival resources, such as Hawaiian language newspapers, could help contextualize the events discussed

within, providing the basis for a digital archive that would represent a key moment in Hawaiian history and make it accessible to a broader audience. However, as it stands now, the framing of the Dole Family Papers within an exclusive scholarly institution accessible to only well-established scholars, and the utilization of a finding aid that openly hides certain materials and obscures the presence of subjects within the collection, constitutes a disservice to the communities who were and continue to be negatively impacted by historic events described within the collection.

Existing Digital Resources At present, there exists a rich variety of digital databases and educational resources oriented toward Hawaiian history, culture, and language. These digital resources serve Kanaka Maoli communities through a variety of manners, whether it be by furthering language revitalization, providing access to digitized archival sources, or supporting education in our history and culture. However, while these digital resources accomplish a great deal, there is no one source specifically devoted to conveying the history of the 1893 overthrow and related processes of colonization in Hawai’i—this is the gap that could be filled by a digital archive that links sources from the Dole Family Papers with other sources related to this history. In the following section, I conduct a review of a selection of digital resources relating to Hawaiian history, language, and culture in order to inform my recommendations for the creation of a digital archive utilizing the Dole Family Papers and to identify what this digital archive could contribute to the existing body of digital resources.

Specifically, I discuss the Bishop Museum’s Hawai’i Alive website, the Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ Papakilo Database.

The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum is the largest museum in Hawai’i and its mission is to “[Inspire] our community and visitors through the exploration and celebration of the extraordinary history, culture, and environment of Hawai’i and the Pacific” (bishopmuseum.org, 2019). To this end, the Bishop Museum’s Hawai’i Alive website serves as an educational resource for teaching not just about Hawaiian history and culture, but for allowing Hawaiian history and culture to inform

the process of teaching. Visitors to this exhibit-like digital collection may explore materials via three different means: Topics in Hawaiian history, Hawai’i State Educational Standards, or three different Realms. The latter method for navigating and learning from the site is organized according to indigenous ways of knowing and includes the subsections “Wao Lani – Realm of Gods,” “Wao Kanaka – Realm of Man,” and “Kai Akea – Ocean Realm” with contextualizing information for each realm that discusses its significance and meaning in indigenous lifeways (hawaiialive.org, 2019). The other two sections, Topics and Standards, are organized according to Hawai’i state educational standards and not indigenous ways of knowing.

However, additional resources provided on the website encourage school teachers to incorporate Indigenous approaches to education into their lesson planning, citing as justification the Ka Huaka’i 2005 Native Hawaiian Educational Assessment showing significant gains by Native Hawaiian students when culture-based teaching practices were employed (hawaiialive.org, 2018). Thus, not only does Hawai’i Alive serve as an educational resource for teaching and learning about Hawaiian history, but it puts Hawaiian culture and ways of knowing into practice. Further, it does so through use of primary sources held in the Bishop Museum’s collections, allowing an opportunity for increased access and engagement by Kanaka Maoli individuals and communities with sources related to their cultural heritage and history. However, Hawai’i Alive is primarily oriented toward K-12 students and teachers and the teaching of Hawai’i state educational standards and thus may be of less use to Hawaiians of varying age groups and education levels.

Additionally, it draws specifically from the Bishop Museum’s collections, and there may be useful sources for teaching and learning Hawaiian history elsewhere that could be beneficially linked to in a digital resource.

The Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library is a digital library containing Hawaiian language print materials. Its purpose is “to make these resources available for the use, teaching, and revitalization of the Hawaiian language and for a broader and deeper understanding of Hawai’i” (ulukau.org, 2019). To this end, Ulukau centers Hawaiian language within its design and makes accessible a broad variety of Hawaiian language printed materials that both support the development of Hawaiian language skills and that allow site visitors to engage with the

indigenous perspectives presented within.

The central importance of the Hawaiian language for the site is immediately apparent when one navigates to the home page, where they are first greeted with the Hawaiian language version of the site, and then offered the opportunity to view the English text version of the site. From the home page, site visitors may access Hawaiian language texts by either entering key terms into a search bar or by opening a menu to view a variety of different sections, including dictionaries, books, newspapers, genealogy, Hawaiian place names, and the Hawaiian Bible (ulukau.org, 2019). Thus, the website offers a broad variety of resources that allow Hawaiian language learners to not only develop their skills, but to engage with materials that may foster a deeper understanding of Hawaiian history and culture.

With regards to the newspaper subsection, the Hawaiian Nūpepa Collection of Hawaiian-language newspapers offers opportunities to engage with Hawaiian history and contemporary indigenous perspectives on historical events.

The Nūpepa Collection contains numerous newspaper issues originally published across a broad temporal range, from 1834 to 1948, and digitized as image files available for viewing or download, with the occasional inclusion of text files (nupepa.org, 2019).

While this digitized collection offers an excellent opportunity to learn from Hawaiian-language sources documenting Hawaiian history and indigenous perspectives on our history, language barriers nevertheless present a troubling barrier. Though the website itself is available in English translation, the newspapers are not, which makes access of the materials themselves difficult for those who do not speak Hawaiian, but nevertheless wish to learn more about our history from indigenous perspectives.

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) is a semi-autonomous department of the state of Hawai’i that focuses on “strategic priorities for improving the conditions of Native Hawaiians in the areas of ‘āina, culture, economic self-sufficiency, education, governance, and health” (oha.org, 2018). The Papakilo Database is one means by which OHA fulfills this mandate to improve Native Hawaiian conditions by enabling the preservation and perpetuation of our culture and history. In terms of execution, the Papakilo Database is very similar to the Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library in that it serves as a nexus for providing access to a variety of digital collections and resources. However,

the Papakilo Database is not explicitly oriented toward language revitalization, instead focusing specifically on providing access to digital records and sources within the databases it contains and links to. Databases available for searching through Papakilo include but are not limited to genealogy indexes, historic sites, maps, multi-media records, Hawaiian place names, and Hawaiian newspapers, with reference to even further future additions (papakilodatabase.com, 2019).

Like the Ulukau’s Nūpepa Collection, the Papakilo Database’s collection of Hawaiian newspapers offers an interesting opportunity not only to reconnect with sources relating to Hawaiian history, but to study our history from indigenous perspectives through Hawaiianlanguage materials. The Papakilo Database provides access to a sizeable collection of historic Hawaiian Newspapers through collaborations with other organizations including the Bishop Museum and Ulukau, allowing for the provision of access to 11,934 issues comprising 58,612 pages and 379,918 articles from multiple repositories in one location (“About This Collection,” papakilodatabase.com, 2018).

This collaboration allows for an even further level of access and engagement with historic sources and indigenous perspectives on historic events.

However, while the publications in this collection are not exclusively Hawaiian-language, the majority are, and the issue of language barriers arises again between an Indigenous population that primarily speaks English and a collection of materials written in our ancestral language.

The Hawai’i Alive website, Ulukau Hawaiian Electronic Library, and Papakilo Database all fulfill their stated purposes very well and serve Kanaka Maoli communities by creating opportunities to (re)connect with our history, culture, and language regardless of where we reside. Hawai’i Alive provides an educational resource for teaching and learning about Hawaiian history that also encourages informing educational practices with Kanaka Maoli worldviews.

Both Ulukau and Papakilo allow for increased access of a wide variety of sources, while Ulukau additionally supports Hawaiian language revitalization. However, in the case of Ulukau’s and Papakilo’s newspaper collections, language barriers make engaging and reconnecting with sources written in Hawaiian difficult for Kānaka Maoli who speak only English or who are just beginning their studies of the Hawaiian language. While Hawai’i Alive provides

strong context and framing for sources, drawing only from Bishop Museum collections creates a smaller collection of digitized sources, and the site’s primary orientation toward K-12 students and teachers in the state of Hawai’i may limit its use for other individuals and communities at different age and educational levels. Finally, while all these digital resources discuss or relate in some way to historical issues of sovereignty and colonization, none of them are oriented specifically toward educating site visitors about the 1893 overthrow and related historical and ongoing processes. This is the gap that a digital archive utilizing the Dole Family Papers and linking to additional historical sources could fill, while also drawing from the digital resources discussed above as noteworthy examples.

Recommendations A digital archive utilizing the Dole Family Papers, as well as additional archival sources, would serve as an educational resource for learning about the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, as well as related historical and ongoing processes of colonization. Materials from the Dole Family Papers could serve to evidence historic injustices, while a broader collection of materials speaking to colonization and Kanaka Maoli resistance would create opportunities to speak back to colonial narratives and assert the importance of indigenous perspectives. However, as Ellen Cushman (2013) cautioned, care would have to be taken to create a decolonized digital archive rather than a digital archive that reproduces the colonial power structures already present in the physical archive. With all that has been discussed thus far in mind, I make the following recommendations for the creation of a decolonized digital archive utilizing the Dole Family Papers that would have the potential to better serve Kanaka Maoli communities: Create a digital archive of linked sources relating to the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, histories of settler colonialism in Hawai’i, and Kanaka Maoli responses and resistance to these events.

A digital archive would help make accessible archival sources relating to Hawaiian history to on- and off-island Kānaka

Maoli alike, fostering (re)connections between ourselves and our histories.

Creating a digital archive would also Having opportunities to learn about a once-independent Hawaiian nation that was subsequently overthrown and illegally occupied, empowers us to see ourselves as a sovereign people whose right to self-determination can and should be realized again. Further opportunities to learn about this history from Kanaka Maoli perspectives unsettles settler narratives that justify colonization and occupation, and places contemporary struggles to assert sovereignty within the context of an ongoing struggle for justice.

Digitize materials from the Dole Family Papers to increase accessibility and allow for the creation of links between these and other archival materials that speak to histories of settler colonialism in Hawai’i.

Digitizing materials from the Dole Family Papers and utilizing them in a digital archive would create an opportunity to evidence historical injustices committed against KÄ naka Maoli.

However, it is important to contextualize materials in order to avoid simply reproducing the narratives contained within them.

Doing so would fulfill the guideline from the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials to solicit and provide context for collections from the perspective of culturally affiliated communities (First Archivists Circle, 2007). Providing context creates the opportunity to utilize sources presenting colonial perspectives to evidence historical injustices rather than simply reproducing narratives the sources present.

Digitize additional archival materials and link to already digitized archival materials, especially sources that present Kanaka Maoli perspectives.

Taking care to include archival sources that present Kanaka Maoli perspectives would help to ensure that the digital archive would accomplish decolonizing aims rather than simply reproduce colonial narratives. Striving for balance in archival content and perspectives would fulfill the guideline from the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials to develop more comprehensive and inclusive holdings (First Archivists Circle, 2007). Emphasizing Kanaka Maoli perspectives would further

empower us to learn about and understand history from our own points of view, rather than learning to see ourselves through colonial perspectives.

Emphasize the use of Hawaiian language materials, while providing English translations when possible as a secondary option for accessing texts.

Emphasizing Hawaiian language archival materials would serve to further emphasize Kﾄ］aka Maoli perspectives on historical events and processes, and energetically underscore the point that Kﾄ］aka Maoli hold distinct identities not to be subsumed or subordinated to the United States and its own nation building project. However, providing English language translations as options that archival users could select would help make sources accessible to Kﾄ］aka Maoli who do not speak Hawaiian, or who are still developing their language skills.

Presenting such sources first in Hawaiian, and then in English, would still serve to assert the importance of Hawaiian language materials, while easing access for non-Hawaiian speaking Kﾄ］aka Maoli and offering an opportunity to test language skills for those who are learning. Indigenous community members should be invited to contribute to translation projects to allow for further (re)connection with Hawaiian language materials.

Collaborate with Kanaka Maoli community members, leaders, and scholars to identify additional priorities and concerns for the creation of a digital archive.

Collaborating with Kanaka Maoli community members, leaders, and scholars would allow for greater community input and control over the creation of a digital archive. It would allow for the identification of additional priorities and concerns and ensure that Kanaka Maoli interests are represented through-out the development process. Collaboration would ensure that Indigenous priorities for decolonizing archival materials are met and that the colonial nature of archival materials is not simply transferred into a digital space.

By implementing these recommendations, steps could be taken toward the decolonization of Hawaiian archival materials, and the creation of a digital archive that would serve the needs

of Kanaka Maoli communities by resisting the erasure of our identity as a sovereign people and speaking to the historic and ongoing injustices committed against Kānaka Maoli. This digital collection of historic materials would have significant implications in the present, empowering Kānaka Maoli to assert our identity as a distinct group of Indigenous people with the right to selfdetermination.

Further, the undertaking of this project to decolonize archival materials would serve to support broader assertions as to the importance of decolonizing archives, underscoring the applicability of decolonizing methods across contexts while demonstrating the importance of attending to the specificities of distinct indigenous identities and community needs. Continuing to advocate for and utilize methods for decolonizing archives will serve to destabilize the colonial power structures present in archival collections, allowing for new possibilities and visions of the future based on indigenous ways of knowing and understanding the past.

Conclusion The purpose of this article has been to discuss research conducted with the Dole Family Papers at the Huntington Library and argue that the Papers’ positioning within an elite institution with a restrictive approach to access vitiates their capacity to evidence injustice and speak to historic and ongoing issues of colonization that Kānaka Maoli face. Drawing on the works of archival professionals and Kanaka Maoli scholars alike, I have made recommendations for how the Papers could be utilized to contribute to a digital archive of linked resources that would support decolonizing aims and better serve the needs of Kanaka Maoli communities. If fully realized, such a digital archive could evidence United States imperialism and its effects on Kānaka Maoli, demonstrate Indigenous resistance and survival, and disrupt hegemonic narratives of Hawaiian history that support settler futurity in Hawai’i. Moreover, the creation of such an archive could have important implications in the present, empowering Kānaka Maoli to assert our identity as a distinct group of indigenous people with the right to self-determination and demonstrating the vital importance of decolonizing archives for (re)connecting with indigenous histories and identities.

Through conducting research for and writing this article, I have

come to more fully understand my own identity as Kanaka Maoli for the first time. Our histories are not simply static words printed on dead plant matter, but methods for both denying and empowering our identities, contested narratives and ever developing processes, the contexts that inform our present and shape our futures. Asserting the importance of our history, and our perspectives within that history, is to assert the importance of ourselves in the present and to play an active role in shaping our future.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Professor Gilliland, Gracen Brilmyer, and Maria Montenegro for their support, feedback, and guidance in developing this article. I owe thanks also to my partner for his steadfast support, and to everyone who took the time to read my work and offer much-needed feedback. Finally, I owe thanks to my cousins Noah Keola Ryan, Shalee Kekawa, and to other family members for taking the time to talk story and help guide me in developing a deeper appreciation for our history.

References Apology Resolution of 1993, Pub. L. No. 103-150, 107 Stat. 1510 (1993).

Application for Reading Privileges. The Huntington. Retrieved from https://aeon.huntington.org/aeon.dll?

Action=10&Form=79 Black, B. (2011). Dole Family Papers: Finding Aid. Bishop Museum. (2018). About us. Retrieved from Bishopmuseum.org Chang, D. (2016). The world and all the things upon it: Native Hawaiian geographies of exploration. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cushman, E. (2013). Wampum, Sequoyan, and story: Decolonizing the digital archive. College English, 76(2), 115–135.

Dole Family Papers. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

First Archivists Circle. (2007). Protocols for Native American archival materials. Retrieved from http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html Franklin, C., & Lyons, L. (2004). Remixing hybridity: Globalization, Native resistance, and cultural production in Hawai'i. American Studies, 45(3), 49–80.

Hall, L. K. (2005). “Hawaiian at Heart” and other fictions. The Contemporary Pacific, 404–413.

Hawai’i Alive. (2018). Retrieved from Hawaiialive.org Kauanui, J. K. (2007). Diasporic deracination and “Off-Island” Hawaiians. The Contemporary Pacific, 19(1), 138-160.

McKemmish, S., Faulkhead, S., & Russell, L. (2011). Distrust in the archive: Reconciling records. Archival Science, 11(3–4), 211–239.

Nūpepa. (2019). Retrieved from Nupepa.org Office of Hawaiian Affairs. (2019). What we do. Retrieved from Oha.org O’Neal, J. (2015). “The right to know”: Decolonizing Native American archives. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1), Article 2. Retrieved from

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol6/iss1/ 2 Pearce-Moses, R. (2005). A glossary of archival and records terminology. Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists.

Queen Lili’uokalani. (1898). Hawai’i’s Story by Hawai’i’s Queen.

Boston, MA: Lee and Shepherd.

Sai, D. K. (2008). The American occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom: Beginning the transition from occupied to restored state (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).

University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London, England: Zed Books.

Society of American Archivists. (2018). SAA Council Endorsement of Protocols for Native American Archival Materials.

Retrieved from https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-councilendorsement-of-protocols-for-native-american-archivalmaterials Ulukau Electronic Library. (2018). About Ulukau. Retrieved from Ulukau.org

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Cheryl Sim's Un jour, Un jour: Imagining potential futures in the fragmented archives of Expo67

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p4392f7

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Ciccone, Patricia

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

In the summer of 2017, the city of Montréal was transformed into a living archive: all the public spaces were filled with posters, billboards and photographic displays using archival records to advertise various events related to the 50 th anniversary of the Montreal’s World Fair of 67, also known as Expo67. The Fair had quite an impact on the city starting from the mid-60s: in the years prior, the province of Quebec, where Montreal is located, had just left a socio-political era called “La Grande Noirceur” (The Great Darkness), an era marked by religious and social conservatism as well as cultural void, so the years leading to the Expo felt like a new sort of excitement, a becoming-modern of a city that had just left the yoke of its patriarchal father.

From 1962, the year the Expo was announced, to the actual event in 1967, the city was able to transformed itself at an unprecedented pace and many saw this as an opportunity for Montreal to finally synchronize to the rhythms of modernity1 that most of the surrounding urban centers had already been enjoying for a few decades. In 1967, the Expo, with its 38 national pavilions, 7 provincial pavilions and 24 sponsored pavilions, attracted more than 50 million paid admissions (The Canadian Encyclopedia). These numbers had a quite significant impact on the economic and the cultural standing of the burgeoning city.

But at the same time, Montreal has always been a contested territory on many levels: it sits on traditional and unceded Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) territory, is part of the (Francophone) province of Québec which has the contentious history of wanting to claim its independence from (Anglophone) Canada, while also being considered one of Canada’s most urban and important economic center. These tensions, coupled with the always-already problematic colonial histories of World Fairs (Richman, 2010) are not, however, part of the dominant, national narrative that surround the mystic of the Expo.

1 I use the term modernity as the ensemble of particular socio-cultural

norms, attitudes and practices that are understood to bring a society from traditional to modern. This term is often associated with theories of globalization, and while its use is highly debated amongst scholars, I believe that it useful to convey the story that “modern” World’s Fairs aspire to tell.

Figure 1. Subway ad for Rêver le monde (Dreaming the World), the summer exhibit at Musée Stewart, Montréal’s history museum. The image depicts three significant structures that were constructed for the Expo: Habitat 67 (a state-of-the-art apartment building in Montréal’s Old-Port), the biosphere (the American pavilion), and a Calder sculpture entitled “Terre des Hommes,” along with an image of the moon landing. Inserted into the figure of a human, this poster, designed in 2017, is a throwback to the visual imaginary of the Fair. © Musée Stewart Museum, 2017.

The celebratory archival images on display all over city in the summer of 2017, then, were meant to throw us right back into a certain apolitical idealization of the 1960s: groovy typographies, retro images, eye-catching historical representation of buildings and bold colors.

A mixture of technological and architectural awe, along with a festive strand of nostalgia united all these billboards together and proposed a very self-serving look at what the Expo67 still means to Montreal today. Indeed, the success of the Expo was quickly associated to a certain idealization of a united and solid Canadian nation, or rather, it became the idealized site where the nation could enact the imaginary process of becoming a homogenous and harmonious monocultural community. Because of all the socio-

political complexities underlying the Fair, many stories simply had to be forgotten to transform Expo67 into this straightforward dominant narrative about national social harmony and economic excellence.

Figure 2. Promotional image for A la Recherche d’Expo67, Montréal contemporary art museum’s summer exhibit, taken in June 2017 in downtown Montréal.

But this seemingly unified nostalgic aesthetic was disturbed by one particular image: that of a young woman of color, wearing the official “hostess” outfit of the Expo, and standing in front of the Biosphere (the American Pavilion, one of the last remaining buildings from the Expo67), looking down.

Offering a more intimate look into the Expo, the image greatly contrasted with the large-scale, impersonal photographs that were spread out across the city (Figure 2).

Upon investigation, I discovered that this particular image, a still taken from Cheryl Sim’s 2017 video installation Un jour, un jour (One day, one day), was the promotional poster for “A la Recherche d’Expo67 (In Search of Expo67),” a contemporary art exhibit at Montréal’s public contemporary art museum, curated

by Expo67 scholar Monika Kin Gagnon. The museum, itself

located in downtown Montreal, on Place des Arts (Plaza of the Arts), used this poster to promote the exhibit all around the city, allowing Cheryl Sim’s imagined contemporary image to circulate alongside the rest of the historical images. Thinking about my own reaction to seeing the image for the first time, I could not stop to wonder what it was about this particular image that made it so arresting? Why did it strike me as so different from the rest of the commemorative imagery across the city? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by looking at one artist’s response to the problem of (under)representation in the archival legacy of Expo67 as well as her quest to imagine alternative forms of national belonging.

The rest of this paper, then, focuses the archival imaginaries put forward by artists participating in the exhibit but most specifically on Cheryl Sim’s video installation Un jour, un jour (One day, one day). Not only did the work of the artist caught my attention as I was biking around the city, but her work gives voice to a community that has historically been largely erased from the legacy of the Expo: the immigrants, more specifically the Sino-Filipino immigrants. In this particular piece, the artist also highlights the value that affect has on remembrance.

In Un jour, un jour, Sim rediscovers and reassembles her family’s photo album in a multi-screen video work that imitates the multi-screens and immersive environments often associated with the Expo. The artwork represents the distinctive medial disorder prominent in the Expo’s archives by offering counter narratives: a video installation in search of its story and still-images seeking for their lost voices.

In order to provide a critical reading of this artwork, I apply Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s (2016) framework of the archival imaginary and of the impossible archival imaginary, as articulated in their article, “Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined.”

Imaginary, in this case, is presented as a productive force in the sense that the processes of imagination do not solely serve to represent absences as much as they participate actively in articulating these absences and holding responsible the institutional power that help to create them (Gilliland & Caswell, 2016). Sim uses the imaginary to actively remake the social through an imagined archival narrative. In such a way, the

imaginary in her work becomes the structure of what is possible and the impossible archive represents the voices that are missing. Impossible archival imaginaries, Gilliland and Caswell argue, “are archivally impossible in the sense that they will never result in actualized records in any traditional sense, although they may exist in some kind of co-constitutive relationship with actualized records” (p. 61). These imaginaries can “provide a trajectory to the future out of a particular perspective on the past and may build upon either actual or imagined documentation and narratives” (p. 61). Sim’s work is particularly well-suited to talk about impossible archival imaginaries, as her futuristic alterego digs into an old photo album in order to reestablish her family’s modest history within the larger legacy of the Expo by presenting their story as a time-travelling one. Throughout the rest of this article, I argue that the records, imagined and actual, chosen by Cheryl Sim for her video, “offer important affective counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize” (p. 61).

Ephemerality in the Archives: Jennifer VanderBurgh (2014) is right when she says that ephemerality is often a question of value: “that which is valued tend to be saved2 while everything else is left to entropy, deterioration and other forms of degradation and loss” (p. 210).

Monika Kin Gagnon, the lead researcher and co-curator of A la Recherche d’Expo exhibit at the Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC) knows this all too well. For more than a decade, she has been fighting against both physical decay and institutional resistance to preserve the memory of her late father, Charles Gagnon, a filmmaker whose immersive film The Eighth Day, caused major drama when it premiered at the Christian Pavilion during the Expo. The multimedia production amazed fans of new 2 The evaluation of archival materials (appraisal) still remains a widely disputed area in the field of archival studies: it varies between understanding archivists as simple custodians of information to seeing them as active decision makers that shape local, national and global histories.

technological thrills but its positioning of religion as the cause of most wars and human suffering shocked many observers who contested the pavilion and its depiction of religion (Gagnon, 2010, p. 145). The filmic material was later left to decay in the archives from which Monika Kin Gagnon was only able to partially reconstitute its narrative using the various fragments that she was able to find in diverse repositories across the country (p. 145).

It is with that in mind that Gagnon decided to get involved with the MAC’s exhibit curator Lesley Johnston to collectively reimagine and offer new perspectives on the legacy of the Expo67 by using its fragmented and scattered archive in a similar fashion. The summer-long exhibit (from June 21, 2017 to October 1, 2017, roughly covering the original calendar of the Expo) presented the work of 19 Canadian artists and offered a rather diversified and inclusive series of voices, from local and pan-national artists, as well as artworks in four different languages. Out of these nineteen artists, sixteen proposed new artworks and while there was no official theme for the exhibit, most of these 16 artists engaged critically with archival records, highlighting losses and absences while simultaneously celebrating the creative legacy of the fair.

In an interview between Gagnon and Lesley Johnston (2018), the co-curator of the exhibit, they mentioned how “the fragmented archives” that surround the historical legacy of the Expo was both a source of inspiration and of disorientation for the artists.

The co-curators used the term “fragmented archives” to describe not only the set of complex rules that govern archival access and use, but also to express the multiplicity of archival sites that constitute the Canadian archival system, where artists and users alike can find themselves confronted by continually incomplete narratives. And while the theme of the “archives” was not imposed, many artists directly took on those archival tensions between the dominant discourses and ideologies that surround the national imaginary of the Expo and the more localized and personal experiences that had often been ignored by these dominant historical investigations.

While this paper devotes most of its focus to Cheryl Sim’s video, I will begin this article by highlighting some of the other contributions to the exhibit in order to demonstrate what sort of archival research and use was performed by some of the other

artists. Art practices centering around archival records are often historicized by looking at the archival turn in visual arts that happened during the 1960s. Previously understood to be a documentation of an artist’ work, as something external to the creative process, archival records slowly became part of the material or conceptual components of artwork (Benichou, 2009).

This brief overview proposes to look at the multitude of ways artists engage with, question and critique archival records and archival institutions. I argue that such undertakings can help develop a critical view of national memory while simultaneously inciting action.

A la Recherche d’Expo67 As Jerome Delgado (2017) confirmed in the daily French newspaper Le Devoir, one of the most talked about work during the A la recherche d’Expo67 exhibit was the restoration of La Vie Polaire (Polar Life) and its concurrent three-screen reconstitution.

Directed by Graeme Ferguson, who is attributed with being one of the co-inventors of IMAX technology, the original film made use of the spatial complexity of an early IMAX prototype and was screened in a room with a rotating sitting area, where spectators could lounge and find themselves immersed in the eleven screens on which the film was simultaneously projected (Les Archives de Montreal, 2014). Telling the story of a group of urban ethnographers going into the northern communities across the world (most of the film focuses on Canada’s indigenous communities, but the filmmakers also go to Lapland, Siberia and Alaska), the film uncritically embodied the colonial and imperial discourses implicit to the larger theme of the Expo (and of World’s Fairs in general).

Often mediated through modern technologies, these stories of foreign and/or distant land were fundamental to the imagined globalism implicit to World’s Fair.

This time, however, the restoration of the film does not have the same technical complexity: exhibited in the basement screening room, this three screens projection of La Vie Polaire showcases how difficult it is to restore old films, and that is if they are preserved and catalogued properly. After finding the unidentified eleven interpositive reels of the original film, Stephanie Cote, an archivist for the Cinémathèque, wasn’t even certain that the necessary tools to salvage the reels even existed

(Lemay, 2014). And even with a quadripartite collaboration between the Cinémathèque Québecoise, the National Film Board of Canada, the CINEMAexpo67 research group and the city of Montréal, the project encountered many financial troubles and was almost left incomplete. This straightforward success story (lost, found, and restored) surrounding the restoration of La Vie Polaire plays out as a sort of archival fairy tale: overcoming the difficult limits of archival labor and coming into the world into its own, but not without exemplifying, at the most basic level, the complex relationship between archival institutions, archival practices, money and technology.

Also present in the exhibit was David K. Ross’ beautiful homage to affective memories of the Expo, “Souveraine comme l’amour” (Sovereign Like Love). This piece plays into a very different emotional register than does the restoration of La Vie Polaire. Ross, an artist and an architect, worked with the architectural record of the Expo67 site, found at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, to map out the trajectory of the monorail, the popular and futuristic mode of mass transportation during the Expo, to recreate its route using a drone camera. The emblematic itinerary is now empty, and Ross’ piece juxtaposes archival memories with physical absence.

But the monorail was not simply a straightforward way to get from one section of the fair to another: the route offered many vantage points, picture-ready curves and turns.

However, after not finding any personal photos of these “points of interests” in the architectural records he looked at, Ross explained, in an interview with co-curator Monika Kin Gagnon for Concordia University’s “Thinking Out Loud” podcast (2017), that he chose drone vision to anchor his project in the contemporary and to give a view onto the site through a technology that has as much commercial appeal as Super8 (the commercial technology of choice on the site of the Expo in 1967) did back then. If 50 years later, the equivalence between the archival records (maps, drawings, and scale models) and the site is no more, Ross’ work seeks to recreate the now-empty affective trajectory that more than a million visitors used during the original Expo. David K. Ross’ critical and medial conception of urban memory and site-specific history proposes a resistance to a contemporary urbanization model that is amnesiac while resisting the urge to stay frozen into an understanding of the

urban space only through heritage (Benichou, 2009, p. 119).

Ross’ high-tech images engender the possibility of new records that “exist in some kind of co-constitutive relationship with actualized records” (Gilliland & Caswell, 2016, p. 61). Using the archive as a site that allows new knowledges to be generated, Ross’ piece conveys that archival imaginaries have the potential to create new and concrete affective realities.

The final piece I will discuss in this brief thematic introduction is Duane Linklater’s “Earth Mother Hair, Indian Hair, and Earth Mother Eyes, Indian Eyes, Animal Eyes.”

A reproduction of indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau’s Earth Mother and her Children, a wood panel painting exploring “Anishinaabe’s world view and a biocentrist solution for caring for our world” that was meant to be displayed on the exterior of the Indians of Canada Pavilion (Robertson, 2016, p. 80). On the online portal for Canadian Art, a magazine celebrating Canadian artists, Linklater’s piece is described as examining the “institutionalization and historicization of indigenous bodies and artworks in the archives” (Canadian Art). The wood painting was originally massively censored, leaving Morrisseau disillusioned by the whole project of the Expo. Using records found at the archives of the gallery that represented Morrisseau, Linklater was able to (re)produce the original uncensored artwork. The project, then, becomes one that addresses “cultural loss and recovery as well as authenticity, appropriation and authorship.”

This constant struggle, this uneven fight between the Indigenous populations and institutional power in Canada, Linklater reminds us, is still experienced, witnessed and imposed today (Canadian Art).

His project echoes Caswell and Gilliland’s critique of Duranti’s conception of the record as being only the by-products of “legal, administrative and historical constructions of evidence” (Gilliland & Caswell, 2016, p. 71) and, additionally, proposes to look at how the incorporation of records by or about Indigenous people into the national settler archival repositories (Ghaddard, 2016, p. 23) has been crucial for the constitution of a settler historical archival memory (at the expense of an Indigenous one), which transforms Canadian national shame and guilt into national glory and honor. In this particular case, it seems, Linklater’s calls on the imaginary, “to instantiate the possibility of a justice that has not yet arrived” (Gilliland & Caswell, 2016, p.

65).

A la recherche d’Expo67 proposes a critical reading of the fleeting, obsolete, or forgotten nature of our interactions with archival records, at times highlighting the economic obstacles, at other times, using documented institutional obstructions to propose criticisms. In a series of interviews conducted for Concordia’s podcast “Thinking Out Loud,” Gagnon (2017b) explained how important it was for her to not give too much instruction as to what and how artists could contribute while simultaneously helping them frame their contributions around the theme of the Expo. Her goal was to help the artists get involved with the “fragmented archives” of the Expo, and to let these encounters with archival records be the start of their creative fire. If these three pieces, by retracing known histories, serve to exemplify the tendency of archival institutions to erase and exclude certain types of records and communities from their collections, Sim’s negotiations of these archival omissions are offering an even deeper critique of memory and archival institutions. Questioning the lack of productive space left in the archives for personal, ephemeral and affective records amidst the larger imaginary of the Fair, the artist proposes a very intimate counter-narrative that combines these absences with imagination to propose new visions for the future.

Un jour, un jour If most of the public programs seen around the city kept the records in the realm of a nostalgic historical past, Sim’s work confronts the institutional history that have kept the memories of her community, and many like hers, out of the official story of the Expo, by putting affect and personal narratives at the forefront of her work. But her piece does even more. Not only does it highlight the contradictions imminent in the worldbuilding discourse of the Expo (world building for whom? Who is able to participate in such a project? Who gets to speak?), it also uses the archives as a potential site of transgression, where imaginary, affect and subversive power can transform the future.

Marika Cifor argues in “Affecting Relations: Introducing Affect Theory to Archival Discourse” (2016) that “recognizing and positioning affective value as an appraisal criterion calls on archivists and scholars to carefully consider the affect of records themselves in relation to their creators, subjects, users, larger

communities and systems of power” (p. 14). Once affective relations are recognized as core elements of how “we form, sustain and break social relations, differences and individual and collective identities” (p. 8) then maybe archives can participate in their valuations. Sim’s work, I argue, performs evaluative work of its chosen and imagined archival material and insists that they be recognized as valuable additions to a potentially more inclusive and complete national collection.

Figure 3. Image of the display of “Un Jour, un jour” at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal. © CINEMAexpo67, 2017.

Cheryl Sim’s piece was not only the piece that welcomed every museum visitor into the exhibit, it was also the one that served as an invitation to the event itself. On display all over the city in the summer of 2017, the image of the artist, who plays her own alter-ego in the piece, disturbed the dominant narrative that the other billboards promoting the Expo’s 50 th anniversary all seemed geared toward. The ambiguous temporality of the image, when put alongside a series of historical images all over the city, played in Sim’s favor. In a personal conversation I had with the artist (2018), Sim mentioned how she and Gagnon had many discussions about the implication of choosing her

racialized image as the main promotional image for the event, but ultimately decided that this type of strategic representation was what the exhibit, and Sim’s work, was truly about.

Questioning who gets to participate in the celebration of Montreal’s history, of Montreal’s modernity, of Montreal’s nationbuilding, Sim’s work thinks through archival legacy, collective memory, and national belonging.

The piece is a technically simple three-screen video installation, displayed on a hexagonal bench. The images on each screen, sometimes in synch, sometimes out of synch, alternate between waves, photos from a family scrapbook and images of the artist dressed in an Expo hostess outfit, posing in front of the remaining structure on the Expo island.

The narrative is also simple: Sim’s alter ego discovers an old scrapbook on the grounds of the Fair, featuring pictures of her parents’ visit to the Expo during their honeymoon, thus allowing her to discover a whole new, previously unknown and alternate Expo history. The artist’s Sino-Filipino’s heritage is put at the forefront of the video with visual cues constantly reminding the viewer of the artist’s and her parents’ racialized bodies. While these images are not contrasted with anything within the artwork itself (Cheryl and her parents are the only individuals appearing in the video), the decision to use a still from the video as the promotional material for the whole exhibit articulates a desire to insert the brown body of the artist within the overtly Whitedominant imaginary of the Fair. The video work is situated in the first room of the exhibit and if a visitor chooses to do so, they can sit on the bench, and listen to an electropop cover of the Expo67 theme song performed by the artist synchronized to the video.

Archival Imaginaries: Michelle Caswell (2014) defines the archival imaginary: . . . the dynamic way in which communities creatively and collectively re-envision the future through archival interventions in representations of the shared past. Through the archival imaginary, the past becomes a lens to the future; the future is rooted in that which preceded it.

Through the archival

imaginary, the future can be conceived through kernels of what was possible in the past. (p. 49)

Sim echoed that feeling in a conversation we had around her piece in Montréal in January of 2018. For the artist, mixing past and future was not only meant to present a contemporary narrative for women of color, but to imply a critique of the linear and dominant narratives of the archives.

By adding new temporal layers to the archives, through her temporallyambiguous alter ego interaction with the past aside concomitant images of her parents at the Fair, Sim not only complicates the viewers' relationship to their own social memory but also highlights the limits of archival institutions.

By recasting historical events using both “real” and “imagined” images, Sims forces the viewer to wonder if the protagonist of the video was truly a part of the historical event and therefore deserves to be represented as part of the 50 th anniversary festivities.

By juxtaposing this imaginary cultural icon (part hostess, part immigrant) with the imaginary of a culturally constructed narrative (that of the city-state), Sim’s project plays with this double-entendre of memory-making as fiction-making, but also as an aspirational form of future-making. The video, then, becomes a sort of fantastical work in which the artist randomly finds images reflecting herself and her community. Cheryl Sim’s work is situated at the crossroad of these two realities: her work repositions immigrant narratives within Montreal’s history of progress. It draws upon seemingly forgotten historical records and creates new ones, in order to recreate event that probably did occur but were never preserved as part of the larger nation’s history.

As I hope to have convinced the reader by now, both World’s Fairs and archival records are often associated with a dominant viewpoint and with the reinforcing of that viewpoint to a structural and ideological narrative. During our interview, Sim mentioned how aware she has been of the way these ideologies surrounding “official” narratives (either archival or historical) affect those who are excluded from them. In 2018, Sim told me how her father’s own archival impulse was to juxtapose their personal honeymoon photos with “actual postcards from the pavilions they visited,” as if their personal memories, their personal visual archives, were not legitimate enough to validate

their experience at the Fair. For Sim, it is precisely the photos of her parents that got her interested in the Expo itself, rather than the publically preserved visual records of the Fair; it was the private, familial records in the form of photographs that pushed Sim to create this character. Her artwork would therefore show her father that they, in fact, had been part of the official history all along, and that no one would contest the veracity of their images if she could reaffirm that her racialized body could be considered part of the Expo history. Through Sim’s work, then, Gilliland and Caswell’s (2016) critique of Duranti’s conception of the record as being only “the by-products, essence or other forms of documentation of actions or acts that are evaluated, valued and employed according to legal, administrative and historical constructions of evidence (i.e., they are probative, dispositive, narrative or supporting with regard to an action or act)” becomes powerful and key. In Un jour, un jour, the “evidence” is located in her family’s personal memories of their visit to the Fair and in the frailty she saw in her father’s methodological crafting of these memories.

Representational Belonging: In “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” authors Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario Ramirez (2016) establish a clear theoretical framework “for understanding several levels through which representational belonging operates in community archives” (p. 32). Representational belonging “denotes the ways in which community archives can empower people who have been marginalized by mainstream media and memory institutions to have the autonomy and authority to establish, enact, and reflect on their presence in ways that are complex, meaningful, substantive, and positive to them in a variety of symbolic contexts” (Caswell et al., 2018, p. 76). For the authors, “three levels of impact—epistemological, ontological, and social —together undergird our conception of representational belonging.” (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 32). They go on to clearly explain how these three levels function within the archives: On an epistemological level, community archives provide empirical evidence for a community to assert its existence in the

past. Epistemology, or the theory of how we know what we know, aptly describes the ways in which community archives enable communities to establish their histories through material artifacts. By collecting materials that document the previously unknown history of a community, community archives assert we were here. This epistemological impact also has an ontological effect. Ontology, or the study of the nature of being, examines how people exist in the world.

On an ontological level, community archives affirm I am here. They reflect and assert identities in the present, allowing individuals “to suddenly see themselves existing” in ways they could not and did not previously. This epistemological and ontological impact, in turn, has a social impact. On a social level, community archives assert you belong here to members of the communities they serve.

At the social level, our research showed how one community archives enabled both academics and their students to feel a sense of belonging and inclusion with each other through interaction with the archives. (p. 32)

While their research centers around a very particular type of archives, community archives, this framework applies perfectly to Sim’s story. For Sim, the ontological nature of the existence of her personal records allowed her to question the social narratives promoted by established archival institutions.

When not finding anything that could testify to her and her family’s history in the “fragmented” archives, she decided to create her own narrative using what she knew to be true about the Expo: it is the place her parents went to start their new life together.

Sim told me that when someone inherits a memory, like the photo album she received from her parents, it transforms and transposes that memory into a site of potentiality for the present and the future. Sim’s piece is not only about the affect she found in her family’s personal history but it also serves as an appeal for the reinterpretation of national belonging.

By inserting herself in the history of an event that continues to shape the idea of what Montreal was, is and can be, Sim asks what the absence of certain communities from this broad history means, questioning the neutrality and validity of memorymaking institutions.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I’ve argued that Sim’s piece Un jour, un jour becomes a site where archival records can be rearticulated and conceptualized in favor of those from marginalized positions, where tentatively rewritten history to include communities that lived within the proscriptive local of the governmental archival structure becomes a project of the future rather than an historicizing. By highlighting the works of some fellow artists from the exhibit, who all focus on reconstituting known histories that were inadequately preserved, I was able to emphasize how Sim’s contribution not only critiques archival institutions for their lack of commitment to different communities, but also, how it recasts these absences as sites of new potentials. As an artist, Sim performs what Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd (2009) assert as “ . . . the endeavor by individuals and social groups to document their history, particularly if that history has been generally subordinated or marginalized, is political and subversive.

These ‘recast’ histories and their making challenge and seek to undermine both the distortions and omissions of orthodox historical narratives, as well as the archive and heritage collections that sustain them” (pp. 3–4).

But she also does much more. The artist also creates a response these archival absences or archival ruins and combats oblivion by recasting her history, her family’s history as part of the official story of the Expo. She does so not only because this history is of personal interest to her, but rather, because these omissions represent the larger failure of mainstream society to correctly represent diverse cultural inputs. In Un jour, un jour, Sim creates her own flexible history to input into the larger official story of the Expo. This piece, I argue, follows what Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) suggest: “by treating records and archives as contested sites of power, we can bring new sensibilities to understanding records and archives as dynamic technologies of rule which actually create the histories and social realities they ostensibly only describe” (p. 7).

Similarly, Caswell et al. (2016) also conclude their research by taking about the dynamics of archival work and archival institutions by affirming that more than simply held for the evidential value, records also have affective value (p. 35). By doing her own uncovering work, Sim does not simply create new records but establish new rules for what is to come, and positions affective value at the forefront of that research and action. As I

argued throughout this article, Cheryl Sim works to uncover valuable photographic record that were until then not accessible to the public, while also testifying and adding important information to the larger history of the Expo, by adding records that were not seen as valuable at the time of preservation. What becomes so striking about the image, then, is that when it is put in contrast with all the other photographic records, all around the city, Sim’s face demands the pluralization of the past and challenges us to take full responsibility of our collective futures.

References Benichou, A. (2009, Spring). Les usages citoyens des espaces urbains: Entre actualités, archives et oeuvres. Archivaria, 67, 115–142.

Caswell, Michelle. (2014). Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for Identity-based Community Archives. In Identity Palimpsests: Ethnic Archiving in the U.S. and Canada (pp. 35-55). Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.

Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016, Spring/Summer).

To suddenly discover yourself existing: Uncovering the affective impact of community archives. The American Archivist, 79(1), 56–81.

Caswell, M., Gabiola, J., Zavala, J., et al. (2018). Imagining transformative spaces: the personal–political sites of community archives. Archival Science, 18(1), 73–93.

Cifor, M. (2016) Affecting relations: Introducing affect theory to archival discourse. Archival Science, 16(1), 7–31.

Delgado, J. (2018). Cinquante ans après l’Expo, de nouveaux regards. Le Devoir, June 21. Retrieved from https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/arts-visuels/501757/50ans-apres-l-expo-de-nouveaux-regards Linklater, D. (2018). Canadian Art. Retrieved from https://canadianart.ca/artists/duane-linklater/ Expo67. (2015). The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/expo-67/ Gagnon, M. K. (2010). The Christian Pavilion at Expo67: Notes from Charles Gagnon’s archive. In R. Richman & J. Sloan (Eds.), Expo67: Not Just a Souvenir (pp. 143–162). Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Gagnon, M. K. (2017a). Come fly with me. Thinking Out Loud podcast. Retrieved from https://www.concordia.ca/events/conversationseries/thinking-out-loud/expo67/come-fly-with-me.html Gagnon, M. K. (2017b). In search of Expo67. Thinking Out Loud podcast. Retrieved from https://www.concordia.ca/events/conversationseries/thinking-out-loud/expo67/in-search-of-expo-67.html

Ghaddar, J. J. (2016, Fall). The spectre in the archive: Truth, reconciliation, and indigenous archival memory. Archivaria, 82, 3–26.

Gilliland, A., & Caswell, M. (2016). Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined.

Archival Science, 16(1), 53–75.

Lambert, Maude-Emmanuelle. (2016). Expo67. In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Online. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/expo-67/ Lemay, D. (2014). La vie polaire: du Grand Nord au grand écran.

La Presse, October 10. Retrieved from http://www.lapresse.ca/cinema/nouvelles/201410/10/014808200-la-vie-polaire-du-grand-nord-au-grand-ecran.php Richman, R., & Sloan, J. (Ed.). (2010). Expo67: Not just a souvenir. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Robertson, C. (2016). Mythologizing Norval Morrisseau: Art and the colonial narrative in the Canadian media. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press.

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19. doi:10.1007/bf02435628 VanderBurgh, J. (2014). Against ephemerality: The CBS’s archival turn, 1989–96. In Z. Druick & G. Cammaer (Eds.), Cinephemera: Archives, ephemeral cinema, and new screen histories in Canada (pp. 210–231). Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Spherical Memory: Shaping Immersive Narratives From Personal Media Collections

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dh313h5

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Peters-Lazaro, Gabriel Yoshi

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

Specifications Immersive video essay rendered in 4k spherical/VR/360 video, H.264 encoded MOV file. 3.16gb. 4096x2048, 60FPS, 30mbit/s, 14:14 duration. 48Khz AAC stereo. Equirectangular monoscopic projection with embedded 360/VR metadata.

Abstract This spherical video project expands on visual themes and materials from the author’s dissertation project, In Camera: a Video Practice of Living, Learning and Connecting, that took the form of a feature length essay film composed specifically for exhibition in IMAX. That project mined and externalized a personal and professional video archive spanning 19 years and explored the relationship between mediation, body and memory.

The architectural scale and nature of the giant screen IMAX experience lent itself to a visual composition marked by multichannel simultaneity and multi layered collage and nesting.

The goal of this project is an experimental translation of that visual experience into the intimate yet expansive space of spherical, or VR, video. As immersive video authoring practices become more accessible, they present interesting opportunities for organizing, exploring, narrativizing and sharing personal media collections.

The author aims to explore these new opportunities as they relate to mediated experiences of identity formation and the negotiation of personal and professional practices of knowledge creation. Immersive video experiences offer novel opportunities for personal reflection and processing.

This piece includes audio recorded at UCLA in January 2018 as well as new material depicting experiences of a recent surgery, diagnosis and treatment.

Recommendations for viewing The VR video file can be downloaded or streamed from Vimeo at this link: https://vimeo.com/282013912/266f28d6de The piece can be viewed directly in a web browser on Vimeo at the above link. In this case, as with local playback in VLC Player, the user can click, hold and drag the video around so

that they are able to approximate the experience of looking around and choosing where to focus the view.

Spherical Memory is best viewed in a dedicated virtual reality (VR) headset. When experienced this way the viewer is able to look around inside a fully immersive spherical video environment. The piece is composed of multiple non-spherical video sources mapped within the spherical environment playing simultaneously. By viewing the piece in VR, the viewer is able to choose where and when to place their attention within this space, facilitating the optimum, user-driven experience. 1 If no VR headset is available, the next best option is to download full resolution file for local playback on a computer system. VLC Player versions 3.0 and above will recognize and playback 360/VR video, allowing the viewer to drag around the image. There will likely be some geometric artifacts with this playback method.

1 The piece was authored for and tested on the Oculus Go VR viewer, 2018 and this is the preferred viewing method. However, the piece should also work in virtually any VR system including HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PSVR, Gear VR, Daydream, and Cardboard.

[real]izing:

grounding responsibilities and accountabilities for archival practices and approaches

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Troubling Accounts of the Archives

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b18x1th

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Caswell, Michelle

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

What to do with an archival mystery? 1 Like many archivists and researchers, I’ve come across many records that simply don’t make any sense, or at least, foreclose the possibility of any singular sense to-be-made. For archivists, the pieces left behind, the remnants in our care, are always incomplete, always fragmented, always subject to infinite impositions.

Despite all our talk of provenance and metadata, we never have enough context; the record is distanced from the context of its creation the instant it is created. And so we enter this game in a state of loss. We are never enough.

(And yet we still manage to be too much.)

It is in this (lack-of) context I find myself haunted by a photograph (Figure 1).

Figure 1. With shipmates on the S/S Ile de France. From “Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn,” by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, undated, South Asian American Digital Archive, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5101). Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

1

I would like to thank Gracen Brilmyer, Maria Montenegro, and Anne Gilliland for the opportunity to present this work at the “[dis]memory, [mis]representation & [re]figuring the archival lens: A Symposium on Visual Archives & Forms of Representation” at UCLA on January 26, 2018. The work is indebted to Verne Harris’s notions of archival traces and hauntings, Eric Ketelaar’s concept of “infinite activation,” and Sue McKemmish’s insistence on archives opening out into the future. This article would not be possible without the work of Samip Mallick and the volunteers who make the South Asian American Digital Archive possible, in particular my student, Evan Tucker, who digitized the Dhillonn collection.

I am both a professor of information studies and the co-founder of the independent, communitybased South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org) (SAADA). SAADA preserves and makes accessible the history of those in the United States who trace their lineage to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe.

We are a post-custodial archives, which means that rather than accept physical custody of materials, we borrow them from individuals, families, organizations, and archives, we digitize them and describe using culturally appropriate terminology, make them freely accessible online, and then return them. We have a particular emphasis on collecting materials related to early South Asian immigration to the United States pre-1965, to anti-South Asian race riots, to labor, student, and religious organizations, to political activism, and to artists and intellectuals. We collect materials that are not just celebratory in nature, but reflect the diverse range of South Asian American experiences from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.

Over the past decade of working on SAADA, I’ve helped to digitize thousands of records: family photos, letters between relatives, home movie reels.

Through all this scanning, a particular genre has emerged that has really stuck with me because I can’t quite make sense of it. I will call this genre the 1950s Orientalist party photo. It is a genre—one I have seen in several scrapbook collections made by several different Indian immigrants who came to the United States as students in the 1950s—but right now I want to hone in on one particular collection, that of Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn.

Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn came to the United States from India in 1955 to pursue master’s degrees in chemical engineering and mathematics at the University of Oklahoma. There, he started an international club, excelled academically, and garnered a reputation for throwing good parties. His scrapbook attests to that. Spanning the years 1955 to 1958, the scrapbook photographs show elaborate costume parties, thrown by Dhillonn himself, in which he plays up the image of the “exotic Other,”

masquerading as “the royal maharaja of Florpur”—a place that does not actually exist, at least not on any map. He goes as far as issuing press releases to local newspapers to announce the impending arrival of “His Highness” (Figure 2).

Figure 2. From “Notice,” by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, October 29, 1955, https://www.saada.org/item/201707195095. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

At least one newspaper took the bait, reporting that “His Highness, the Maharaja of Florpur from India, famous for his fabulous harem of 152 girls of various nationalities, is visiting the OU campus on Saturday,” also noting, “His Highness is purported to be on his way to Texas to expand his harem” (Figure 3). The article ends with a direct solicitation: “His Highness will be very pleased to meet OU co-eds in the lounge during this time. His only requirements for future brides are curves and a pretty face. She should also have strong teeth.”

Figure 3. From “Maharaja Plans to Visit Campus,” by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, October 29, 1955, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5094. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

Dhillonn then stages a second appearance and issues a second press release, this time commenting on how, during his prior visit, the “maharaja” was so “impressed by OU co-eds, their charm, their curves, and their beauty,” that he decided to return.

Figure 4. From “Dear Sir,” by Sharanjit Singh Dhillon, South Asian American Digital Archive. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

SAADA has photographs from several of these parties.

Some of the parties feature costume contests. Some are thrown by the international club Dhillonn founded as “international night” festivities.

In several photographs across multiple parties, we see white women flirt with Dhillonn under the guise of being harem members (Figure 5).

Figure 5. From untitled photograph, by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, February 1956, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5071. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

In another photograph, we see three white men in turbans and at least one of them in brown face (Figure 6).

Figure 6. From untitled photograph, by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, February 1956, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5072. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

In student newspaper clippings from the time, Dhillonn is portrayed as an exciting, exotic other. For example, a photo published in The Oklahoma Daily in 1955 shows a white woman smiling and taking notes as she looks at Dhillonn. The caption begins, in all capital letters, “GETTING SOME” (Figure 7). The rest of the text plays up Dhillonn’s otherness; what he is getting is some “proven pointers on the American female.” While he is listed as “a Panjab [sic] chief in India,” the woman is identified as belonging to “the Kappa Kappa Gamma tribe.” Another 1955 clipping, this one from The Norman Transcript entitled, “ChitChat, Sikh Style,” shows a different white woman

smiling at Dhillonn; the article states he “had no trouble making himself understood.” That “exotic other” persona is certainly played up in the party photographs as well.

Figure 7. From “Getting Some Proven Pointers,” by The Oklahoma Daily, https://www.saada.org/item/201707195062. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

Figure 8. From “Chit Chat, Sikh Style,” by The Norman Transcript, December 6, 1955, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5086. Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

But even within the context of the rest of his collection, that first photograph (Figure 1) in particular remains a complete mystery to me. We see Dhillonn on the left, as the “maharaja.” We see a Black man, sullen, eyes downcast, playing the part

of the harem guard—in line with the long history of Black eunuchs serving as harem guards. And we see three smiling white men draped in makeshift saris smiling and having what appears to be the time of their lives. Sharanjit plays up the joke on the back of the photo, reproducing the supposedly royal announcement, listing the names of the “cast,” delineating the order of favorite harem girls and wife, and identifying the guard as Conroy Allison (Figure 9). The white men are named as well; we might note that they do not have French names, but we can only guess that, perhaps, they are American. We also learn the photograph documents a costume contest, a bottle of champagne the first prize. A revealing stamp reads: S/S ILE de FRANCE C G Transatlantique PHOTOS Yves BIZIEN, FRENCH LINE

Unlike the other photographs in the scrapbook, this one was not taken at the University of Oklahoma, but on a ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic prior to Dhillonn’s American debut, presumably as he made the long journey from Karnal, India to Norman, Oklahoma. The photograph might mark the moment in which Dhillonn learns to navigate his racial difference in a sea of white supremacy—while the S/S Ile de France party was a prototype for the Oklahoma parties he later threw, the S/S Ile de France photograph was a prototype for the Oklahoma photographs he later staged.

Figure 8. Verso of Figure 1, by Sharanjit Singh Dhillon, undated, https://www.saada.org/item/20170719-5101.

Image appears courtesy of SAADA and Bibi Dhillonn.

It is a troubling photograph. It troubles our senses of agency, it troubles our understandings of race and gender and sexuality, and it troubles any easy interpretations.

It raises questions for which I do not yet have— nor do I ever expect to have—answers. What in the heck is going on here? If these party photographs are records, which they are, what exactly are they

records of? We have some context to help us figure it out, but not much. Scholars usually think of the time between 1946, when the Luce-Cellar Act imposed a racist, restrictive 100-person a year quota on immigration from India, and 1965, when U.S. immigration policies opened up, as being a kind of dead space for the South Asian American community. Yet SAADA’s staff and volunteers have found some amazing collections in that dead space, mostly from Indian students who came to the United States to study in STEM fields and stayed. We know Dhillonn’s party photographs were taken more than a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia to prohibit anti-miscegenation laws, when interracial sexual relationships were still illegal in many states. We know homosexuality and its attendant threat of cross-dressing was illegal in many parts of the United States at this time as well.

(We do not know what the rules and norms might have been on a transatlantic luxury liner, but we can imagine they might have been somewhat more relaxed than American Jim Crow standards of the time.)

Focusing on Dhillonn, we know that he funded his education, in part, by picking peaches in Fresno in the summer; there, he joined a network of Sikh men that have been employed in California’s agricultural industry since the turn of the twentieth century. In those early years in the United States, he changed the spelling of his name from Dhillon to Dhillonn in an attempt to get Americans to pronounce it correctly. In 1958, Dhillonn met his wife, Dorothy, who was also studying at the University of Oklahoma. The party photographs stop that year.

After their 1959 wedding—the home movie footage of which is also in SAADA—the couple had four children, soon moving from Oklahoma to rural California, where Dhillonn got a job as a chemical engineer at Borax. After a racist attack at a gas station, Dhillonn cut his hair and beard and stopped wearing the customary Sikh turban. We see over the course of a decade of scrapbook photographs and home movie reels that Dhillonn goes from playing up his otherness to trying to fit in, from “exotic oriental” to assimilated American. And then, seemingly abruptly, as if in the middle of the

story—and aren’t we always in the middle of the story?—the scrapbook ends.

Although Dhillonn continued to document his life, the scrapbook and the home movie reels are all that is currently in SAADA. How do we read this photographic record given the little information we have? Why would Dhillonn play up and play into the Orientalist stereotypes that constructed him as an exotic Other? What sexual possibilities are awakened by the white men in makeshift saris in the photograph? Does their racism foreclose any true liberatory potentials? When we read this photograph as possible evidence of samesex desire, are we engaged in a kind of “perverse presentism” as Halberstam (1998) might call it, and if so, so what? Who is Conroy Allison, the Black “harem guard” and what was he thinking through all of this? Is this just a group of guys from different backgrounds having a 1950s version of transgressive fun on a transatlantic cruise ship? Is this merely a light-hearted way (presumably) new acquaintances in the 1950s could deal with racial difference? How does whiteness (and the colonial photographic gaze) construct these subjects even as the costumes and the photographs are staged by Dhillonn himself?

How do we read this image in ways that acknowledge Dhillonn’s agency, that don’t purport to speak for him? How does this image and others like it plant the trajectory of white cultural appropriation we are still dealing with today? And how does my own whiteness structure how I interpret this record?

And herein lies the beauty of archives (and photographic records especially).

We all bring different selves to this record.

We will all ask different questions of it. I have my interpretation, but it does not foreclose yours. There is room for infinite activation of any record, as Eric Ketelaar (2001) has asserted. Endless stories unravel from the records’ yarn.

This record is part of both an archival diaspora, to use Ricardo Punzalan’s (2014) term, and a diasporic archives.

In the first sense, it was dispersed from that moment of record creation. We can never be back on that cruise ship at that party where the photographer Yzes Bizien clicked the camera (as the stamp on the back of the photograph

informs us).

We know never enough about its context, even read together with all of the photographs from that decade in Dhillonn’s scrapbook.

This photograph demands a broader interpretation of provenance. I’m advocating here, as so many others have done before me—Chris Hurley, Jeannette Bastian, Joel Wurl, to name a few— for a shift from a narrow, dominant Western interpretation of provenance that focuses exclusively on the photographer as record creator or Dhillonn as record-keeper, towards a much more expansive notion of provenance that includes the whole community responsible for the creation and stewardship of this record (Bastian, 2006; Hurley, 2005; Wurl, 2005).

The record is part of what Jeannette Bastian has called “a community of records,” that is, “the aggregate of records in all forms generated by multiple layers of actions and interactions between and among the people and institutions within a community” (Bastian, 2003). If we take seriously Joel Wurl’s assertion of ethnicity as provenance, we can trace the provenance of this record to the entire South Asian American community. Which is, of course, a diasporic community and indeed, multiple, fractured communities. This record is thus a double diaspora, a record dispersed from the event of its creation as all records are, and, until SAADA intervened by digitizing it and reuniting it with other South Asian American materials, dispersed from the community who created it and cares about and for it.

But it is too simplistic and too neat a story, I think, to argue that SAADA reunited digital copies of these Dhillonn photographs with digital copies of other records documenting South Asian American history, so we “fixed” the dispersion and our work is now done. That is part of the story, but it is not all of it. I am very suspicious of easy solutions and I think we need to hold ourselves to higher and more complicated, more nuanced standards.

Our responsibility as archivists does not end at this “virtual reunification.” Our responsibility continues as long as the record is subject to interpretation (which is, if not forever, as long as we, collectively, dedicate the attention and resources to care for it).

As an archivist—and not just any archivist but one partially charged with stewarding this particular photograph through my role with SAADA—I am ethically called to ask: Who has most at stake in the preservation, digitization, and accessibility of these photos? How do we center those who are made most vulnerable by our archival interventions in this record? How do we activate this record for human liberation? How do we use it to dismantle white supremacy?

How do we use it to hold power accountable?

How do we use it hold ourselves accountable to each other and to hold us, as archivists for SAADA, accountable to the community we serve and represent?

I want to push beyond standard archival studies constructions of accountability that rely on legal formations and instead focus on records and archives as instruments through which we can construct webs of responsibilities in line with a feminist approach to ethics.

Speaking at the Archives and Affect symposium at UCLA in 2014, I proposed a feminist ethics model for thinking through archival responsibility. In a feminist ethics approach, archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility.

Working with Marika Cifor, we proposed four interrelated shifts in these archival relationships marked by what we called radical empathy (Caswell & Ciphor, 2016). Our approach is clear that not all relationships were equally worthy of empathy, that power infused and catalyzed such relationships and as such, was central to the conversation. In each of these relationships, we begin by asking who is made most vulnerable and proceed from there.

Using this framework, in the case of the Dhillonn scrapbook, SAADA archivists are ethically bound to: (a) the creator of the records—in this case Dhillonn, who, though he didn’t take the photographs, clearly staged them and saved them; (b) the subjects of the records—so the people in the photograph: Sharanjit, the three white men, and Conroy Allison; (c) the current and potential users of the record via its digital surrogate in SAADA, which now includes all of you thinking through these records alongside this article; and, (d) the larger

community SAADA serves and represents, that is, South Asian Americans. I am particularly interested in that third and fourth responsibility. How can we repurpose this image in ways that hold us accountable to our users and the larger South Asian American community? To put it bluntly, is this record in any way redeemable? Can this record be saved? * To begin to answer that question, I turn to another record in SAADA, involving a different Indian student who came from the Kashmir Valley to study in the United States in the 1950s. Kuldip Rae Singh was an unknown 21-year-old UCLA medical student when he appeared on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” show in 1956. Singing his heart out, Singh became an overnight sensation, getting a recording contract, attracting throngs of screaming teenage girls, and being featured in LIFE magazine. He had a very brief career in the United States before ultimately moving to Spain to finish his medical studies. In his debut television appearance, Singh is subjected to—and willingly plays into—racist stereotypes of Indians. Groucho Marx calls him “Cool Dip,” and makes a joke about how he took a “cool dip” in his swimming pool that morning.2 When Singh says he comes from the valley of Kashmir, in the Himalayas, Marx trips on the pronunciation and asks, “Are you calling me a liar?” Marx asks if he came to the United States by camel, and Singh responds, “I did halfway, yes, but the other way I had to take a boat, you know, they don’t swim,” cuing audience laughter. “Brenda,” a young white woman who is the other contestant on the show, blushes and coyly looks at Singh. When Marx asks her what she thinks of him, she flirtingly responds, “he’s real cool,” again to audience laughter.

Singh is clearly sexualized in this portrayal; he says he sings “love songs,” and Marx goes as far as commenting, “many women in the audience are planning to leave their husbands.” Marx then invites Singh to sing, but only after confirming that he’s not “a hip-shaker,” 2

The clip from “You Bet Your Life” is extraordinary. https://vimeo.com/226992471

perhaps in an attempt to quell any racial ambiguity that might read Singh as Black. As Singh croons a love song—“those eyes are the eyes of a woman in love”—Brenda blushes and giggles uncontrollably.

The crowd eats it up. Like Dhillonn, we see Singh play into Orientalist stereotypes in exchange for white social capital.

In 2016, inspired by Kathy Carbone’s work on the City of Portland’s Archives and Record Center’s artist-in-residency program and my research team’s work on symbolic annihilation and South Asian American history, SAADA launched the “Where We Belong: Artists in the Archive” project with a generous grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (Carbone, 2015; Caswell, Cifor, & Ramirez, 2016). The funding enabled SAADA to launch a discovery process whereby we selected five South Asian American artists working across a range of media and genres to create new works of art inspired by records in SAADA. One of the explicit goals of the project was to counter the symbolic annihilation of South Asian Americans by creating new artistic representations that re-contextualize the community’s history. After an intensive in-person weekend retreat in October 2016, the five selected artists began working on their pieces, which were then presented to the public at a well-attended daylong event at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in April 2017.3 One of the commissioned artists was Rudresh Mahanthappa, a New York-based jazz alto saxophonist and composer. For his SAADA residency, Mahanthappa composed a sound piece that incorporates remixed audio from Singh’s television appearance.

Entitled, “Cool Dip,” the piece heightens the discomfort of Singh’s performance, juxtaposing Marx’s racist banter with a sped-up laugh track and discordant notes (Mahanthappa, 2018).

Mahanthappa plays over and against Marx and Singh’s dialogue, his saxophone interrupting and resisting the flow of the conversation, even as it is forced to keep up with its pace.

3

One of the artists, a musician named Zain Alam, created a haunting score for Sharajnit Singh and Dorothy Dhillonn’s silent home movies of their wedding. Zain Alam, “Lavaan,” https://www.saada.org/wherewebelong/lavaan.

When Mahanthappa debuted the piece at the SAADA event, the audience—mostly secondgeneration South Asian Americans—vocally expressed the discomfort it evoked. One woman stood up and recounted all the times she watched her immigrant parents play into racist stereotypes of South Asians so as not to rock the boat, to smooth things over with their white neighbors and coworkers, and to assimilate. Another woman stood up and talked about how her dad had given up trying to get white people to say his name right, so he just changed his name. With “Cool Dip,” Mahanthappa activated that 1956 footage for an important—if painful—conversation about racism in the contemporary United States.

Here is where community archives can activate troubling records from the past to be accountable to their communities now. These records enable us to move towards a community-based form of mutual responsibility. Indeed, for communities for whom legal justice remains elusive, accountability is rooted in ethical relationships with each other rather than with the (failed) state.4 We can thus conceptualize accountability in a community archives setting as a relationship to the past and the future, specifically as an obligation to preserve evidence in the now that both interprets the past and imagines possibilities for future generations.

Community-based forms of accountability may take the form of activating records, sharing stories, educating, making connections, learning strategies, speaking out, intervening, and imagining more just futures. In practicing these techniques, we forge mutual responsibilities between ourselves as archivists and those who create records, those who are the subjects of records, those who use records, and the large communities we represent and serve.

We reunite people who have never been united as a community even as we reunite records that have never been united as archives. Through it all, we are ethically obligated to the people, not the stuff.

4

I am not claiming that legal accountability for injustice is unimportant, but rather it is seen as an unrealistic and even unattainable luxury for many given the white supremacy of the American judicial system.

Returning to the Dhillonn party photographs, we can use Mahanthappa’s (2018) reinterpretation of the Kuldip Rae Singh footage and the discussion it provoked to read these records as a way for Dhillonn to fit in socially; by playing into Orientalist stereotypes, Dhillonn successfully maneuvered his way across two oceans and around 1950s Norman, Oklahoma, against an ever-present backdrop of white supremacy. He actively constructed his own image as a novelty rather than as a threat for his own survival. In the context of Singh—and Rudresh Mahanthappa’s interpretation of his peers—we can begin to see Dhillonn’s parties as a survival strategy in the face of the constant threat of racist violence.

Perhaps we can read them as an odd alliance in which Dhillonn is communicating that, though he may be racially different, he shares the dominant white culture’s attitude towards women, an assertion of similarity against racialized difference. Or perhaps we read them as a clever way that Dhillonn can control the narrative, poking fun at these gullible white people who think he’s a maharaja. “Who exactly is the joke on?” we might think of him asking as he looks directly at the camera. Or perhaps we can read them as all of the above or none of the above and then some in perpetuity. Always bothand; the archives are always both-and.

As a community archive, SAADA is held accountable to Dhillonn and the larger community by activating these records for this conversation.

And yet we do not have to over-determine the meaning of these troubled records. By troubling them, living within the discomfort they create, and opening up spaces for debate about them, we are envisioning and enacting a community-based conception of accountability that takes power into account and centers those who have the most at stake in archival interventions.

Returning to my initial question: What do you do with an archival mystery?

You unravel its threads. You let them unravel you. You trouble it.

You live with/in the trouble. You let it haunt you.

You stay with the ghosts. You tend their pieces but you never make peace with them. *********************************************

Postscript I meet Tarfia Faizullah, a Bangladeshi American poet, at a conference. Over much-deserved drinks at the hotel bar, I show her Dhillonn’s party photographs.

She begins to tear up. “I’ve never seen images of people who look like me in the U.S. from that time,” she tells me.

The records, they are imperfect pieces, but they haunt us perfectly.

References Bastian, J. (2003). Owning memory: How a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Bastian, J. (2006). Reading colonial records through an archival lens: The provenance of place, space, and creation. Archival Science, 6(3–4), 267–284.

Carbone, K. (2015, Spring). Artists in the archive: An exploratory study of the artist-in-residence program at the City of Portland Archives & Record Center. Archivaria, 79, 27–52.

Caswell, M., & Cifor, M. (2016, Spring). From human rights to feminist ethics: Radical empathy in archives. Archivaria, 81, 23–43.

Caswell, M., Cifor, M., & Ramirez, M. H. (2016, Spring/Summer). “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist, 79, 56–81.

Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hurley, C. (2005). Parallel provenance: What if anything is archival description? Archives and Manuscripts, 33(1), 110–145.

Ketelaar, E. (2001). Tacit narratives: The meaning of archives. Archival Science, 1(2), 131–141.

Mahanthappa, R. (2018). Cool dip. You Bet Your Life.

Retrieved from https://www.saada.org/project/timeline/kuldiprae-singh Punzalan, R. (2014, Fall/Winter). Archival diasporas: A framework for understanding the complexities and challenges of dispersed photographic collections. American Archivist, 77(2), 326–349.

Wurl, J. (2005). Ethnicity as provenance: In search of values and principles documenting the immigrant experience. Archival Issues, 29(1), 65–76.

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title Collecting Contested Identities: The ambiguity of national culture in the Israeli Digital National Collection

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29j8h665

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Authors Agmon, Yair Levy, Lihi

Publication Date 2019

Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29j8h665#supplemental Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

In 1949, Moshe Ben-David, then 22 years old and already an established jewelry maker by family tradition, immigrated from his ancestral home in Southern Yemen to the year-old State of Israel. His personal migration, part of a larger wave influenced by a Zionist zeal, was initiated and carried out by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency that feared for the well-being of the community (Ben Zvi, 1949). The Jewish exodus from Yemen was sparked by the rising tides of nationalism, a political backlash to the failure of the Palestinian cause, and an antiSemitic sentiment that had flared in the 1947 Aden riots. The perceived sense of immediate threat to the well-being of the community gave way to a decision to transport people to Israel as quickly as possible. The exodus from Yemen—simultaneously conducted in Iraq and subsequently in Iran, Morocco, and the majority of the Arab world—meant hastily leaving without gathering belongings, cultural artifacts, personal records, and documents. As people rushed from city centers to transitory and refugee camps, to makeshift airports, they carried only what they could. It is almost unfathomable that the flourishing Jewish Yemeni community—one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, deeply entrenched in its territory, and holding a unique cultural and religious tradition—had all but disappeared in less than a year.

Ancient Torah books, musical instruments, photographs, personal letters, heirloom rugs, silver, jewelry, and furniture were left behind, lost in transportation, or sold to fund a new beginning, causing a massive loss of community heritage and cultural knowledge (Meir-Glitzenstein, 2015, p. 110). BenDavid experienced this himself amidst a rapid shift from his ancestral home and tradition to a new start in a transitory camp in Israel. Yet unlike many of his counterparts, Ben-David was able to re-engage with his traditions and eventually work as a jewelry designer, retaining a form of cultural heritage once dominant but now mostly lost from his community.

Ben-David was recently recognized for his substantial contribution to the field of Israeli design (specifically jewelry design) by the state’s official cultural heritage project, The Digital National Collection.

This project recognizes the importance of preserving cultural and social memory and identity (Foote, 1990) through digitizing and accessioning significant, yet pre-existing, cultural collections through a central online

repository.

In its mission to inscribe “intangible” heritage performed in territorial Israel, it faces not only contemporary challenges of digitization and the politics of classification (of culture and of significance), but it is haunted by the ghosts of past erasures such as Arab Jews, women, and Palestinians, all of whom have long been marginalized. Yet the collection has already managed to generate space and knowledge of some communities that have been historically underrepresented, effectively talking back to these ghosts. The bigger picture, however, remains more complex as not all gaps in cultural history are treated equally and the project remains unequivocally ambiguous towards its own ethical commitments, whatever those may be.

While this ambiguity might be the inevitable result of the tensions that arise from the project’s state affiliation, as opposed to a community archive, it prevents it from taking full advantage of the opportunity to reimagine what Israeli Culture includes. In this article, we demonstrate how the genesis of the Israeli state, as it collapsed multiculturalism in favor of a new ethnonationalism for the Jewish People, provided the social boundaries that are reflected in the cultural knowledge production of this particular project. Furthermore, we argue that while this project purports to be of service to all Israelis, it is structured in such a way that precludes specific ethnicities living within territorial Israel from social representation and access. While these lines of demarcation have shifted from the original foundation of modern Israel, for some people they remain largely intact for non-Jewish populations, especially those who are socially and politically perceived as incommensurable with state politics.

Immigration, Cultural Erasure, and the Young State In its early years, following a massive influx of population, the young Israeli state worked to assimilate over 700,000 (Hakohen, 2003) refugees and immigrants, but lacked the faculties to address many of their most pressing concerns and needs, including permanent housing issues in lieu of transitory tents and labor assignments that were commensurate with their knowledge (Deri, 2017).

The “melting pot” ideology that subjugated the community’s specificity to the primacy of the (mostly Ashkenazi and European) state dictated the solutions.

Labor was assigned in accordance to the needs of the state and previous employment or profession were not taken into consideration.

Yael Guilat (2001), an art historian who authored the chronicles of Moshe Ben-David and Yemenite jewelry in Israel, argues that in the process of forging its self-representation, the young Israeli government chose to ignore the needs of immigrant communities that did not fit the mold. This was not a result of a chaotic or misinformed government; rather, in her book Portrait of Pure Exactitude, Guilat points to a report by ethnographer and scholar Shelomo Dov Goitein, who was closely familiar with the Yemenite community and had urged Prime Minister Ben Gurion to preserve the crafts and traditions of the Yemenite Jews. Despite this, Guilat demonstrates, Ben Gurion ignored the needs of the community in favor of exploiting the immigrants’ Zionist zeal and readily available manpower to work the land—casually assuming that Yemenites are uneducated and accustomed to arduous field labor.

As the labor needs of the community were ignored, so did their housing needs—many of the housing assignments were located in the geographical outskirts of Israel. Development Towns were built to protect Israel’s territorial stronghold and were settled by the new Israelis at the instruction of the government. Constructed and located by security and political needs (Allweil, 2012; Efrat, 2014), these towns lacked social and economic infrastructure to sustain local economies and had perpetuated the disenfranchisement, poverty, and neglect that befell the Arab Jewish immigration to this very day, producing a lingering intergenerational inequality gap (Swirksi, Zelingher, & Konor-Attias, 2015). The cumulative, intergenerational toll of immigration, housing, and labor was for many years brushed off as merely ungratefulness (Deri, 2017); popular portrayals of the refugees and forced migrants depicted them as zealot Zionists that chose conveniently to migrate to Israel as a preferable option. Yet such cultural suppression overlooked how the Jewish Agency had exacerbated the systemic racism and societal neglect affecting the Yemenite community, among others, which claimed lives and property that were never reclaimed or compensated (Meir-Glitzenstein, 2015).

While other immigrant communities in Israel (Sephardic, Mizrahi, Russian, and Ethiopian Jews) perhaps did not suffer this

particular ordeal, many were subjected to the same treatment, resulting in a loss of lives and identity. The physical trauma and duress endured by an entire generation of immigrants has not been fully reckoned and answered for by the Israeli government, nor reconciled in the public sphere, to this very day stirring strong oppositions to the narrative of immigrant oppression that was nevertheless the lived experience of so many (Deri, 2017).

The trauma extends even further than the physical losses endured by these communities. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, as well as other members of the government, have expressed in internal meetings and documents a deep Orientalist perception and a racist disdain against the culture of Arab Jews (Office of the Prime Minister, 1959). Officials at the time perceived their non-Western way of life and their skill set as essentially irrelevant, and their abilities to prosper in the new state were limited at best. This sentiment eventually resulted in a widespread culture hierarchy that relegated Arab Jewish music, literature, poetry, dance, history, film, arts and crafts, religious traditions, language, colloquialism, social demeanor and, for the most part, food, to the bottom echelon of culture. This left Arab Jewish traditional and new cultural production struggling for its existence outside the public sphere, with limited to no institutional support, causing an unimaginable and irreparable loss in all fields. In this cultural context, Arab Jewish culture has had a diminished presence in all possible representations. It is worth noting that in recent years, though, Arab Jewish culture is being revived and expanded through the works of young poets, filmmakers and artists—such as Yossi Sukari, Dikla, and Nevet Yitzhak—who have each earned cultural capital and high visibility for their works.

A Different Fate for Moshe Ben-David Ben-David’s story, on the other hand, followed a somewhat different path that allowed him to preserve his historical family practice of jewelry making and eventually earn widespread recognition of his standing and contribution to the field of Israeli design. After settling into the transitory camp and skipping around odd jobs, Ben-David tells of his emerging relationship with Ruth Dayan—instigated by masterfully woven, heirloomed carpets—that eventually resulted in a job offer to make jewelry

for Maskit, a new government project Dayan headed. Dayan, a social activist, prominent public figure, and wife to iconic General Moshe Dayan, had aligned herself with the cause of nation building and established a first all-Israeli fashion house, hiring Fini Leitersdorf—a Jewish-Hungarian Fashion designer residing in Israel—as its head designer. In order to construct a unifying, somewhat utopian, cosmopolitical aesthetic identity, the newly formed Maskit drew on designs produced by the budding state’s multicultural population, which fully included Arabs among them.

Additionally, Leitersdorf and Dayan tapped immigrant Jews and local craftspeople to enlist in their ranks: Yemenite Jewelry silversmiths and designers, local (Jews and non-Jews) artists, Palestinian pattern weavers, Bedouin fabric makers, etc. Despite Maskit’s financial ebbs and flows, Ben-David thrived as one of the company’s jewelry designers, and in 1964 he was named manager of the jewelry department at Maskit, a position he held until his retirement in 1977 (Guilat, 2016), when he established an autonomous practice which has remained successful and celebrated to this very day.

Historians have extensively researched and written about the Maskit project. Its prominence and influence are recognized as central and essential to the constitution of Israel’s fashion industry. Maskit has been mythologized, lauded in academia, popularized as a household name and identified as a preeminent mark of Israeli originality. Yet, there is a clear cut between the expansive narrativization and eminence of Leitersdorf and Dayan’s role and the limited attention awarded to their craftspeople from whom the design aesthetics were inspired (Bat-Yaar, 2010). A preference in history and culture, specifically towards constructs such as the entrepreneur and the auteur, are by no means surprising nor special, and are a result of reliance on Intellectual Property law to define socially fluctuating conditions around authorship (Gaines, 1991). Thus, Leitersdorf and Dayan embraced Ben-David’s practice as quintessential to the construction of an Israeli aesthetic, yet the three of them were not awarded the same cultural visibility and valorization in society.

Given the broader context of social and cultural subjugation experienced by Arab Jews in the process of relocating to Israel, we cannot exclude the possibility that the difference in academic and cultural recognition and the difference in presence in archival collections between Ben-David,

Leitersdorf, and Dayan was, at least partially, a continuation of the oppression experienced in other aspects mentioned earlier— from housing to labor to social rights to cultural marginalization.

Ben-David’s heritage—comprised of his life’s work as a jewelry designer and the accompanying records of his extensive activity—was excused from the corollaries of erasure and was allocated resources to be preserved, proliferating his existence for perpetuity, granting him and his legacy not only historical standings but also cultural capital and presence. This is a marked exception to the prevalent and systemic erasure of marginalized communities—Ethiopian, Arab, or Russian Jews, Palestinians, Bedouins, Druze, Circassians, Armenians, and women—in cultural institutions and social narratives of the state of Israel.

The Rule, The Exception In 2015, Ben-David’s private collection of records— documenting his jewelry design and jewelry making practice spans over 70 years—was chosen to be included in the National Digital Collection, a project devoted to the preservation of visual culture and commissioned by the State of Israel Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage. The Collection specifically focuses on four fields of visual culture: design, theater, dance, and architecture.

The project lacks any current institutional or organizational support and resources for preservation and conservation; rather, its goal is to create a new, meaningful corpus of data that will facilitate a better understanding of those fields and broadly expand research opportunities.

To establish an all-new repository with no existing framework, the National Digital Collection has mapped preexisting collections that are mostly inaccessible to the public either due to guardianship in the hands of private individuals requiring significant efforts to access them, or because they are housed in institutions (private or public) but have not been for preservation and digitization. Out of the survey of pre-existing collections, the National Digital Collection’s executive committees assesses the significance and contribution of each collection’s author and their records to the field of Israeli culture.

After a ranking has been set, some collections are taken to temporary custody at the National Library (the parent and

executing organization of the Digital National Collection), where staff extensively catalog and digitize files, then return them to their owners. The resulting information—the digital instance of the records and their associated metadata—will be uploaded to a digital, open-access platform dedicated to the project. It is crucial to note that the project limits its scope to digital stewardship, focusing labor and resources on cataloging, digitizing, and accessibility to digital copies of the records.

In the process of sorting the knowledge and records of individuals that have been pivotal to Israeli culture, the Digital National Collection chose to focus on Ben-David’s collection of Yemeni jewelry design. The decision followed the fact that both Leitersdorf and Dayan’s collections have been deposited or catalogued with well-resourced collections. Furthermore, both Dayan and Leitersdorf have been prominently exhibited, researched, and discussed as central figures at the helm of the seminal Maskit project. Ben-David’s collection was exhibited and presented along the years, as well as included in some historical research and existing catalogs, but has not been extensively appraised, described, cataloged, nor earned institutional affiliations thus far. The desire to save Ben-David’s collection from ill fate, as well as emphasize a diverse set of design practices, ultimately led to the decision to include Ben-David’s jewelry collection and personal documents. The choice to also include Ben-David’s work—not merely through the documents that reflect his practice as an employee in Maskit or through Leitersdorf or Dayan’s already accessioned collections, but rather through the records of his individual practice, marks a departure from the prevailing perception of what and who constitutes Israeli design practices. This inclusion hints at an equivocation of Ben-David’s Yemenite practice and knowledge to that of Western practices, placing both within the designation of national importance. This is not to say that some sort of conceptual equality has been achieved, but to point to an action that intentionally and willfully goes against the grain.

However, it is also important to note that Ben-David’s inclusion points to the exclusion, or lack of capability to include his contemporaries—the many other craftspeople, such as Palestinian pattern weavers and other Yemenite Jewelry designers, who worked under Maskit and were not inducted into the collection. Maskit’s records, for unknown reasons, were not

kept in an orderly fashion, providing little evidence and records to the exact demographics and occupations of Maskit’s employees. In turn, this exclusion leads to further difficulty locating Mizrahi or Sephardic designers that might have also worked at Maskit and have not retained their practice upon retirement. The loss of the company’s archival and employee records prevents us from knowing each person’s heritage, which obfuscates the Maskit project’s intention of cosmopolitics—how it tried to use ethnic heritage to construct a new Israeli identity.

The collection’s attempt to face these surmounting difficulties by insisting to include Ben-David is commendable.

Past erasures have created a ghost from the absent (not just of persons, but of a sense of belonging), and we argue that a public rediscovery of what was lost does something to reconcile that ghost. Yet the disparity between Ben-David and those left outside the collection reveals a much broader issue than the technical difficulties that face this specific endeavor. Would BenDavid’s practice, i.e., that of Yemenite jewelry design, have been significant enough to be inducted into the collection if it had not been a part of a fashion house based in Western practices and led by Western Jews? And if so, for Palestinian fabric weavers who experienced a similar path, would they be excluded from the collection? This last question has yet to be answered. The collection might choose to include, if possible, such collections, yet the hardships of accessing and accessioning collections that have been historically neglected and disenfranchised makes this task exponentially more difficult and costly.

Ben-David’s inclusion is a minor reconciliation in a sea of debt collected over 70 years of erasure from the State of Israel, yet it is incredibly meaningful. It offers to a future generation of designers and researchers the perspective of Yemenite knowledge as part of the origins of their contemporary culture.

This would not only allow those of Yemeni descent to feel represented, proud, and valued, but members of other ethnic groups to rethink the hegemonic narrative that declared Europe as the sole bedrock of cultural production in the State of Israel’s early days. Ben-David’s story is but one occurrence in a vast field; hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured into Israel in its early years and hundreds of thousands were forced out, resulting in an inevitable massive loss of records and a systemic cold shoulder to innumerable others.

The Digital National Collection, Genesis and Mission The Digital National Collection has by now digitized and cataloged dozens of collections across its subfields (even if unevenly), resulting in one of the state’s most comprehensive cultural preservation undertakings, with substantial resource allocation. Some of the project’s stated missions to collect and preserve culture are already being successfully addressed by digitizing collections, assisting collections to find or establish repositories, and expanding the production of metadata around these collections.

Yet, despite these highly beneficial contributions to the cultural community in Israel, more could be done by the Collection’s mission statement to address some of the major political and operational questions that arise from its attempt to preserve Israeli culture, given the fact that neither Israeliness nor culture are fixed terms in our social discourse.

Furthermore, one cannot perceive the project as being generated without historical residues and ghosts. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon (1997) uses the cultural products of a society to demonstrate how the absence of people and their traces deeply troubles a society, and that we must speak back to the ghost to achieve reconciliation, not ignore it.

Historical immigration, military regime, and continuous oppression of marginalized communities have shaped the context of cultural knowledge and archival collections. While we have demonstrated the loss of records in Arab immigrant communities, other communities were subjected to other types of record erasure—Palestinian documents held by the state archive (Sela, 2018) or Bedouin’s oral society represented through a singular bureaucratic lens. This is not to say that records are absent or non-existing simply because we have no way of knowing (Hofstadter & Yavne, 2016). Yet these historical accounts suggest a diminished presence of many marginalized communities as well as a preference towards Jewish cultural heritage. Despite the demonstrable presence of these issues and their prevalence when attempting to define and collect culture, the Digital National Collection assumes a veil of objectivity and perfunctory, insisting on not directly addressing any political agenda. While the presumption of objectivity is itself a masked agenda (Fish, 1989), the collection’s posted

mission statement garners some further insight into some of the political constraints and agenda beneath the surface.

In a blog post published in the National Library Blog, the Digital National Collection explains that one of its missions is to provide better understanding of how historical records and cultural production shaped Israeli society.

According to Zaksenberg’s (2017) blog post, access to the Digital National Collection “will allow a reevaluation and renewed understanding of the creative processes, development of each professional field and their impact on culture and society in Israel.”

Oren Weinberg, the director of the National Library, points further to the social possibilities of this project: “for the first time there is a national recognition in the importance of the historical materials of these fields as an inseparable part of the understanding of the cultural, social and political environment of Israel” (Zaksensberg, 2017). In the section dedicated to the design cluster, the blog mentions the time frame of the project as “from the beginning of settlements in the land of Israel at the end of the 19th century till present day” (National Library, 2017).

Evident in its mission statement are both the clear and lucid understanding of the social capital and power that is derived from this public platform, as well as the implicit association with a timeline of Zionism. The Digital National Collection was conceived by the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage––part of a larger scale effort (“Road Marks Project”) to solidify, cement and elaborate the cultural and historical connection of the Jewish people to territorial Israel through: (a) the expansion of existing archeological sites, historical museums, and monuments (“tangible”); and (b) the establishing of archives that collect and preserve cultural records (“intangible”). The ministry defines its mission in regard to heritage as the “exposure, preservation, rehabilitation and development of national heritage sites . . . tangible heritage and intangible heritage such as museums, archives etc.” Specifically relating to intangible culture, the ministry states it engages in “digitizing archives . . . investing in Hebrew literature, language, music and traditional music, films and historical cinema, dance folklore, ceremonies and historical documentation of the national heritage legacy” (Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage, n.d.).

The association, funding, and genesis by a governmental ministry in charge of constituting the Israel-Jewish identity as a

historically indelible fact, assigns the Digital National Collection with a second assignment: (a) to prioritize those records that pertain to a Zionist narrative of Israel, (b) to establish a paper trail of Zionist presence in Israel, and (c) to reject any notion of an illegitimate claim to the land. However, the collection does retain autonomy, and the de facto situation varies from the political association. The project’s collecting range is not entirely predefined in its mission statement nor by the Ministry; rather, the executive committee of each branch (dance, theater, architecture, design) determines its collecting range.

The committee—comprised of academics and prominent practitioners but no archivists—is charged with the task of prioritizing the different collections as they consider their contribution to the field of culture. They attempt to balance representation between well documented yet highly significant figures and lesser known yet not less important creators. The committee of each branch is independent of its parallel in the other fields, leading to increased autonomy that can address specific issues that may arise.

This inevitably leads to significantly varying guidelines and goals, where one committee will decide to focus their efforts on previously underrepresented groups, while another will decide to focus on prominent figures with decaying documents.

The analysis of the Digital National Collection’s own mission statement, its parent organization’s mission statement, and its inner organizational structure are important to understanding its political position as a spectrum of influences.

While the political genesis may favor a clear Zionist agenda, the collection itself might favor preservation, and the committees themselves will opt for cultural inclusion.

This is a tricky ambiguity that allows for a multiplicity of political agendas to coexist with a single entity, and this might just be the reason for its sustainability over a highly contested subject such as Israeliness and culture. While this ambiguity allows for certain latitude of actions—such as including Circassian dance groups or Yemeni designers—it also creates a space for perpetuating certain pitfalls with regards to its timeline, its ability to reach underrepresented collections, and to collect evenly across cultural and language barriers.

Collecting Contested Identities—Who Gets to Be Israeli While the Digital National Collection is not a traditional archive, it holds much of the same social construct and affect, at least in as it “wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies” (Schwartz & Cook, 2002, p. 2). Furthermore, extensive archival scholarship had demonstrated how archives reify national identity through and are themselves “what made up colonial authority” (Stoler, 2002, p. 91).

Implicit in the Digital National Collection’s mission is the assumption that Israeli identity—who and what belongs to it—is a generally cohesive notion that can be transfixed into a repository in the same manner that a camera captures a given optical reality (arguably, even that can be contested with the advent of digital technologies). While the public discourse is slowly shifting towards a wider spread recognition of past exclusions of Israeliness, such as Yemenite or other Arab Jewish cultures, the exclusion of non-Jewish minorities, chiefly Palestinians (20 percent of the population) has only been exacerbated. One event in particular brings into sharp focus the contestation and division over the shared past of Palestinians and Israeli Jews and the demarcating lines of a legitimate Israeli identity.

The colloquially named Nakba Law (“Catastrophe” in Arabic), passed in 2011, has levied punishment—revoking of public funding—against those who commemorate Israeli Independence Day through mourning (among other circumscription). For Palestinians, it is impossible not to mourn the day in which, as Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di describe, “[a] society [was] disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently,” leading to the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians. They continue: “The Nakba has thus become, both in Palestinian memory and history, the demarcation line between two qualitatively opposing periods.

After 1948, the lives of the Palestinians at the individual, community, and national level were dramatically and irreversible changed” (Sa’di & Abu-Lughod, 2007, p. 3). The effects over the Palestinian social psyche are not contested by the law, nor can they be. Its aim is clear, to erase and demarcate the social line

of what is permissible in Israeli society and under the Israeli national identity—to not value Palestinian history. This law indicates the inability of a larger Israeli umbrella to hold space for Palestinian memory and identity (Shenhav, 2012). This law is not an isolated case, there is also the Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic to an unofficial language passed in 2018 and the human rights NGO monitoring law that passed in 2016. We point to these not to open a discussion over the legal battle over identity in Israel, but to demonstrate both the high stakes that are the corollary of being included in an Israeli identity as well as the systematic erasure and marginalization experienced by Palestinians—citizens and noncitizens alike (Adala, 2018).

This is further evident when inspecting memory and culture institutions. A lack of resources and acceptance had led to a complete absence of Palestinian archival presence, either through autonomous archives or exclusion from state archives, except Palestinian records withheld by the Israeli army. Some museums collect and display art by Palestinians and small institutions have repositories of records and artifacts that were salvaged or preserved. Palestinian literature, film, and art do receive funds, albeit extremely limited. Yet public resources for the inclusion, preservation, and display of Palestinian heritage, culture, and history are demonstrably scarce and unequal, and are not up to par to what is needed. All that, despite specific laws that mandate equality within the State of Israel regardless of ethnicities.

What then, does the State of Israel have to lose in a more comprehensive inclusion of Palestinian culture and history? As the Ministry of heritage proclaimed, it is its mission to reinforce the relationship between Jewish Israelis and the territory of Israel. In the territorial zero-sum game, one can understand the Ministry’s single-sided mission in relation to the exclusion of Palestinians as both an affirmation of one relationship (Jews-land) and the negation of the perceived opposite relationship (Palestinians-land). The project’s statement to preserve Israeli culture only further perpetuates the exclusion of Palestinians from Israeliness.

This is not to claim by any means that Palestinian identity should be erased or assimilated into Israeliness, nor to determine what the Palestinians do or should seek or desire, but that the perception of Palestinians and Israel as mutually exclusive fuels

hatred and invisibilization in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere. It is incumbent upon us to reorient that perception to allow for Palestinians, as well as other minorities, to be included with their self-stated identity in the national discourse. It is crucial to realize that these questions of recognition in the Israeli context are not limited to public social reconciliation of past trauma or ghosts. To be recognized as Israeli, whether through cultural attributions or legal standings, carries enormous repercussions to policy, rights, and resources, in a political landscape that denies the de facto governance of over 3 million stateless Palestinians. Additionally, we must not overlook the growing sentiment in Israeli society that Palestinians and Palestinian narratives should be excluded from the public sphere and human rights (Cohen, 2014).

Structural Pitfalls of The Digital National Collection The Digital National Collection, at least publicly, avoids reference to politics of representation or historical injustice. It is impossible to determine whether it is an agreement of silence with its parent organization’s political mission, or the opposite.

Ambiguity around these specific politics can be found in the National Collection’s actions to address some issues, such as the representation of non-European Jews, and the choice to avoid others. In this next section we wish to review some of the ambiguity around the Collection’s practical choices, as well as demonstrate their political nature and the ambiguous picture they draw towards the project’s ethical commitments—whether they be Zionist or anti-colonial.

Collecting Period The association with a Zionist timeline, briefly mentioned in the collection’s website, limits the scope of the collection in accordance to a specific ideology, suggesting that any records that are not pertinent to Zionism are irrelevant. This distinction might be reasonable for a topical archive or collection such as the Zionist Central Archive. As a national level collection, the exclusion of whatever is outside the scope of Zionism, reduces significantly the ability of the project for preservation. Cultural

production in Israel and Palestine did not follow ideological lines and was created by Jews and non-Jews before Zionism as well as outside and against Zionism. How will the collection be able to represent records that oppose this ideology such as Palestinian dissidence posters or records that are simply outside the scope of the chosen timelines such as Jewish art that predates 1881?

Adhering to Zionism as a leading time frame violently excludes a whole range of cultures and records that do not fall under this purview, and skews heavily the historical representation possible in the collection.

Pre-existing Collections The Digital National Collection reliance on pre-existing collections helps facilitate its operation, alleviating some of the financial costs that research and accessioning require. It also allows for the majority of the materials entering the collection to be more meaningful and robust due to their pre-established preservation (in contrary to records that are scattered across different collections or sources). However, it also presents a limitation. Many of the pre-existing collections are already assembled due to existing resources that allowed them to be collected and stored. Some were a result of existing institutions, others a result of familial care, but all were a result of an understanding of the importance of preservation and a privilege in resources to do so. Relying on these collections’ preferences, though, means that we are limited by pre-existing preservation practices, and pre-existing knowledge as well, which can hinder the possibility of generating or excavating new knowledge that had been omitted in the past. In general, these pre-existing collections serve to reproduce the already privileged and existing hegemony.

Language Inaccessibility As mentioned before, Arabic-speaking peoples (Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze) are a significant part of the Israeli population, with a tradition and cultural production that stretches centuries into the past. Yet, the Digital National Collection—reflective of many other institutions—lacks the

resources and scope to collect, catalog, and make available its materials to Arabic speaking populations or making Arabic based collections accessible. That is not to say that there is no desire or successful attempts to mitigate this gap, yet systemic neglect and an overarching social standing of Arabic, prevents the collection from dealing with this form of exclusion in a fully engaged way. This is by no means an insular occurrence—the recent controversial Nation State Law removed Arabic’s official status, betraying government language and cultural bias.

The national trend towards exclusion of the Arabic language from the public sphere is reflected in the Digital National Collection in two ways: the epistemological and language-based barrier to survey, research, access and catalog Arabic inscribed collections, and a pending decision to not present the final website through any bilingual interface.

Collections inscribed in Arabic, research about major cultural producers that are written, and any information housed in Arabic-speaking institutions are to a very large extent inaccessible to the committees that govern the collection. The committees cannot evaluate documents and findings in a language they do not understand. Even for collections that are known through research done in other languages (Hebrew or English), the absence of catalogers precludes the development of any measurements to the collection’s scope, importance, and possible contribution, automatically leading to its classification as irrelevant. Furthermore, having few Arab and Palestinian staff diminishes the ability to communicate, negotiate, and build trust with existing collections in the Palestinian, Bedouin, and Druze communities, which in turn diminishes the resolution in which collections in those communities can even be found and researched. Although a lack of such trust had already foiled some collections from being included and digitized, an attempt has been made to involve Arab dance collections in the project.

Furthermore, the (not yet final) decision to not create an Arabic interface for the website excludes an entire segment of the population from the collection. The demand for Arabic speaking communities to either learn Hebrew in order to participate in this national project, or simply be left out, only further perpetuate the erasure and mistrust experienced for decades. Yet this is a compounded problem, as it also sends a message of intolerance and to the Hebrew-speaking

communities Arabic, Arabic art, Arabic culture is not a part of Israel’s national culture. This choice provides a resounding answer to the question of who gets to be Israeli—not those who consider Arabic culture and language as a defining characteristic of their identity.

While structural problems within the National Digital Collection can be overcome, we argue that the epistemic marginalization of Arabic cannot. Not operating in a bilingual structure, where roughly one-fifth of the population speaks Arabic, limits the ability to respectfully understand what is valuable to these communities or communicate with members of the community about existing collections; in short, marginalizing Arabic hinders an already fraught relationship from building trust. An effort to represent a national culture should include the myriad of cultural identities that comprise that culture.

Conclusion What Ben-David’s story demonstrates for us is the ability to bridge, include, and reconcile ghosts of past oppression by redefining in an expansive way the boundaries of culture. While his inclusion marks a somewhat new path forward for the Yemeni community and possibly more, it is also a scar, a reminder of all those who were erased or marginalized beyond visibility. Today, the battle of cultural identity and historical narratives means the Palestinian-Israeli identity is demarcated out of our society.

These tensions under which the collection operates are a sign of the current political landscape, where inclusion and exclusion carry meaningful and practical repercussions and the pendulum tilts heavily towards exclusionary nationalism. It is almost impossible to imagine a system that will operate under the current conditions and perform up to the task of undoing past erasure to create a more just representation of what Israeli culture is and can be. And yet the Digital National Collection’s contributions and partial reconciliations are extremely meaningful as they do something to settle an historical ghost.

They are, however, insufficient in the face of the increasing demarcation of minority groups from representation in the public sphere. Not because of the project’s good intentions or political constraints, but because only a full inclusion of the narratives of the oppressed—chiefly that of the Palestinian Nakba and sense

of national identity that predated 1948—can lead to a new horizon in the political moors of the Israeli Society’s current situation. Inclusion and recognition in this collection should not be the aftereffect of a possible future political solution; rather, inclusion must be the necessary step to beginning a new process.

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Retrieved from https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index Allweil, Y. (2012). Israeli housing and nation building: Establishment of the State-Citizen Contract, 1948–1953.

Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 23(2), 51– 67.

Bat-Yaar, N. (2010). Israel Fashion Art 1948–2008. Tel Aviv: Resling.

Ben Zvi, I. (1949). Travel journal (Aden). Yemen.

Cohen, H. (2014). Nakba Law, Nakba Day. www.idi.org. Retrieved from https://www.idi.org.il/articles/4640 Deri, D. (2017). The ancestral sin. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7193882/ Efrat, Z. (2018). Object of Zionism: The architecture of Israel.

London, England: Spector Books .

Fish, S. (1989). No bias, no merit: The case against blind submission. In S. Fish & F. Jameson (Eds.), Doing what comes naturally (pp. 163–179). Durham: Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381600-008 Foote, K. (1990). To remember and forget: Archives, memory, and culture. The American Archivist, 53(3), 378–392.

Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.53.3.d87u013444j3g6r2 Gaines, J. (1991). Contested culture: The image, the voice, and the law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Guilat, Y. (2001). The Yemeni ideal in Israeli culture and arts.

Israel Studies, 6(3), 26–53.

Guilat, Y. (2016). Portrait of pure exactitude: The life and oeuvre of the silversmith Moshe Ben-David: From Bayḥān to the Israeli melting pot.

Hakohen, D. (2003). Immigrants in turmoil: mass immigration to Israel and its repercussions in the 1950s and after.

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Hofstadter & Yavne, 2016 Meir-Glitzenstein, E. (2014). The “magic carpet” exodus of Yemenite Jewry: an Israeli formative myth. East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press.

Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage. (n.d.). About. Retrieved from https://landmarks.gov.il/%D7%90%D7%95%D7%93%D7%9 5%D7%AA National Library. (2017). Design Team, Digital National Collection. Retrieved from http://blog.nli.org.il/author/eshkol_design/ Office of The Prime Minister. (1959). A report on the public investigation committee for the events of Wadi Salib 9/7/59. Israel: Office of The Prime Minister.

Sa’di, A. H., & Abu-Lughod, L. (2007). Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Schwartz, J. M., & Cook, T. (2002). Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory. Archival Science, 2(1–2), 1–19. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628 Sela, R. (2018). The genealogy of colonial plunder and erasure – Israel’s control over Palestinian archives. Social Semiotics, 28(2), 201–229. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1291140 Shenhav, Y. (2012). Spineless bookkeeping: The use of Mizrahi Jews as pawns against Palestinian refugees. Retrieved from https://972mag.com/spineless-bookkeeping-the-use-ofmizrahi-jews-as-pawns-against-palestinian-refugees/56472/ State of Israel. (2018). Basic law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Pub. L., No. 2743, 898.

Stoler, A. L. (2002). Colonial archives and the arts of governance.

Archival Science, 2(1–2), 87–109. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632 Swirski, S., Zelingher, R., & Konor-Attias, E. (2015). Israeli: A social report. Israel: Adva Center.

Zaksenberg, H. (2017). The Digital National Collection: Architecture, dance, design and theater. www.nli.org.

Retrieved from http://blog.nli.org.il/culture_and_art/

UCLA InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies Title "A LOUD response to Zero Tolerance"

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99f98163

Journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 15(2)

ISSN 1548-3320

Author Livier, Ruth

Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed

eScholarship.org

Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

On June 19, 2018, in response to 45th administration’s 1 Zero Tolerance policy and its impacts, four Latinx entertainment media professionals founded LOUD (Latin@s-Outraged-UnitedDefiant), an activist group based in Los Angeles, CA. For transparency, I note my position as a founding member of the group. It is from this insider’s perspective that I approach this analysis.2 In this paper, I bring my experience in the Hollywood entertainment industry into conversation with critical archival studies and border activism literature.

The LOUD team came together because we refused to watch the U.S. government’s violence against immigrant and refugee families unfold while comfortably reacting to it via our digital devices. We were also compelled to speak up because we believe there is a link between the exclusionary media that traditional Hollywood systemically produces and this current U.S. government-crafted humanitarian crisis. Acknowledging this link is important because it can open the door for honest dialogue geared towards taking sustainable corrective steps—at an infrastructural level—for more balanced representations of all of our communities in the media. As LOUD founding member, Yareli Arizmendi, states: As Latinx working actors (and union members) we have become hardened to the words used to describe us in the industry, to the characters we are called to play time and time again: Murderers, drug lords, rapists, kidnappers, gang members, illegal aliens, and only sometimes, undocumented humans. But, while we are hired to bring these roles to life, the country learns.

It gets used to this convenient fiction standing in the place of truth . . .

We, as working actors and media creators, feel responsible for having softened the soil upon which these atrocities are being committed. We thus feel a responsibility to raise our voices publicly.3 1

My refusal to name him in a consistent manner is a deliberate act of resistance.

2 I am not speaking for the group, but sharing my own learning process during the course of our activities. Though, admittedly, at times, this line might seem blurred.

3 Yareli Arizmendi quote emailed to LOUD team on Aug. 16, 2018. [Edit by author.]

It is because of this link between Hollywood and this crisis that it is imperative that media professionals raise our voices.

Many of us in the Hollywood entertainment industry who represent the majority world (Alam, 2008), are familiar with its endless “symbolic pronouncements and token gestures” (Hunt, 2011) regarding equitable, fair, and diverse representation.

The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; 2019) Hollywood division was created as a watchdog organization after the whitewash fiasco of the 1999– 2000 Network TV lineup when not one single actor of color was featured in any of their shows. The 2014 “Latino Media Gap” report found that Latinx representation in media, relative to our share of the U.S. population, was even lower in 2014 than it was 70 years prior (Negrón-Muntaner, 2014). In 2015, #OscarsSoWhite, created by April Reign, went viral on Twitter as a pushback against the all-white Oscar nominees. 4 The 2016 and 2017 USC Annenberg “Comprehensive Report[s] on Diversity in Entertainment,” found “an epidemic of invisibility” in Hollywood, where the entire industry is still “a straight, White boys’ club” (Smith, Choueiti, & Pieper, 2016).

These data indicate that the media traditionally produced

by Hollywood, tell an incomplete and unbalanced narrative about U.S. society. Latinx communities are largely misrepresented, symbolically annihilated, and/or hierarchically situated on a secondary-strata to Anglo “normativity” (Caswell, 2014; Chávez, 2015). This centralizing of whiteness in the media is oppressive to the majority world. As Jesús Treviño (2001) states in the preface to his book, Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement: The evening news, documentaries, primetime television, radio, movies, and other forms of popular culture establish the facts of record, set the tone and parameters for their acceptance, endorse what will be remembered as historically important, and sanction what is valid in society . . . . The converse is also true.

If mass media ignore an event, it simply didn’t happen.

Although individuals may remember the importance of a given event, unless validated by media, its significance for society may be forever lost in a black hole of cultural forgetfulness. (xi– xii) 4

April Reign’s Twitter handle: ReignOfApril.

In the activist arena, like in Hollywood, LOUD members are involved in memory work. In the media, we must remain vigilant and stand up against any willful obfuscation of the existence, complexities, and contributions of our communities to society, as well as to any irresponsible perpetuation of the myth of Anglo exceptionalism. In the activist space, we must not allow the state to control the narrative about Zero Tolerance, its impact, nor to define and dehumanize the people they are targeting. This is why we must be deliberate about our archives. As Verne Harris (2002) contends, the archive “is a battleground for meaning and significance.” Our documentary records and recordkeeping practices are our active participation in this “battleground.” Taking control of them is a political move, which denotes our active participation in constructing the narrative of this crisis from our own perspectives.

In the next section, I will define my terms. Then, I will take a look at the ways in which we have engaged with social media and digital tools in the course of our activities, in both our public-facing and internal-facing arenas. My goal is to identify the archival needs that have emerged at different instances of LOUD’s process and to think through the ways in which archivists trained in human rights might be key allies for our activist group.

Key Terms Zero Tolerance The 045th administration’s border militarization policy systematically criminalizes refugee asylum seekers (United Nations, 2016) and seems to specifically target border crossers with children (Flores, 2018; Levinson, 2018). According to an NPR report, Zero Tolerance was modeled after Operation Streamline, which began in 2015 in Del Rio, Texas (Burnett, 2018). Andrew Burridge (2008) connects Streamline to the growth of the Prison Industrial Complex, which Zero Tolerance seems to be escalating (Sharma, 2007). One difference is that under Streamline, families were not torn apart.

Zero Tolerance was officially announced by Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, on April 6, 2018 (United States

Department of Justice, 2018). However, officials had been discussing the scheme to tear children from their parents as a deterrent strategy for border crossers more than a year earlier.

In a March 7, 2017 interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Wolf Blitzer asked Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly: Are Department of Homeland Security personnel going to separate the children from their moms and dads?

To which Kelly replied: Yes . . . . I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents. (Díaz, 2017)

Continuing its practices of separating families that started with slavery and Native American boarding schools, the U.S. government is, once again, separating children from their families (Kaur, 2018). A move, which Amnesty International has characterized as, “nothing short of torture” (Amnesty International, 2018).

Records I am engaging with the definition of records provided by the International Council on Archives (ICA): A record is recorded information produced or received in the initiation, conduct or completion of an institutional or individual activity and that comprises content, context and structure sufficient to provide evidence of the activity. (ICA, 1997, p. 22)

In his article, “Concepts of Record (1): Evidence, Information, and Persistent Representations,” Geoffrey Yeo (2007) points to the affordances of records. These include: “memory, accountability, legitimization of power, a sense of personal or social identity and continuity, and the communication of such benefits across space and time” (p. 330).

Records are key to LOUD’s work because of these affordances.

The records we are (co-)creating provide, for example, evidence of the government’s violent acts against refugee families, so that the administration can be held accountable.

Memory Yeo links records to memory stating: Records are linked with collective memory because they transcend the limits of a single human mind . . . . They allow communities, and their individual members, to recall things otherwise forgotten, or at best imperfectly remembered . . . .

The concept of memory implies a capacity to retrieve information from the past . . . . Evidence can substantiate memories and help prevent their falsification. (pp. 330–331)

Evidential records participate in memory work. This is why we must interrogate, as Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T.Kay Sangwand (2017) discuss in “Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction,” the context of record creation and the powerdynamics that come into play (Caswell, Allina Migoni, Geraci, & Cifor, 2017). Additionally, Katherine Hite (2011) points to the link between social memory and the politics inherent in which groups participate in the creation of the memory surrounding an event: . . . the concept of “historical memory” . . . refers to ways in which groups, collectives, and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events. (pp.

1079–1082)

Memory work is central to LOUD. The records we are (co-)creating in the process of our work participate in shaping and sustaining the memory of Zero Tolerance from perspectives that push back against the Trump administration’s deceptive rhetoric.

Next, I will take a look at the types of records we are engaging with and (co-) creating in our public-facing arena and the archival needs that these have revealed.

LOUD: Our Public-Facing Arena LOUD’s public-facing activities have included: building a social media presence, participating in marches, protests, and rallies, presentations, fundraising, and video production. All of

these activities have necessitated the use of digital tools, engagement with and the creation of records, and they have also revealed a series of archival needs.

Social Media, Digital Tools, and Our Recordkeeping Needs The goal of our social media presence has been to recruit, to inform, and to inspire action. We created a LOUD Gmail account and put out a call on Facebook for volunteers. We received emails and began building our network. We also used Facebook to inform and motivate others to join us at marches, protests, and rallies. Limits of this approach are that we reached only those already on our Facebook networks, digital distance came into play,5 and it kept our communications within the Facebook and Google gazes.

We documented our participation at marches, rallies, and protests via photographs and videos, which serve as records of actions.

Figure 1. Keep Families Together march in downtown Los Angeles.

Vivianne and Ruth attended. This march was an emotional rollercoaster for us. From an angry man throwing stuff at marchers from his second story window to our final stop at the Metropolitan Detention Center where we communicated with detainees via cellphone lights. June 14.

5

By this, I mean the affective dimensions of not communicating face-to-face.

Figure 2. Westwood, CA rally. The four of us attended. Maxine Waters gave a speech that was later criticized by Schumer. The spirit of Waters’ speech was, in my view, not as he framed it. June 23.

Figure 3. Keep Families Together march in downtown Los Angeles.

LOUD’s growing network in attendance. June 30.

In an effort to inform, we also created a Facebook page, HowtobeLOUD (2019). A series of challenges emerged. These included: keeping up with the daily deluge of news stories, how to store and organize these stories for future access, and what curation protocols we should establish. Ultimately, we decided that our Facebook page should serve as a resource for those looking for ways to take action.

Figure 4. Image from HowtobeLOUD Facebook page.

In some cases, this has simply meant sharing stories and asking others to do the same. The goal has been to keep the human impacts of this barbaric administration and its Zero Tolerance policy from getting lost in the deluge of information, and thus silenced and forgotten:

Figure 5. Image from LOUD’s HowtobeLOUD Facebook page.

We also produced videos as vehicles via which to unite our voices in visible support of impacted immigrant and/or refugee families:

Figure 6. Image from LOUD’s HowtobeLOUD Facebook page.

The recruitment emails, Facebook page, news stories, photographs, and videos are all records that are associated with our public-facing activities. Via these records, we are creating an archives of events as they unfold. Referring to Michelle Caswell et al.’s (2017) article, “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation,” keeping a record of our work may be a move towards imagining otherwise and participating in how this historical moment is represented in the future.6 To establish our recordkeeping system and deliberately take control of how our records might participate in the social memory of this moment, we ought to recruit an archivist. The right archivist for our team needs to be trained in human rights and embrace the praxis of social justice. This is because with every archival decision that is made, from how our records are created, described, organized, stored, made accessible, and preserved, the focus needs to be on centralizing the interests and well-being of the populations we aim to support. LOUD’s archival project must be community-centric: A means for community self-representation, identity construction, and empowerment (Caswell, Allina Migoni, et al., 2017).

Given the urgency of the crisis, however, it stands to question: Should archival concerns come into play at this early 6

Even though we do not think of ourselves as a community archive.

stage of our activities? In the next section, I will take a look at the myriad of ways in which archival concerns have come into play during our engagement with sensitive information and the (co-)creation of active records and discuss why I believe the answer to the above question is 'yes'.

LOUD: Our Internal-Facing Arena I first became aware of Zero Tolerance and its impacts via social media. Managing the deluge of information about this administration’s barbaric policy and the escalating horrors that were revealed by the tireless efforts of journalists, public leaders, whistleblowers, and activists, was not an easy task (Democracy Now, 2019. Finding an optimal system of sharing them among the group in an effort to understand the problem and in order to plan our strategies, was also challenging.

Records and Recordkeeping In an effort to organize and preserve some of these news stories, I turned to Zotero; a free, open-source tool that helps to manage research material.

An affective dimension to organizing the records, is that it helped to alleviate some of my anxiety regarding their access for future use. Ensuring their future access was also a way of holding myself accountable for not forgetting these stories, even if and when the media turned its attention elsewhere.

The content of these records participate in telling particular narratives about this crisis. The following images of an August 30, 2018 Tweet from MSNBC correspondent, Jacob Soboroff, serve as examples:

Figure 7. Soboroff, Jacob. Tweet from Aug. 30, 2018. https://twitter.com/jacobsoboroff/status/1037832627825201152.

The first image represents page 3 of 20 of document 213.

It gives us a case title, a page ID, and the form contains categories, descriptions, and numerical values. This digital image opens up questions of provenance and authenticity. It also contains data about how many children were reported to have been in custody as of the date of the tweet, how many of their parents had been deported, and how many children in prison were under the age of five. This image is also embedded with information about the power-dynamics that went into the creation of the document. Its format and content decisions are not neutral. They are political because, in reducing the humans it represents and the violence to which they have been

subjected to numbers, this document fails to communicate the physical, emotional, and psychological impacts of Zero Tolerance.

This next image is of a tweet from Raíces, one of the most vocal and active pro-immigrant groups during this crisis.

Figure 8. Raíces Tweet from August 16, 2018. An audio recording of an interview with a father incarcerated at the Karnes Detention Center. https://twitter.com/RAICESTEXAS/status/1030265187323006976.

The original tweet contains audio in Spanish and is accompanied by English language translations. The format of this record also tells a story about the power-dynamics that have participated in its creation. In this case, we hear from a father who is telling, in his own voice, what he has experienced and witnessed while at the Karnes Detention Center. This format allows us to understand—at a visceral level—the horrors to which these fellow human beings are being subjected.

While Zotero has proven to be a good first step in helping to organize and make these records accessible for future use, an archivist trained in human rights might help us understand their content and context more critically.

LOUD has also created a series of internal records, which demand features beyond what Zotero provides. These records include notes from our meetings, emails, photographs, videos, databases, communications among our volunteers, and records that we are (co-)creating in collaboration with other activist groups. Next, I

will take a closer look at the types of digital tools and digital records management system requirements that this collaborative work has revealed.

Co-created records and Digital technologies Immigrant activist groups have employed digital technologies to facilitate their work at the U.S. southern border.

Humane Borders is a group that has used geospatial information technologies (GIS) to create maps that help guide migrants to water stations and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) repurposed cellphones to create the Transborder Immigration Tool (TBIT), which aids migrants on their journey while keeping the transmission signal outside of the government’s gaze (Walsh, 2013).

Though our brief intervention in the activist arena has taken place beyond the border, our work has also been facilitated by the use of digital technologies.

Digital tools have allowed us to participate in fulfilling the most critical self-assessed needs—including food and medical attention—for immigrant families and/or asylum seekers who have been released from detention. Some of the people we have reached out to are families who have been released and reunited. In other cases, one or more of the family members, usually the children, are still imprisoned. To fulfill their needs, volunteers have directly communicated with these families and used the digital tools with which they are most familiar in order to collect the needed information. Though functional, this process has revealed a tension between the urgency of the work and the thoughtful consideration of any potential unintended consequences of these actions.

In other words, while digital tools have facilitated our activist work, they have also complicated it. This bifurcation has brought to light the need for an optimal digital records management system that addresses some key archival concerns, including: the ethics of file formats, issues of privacy, authenticity, rights in records, the right to be forgotten, preservation, and access (Terwangne et al., 2013).

The questions that we need to address during the process of our activities are: • Which file formats are we using and why?

• •

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

What are the ethics around this? o Are the formats available to all? Can the information be edited? By whom? When?

Via which platforms are we communicating and sharing documents? o Are these protected environments?

Do they prioritize privacy?

How are we taking privacy concerns into consideration? o Whose privacy are we taking into consideration?

Who has access to the records? o How? At which stage(s) of the process?

How do we establish a record’s trustworthiness?

Authenticity? Reliability? Provenance?

Do refugee/migrants have a say in what and how their information is collected?

Do refugees/migrants have a say in if, how, when (their) records are destroyed? (The right to be forgotten).

Who has a right to the record?

Who is visible and to whom, in this infrastructure? And, why?

Who are the point people at each stage of the process? o What are their responsibilities and accountabilities?

How are records being archived and preserved?

What are the ethics around sustainability?

What guidelines/standards/protocols have been put in place?

What power dynamics are embedded in the records?

What liability concerns are at play?

It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into each concern.

The key takeaway is that it is crucial that we interrogate how sensitive information is being collected and organized, and by whom, because it is vital that we create and sustain sensitive information in the most secure and ethical environments. To refer back to my earlier question: Given the urgency of this crisis, should archival concerns come into play at this early stage of our activities? The answer is yes, because archival concerns emerge as a consequence of the work itself.

Archival concerns need to also be taken into consideration because the active records that we (co-)create to address today’s urgent needs can also serve as evidential

records in the future. Taking a cue from Frank Golding’s (2015) work on the “A Charter of Rights to Childhood Records,” we should take into account that our co-created records may contain instances of how the U.S. government is currently violating the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 2019) and might, therefore, serve as evidential records of government misconduct in the future.

Anne Gilliland (2000) explains: The archival concern for the description and preservation of evidence involves a rich understanding of the implicit and explicit values of materials at creation and over time. It also involves an acute awareness of how such values can be diminished or lost when the integrity of materials is compromised. (p. 11)

Therefore, because the situation is urgent, collaborating with archivists trained in human rights who can keep these considerations at the forefront to ensure they are factored into the groups’ decision-making processes, is imperative.

Again, along with archival concerns, these activities have revealed some specific technological necessities. We need digital tools that will help us determine immigrant and/or refugee families’ most urgent needs, tools that will ensure these needs are fulfilled, and tools that facilitate and ensure that our communications are private and outside of the social media and government gazes.

Our Digital Records Management System Requirements In my initial research, I have not found any digital records management system that addresses our needs, fulfills all of our requirements, nor also aligns with our community-centric values. Because of this gap, we are left to do our work piecemeal. This also means that we gravitate towards digital tools, including file formats, that are recognizable and readily available to us, regardless of the archival concerns these might raise. As stated earlier, the volunteers on the ground have to continually balance the tension between the urgency of the crisis we hope to help alleviate and the thoughtful consideration of any unintended consequences our choice of tools and approaches might put into play.

It, therefore, stands to be interrogated: How many resources and how much funding have been allocated towards designing information technologies that specifically address the semantic, epistemic, and ontological preferences and/or needs of the U.S. Latinx migrant and refugee populations and those of the activists who want to help and support them? In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble (2018) points to André Brock, and she explains: . . . Whiteness and maleness [are normalized] in the domain of digital technology and as a presupposition for the prioritization of resources, content, and even design of information and communication technologies (ICTs). (p.

90) When “Whiteness and maleness” are centralized in the design of digital tools, the needs and voices of activists and the migrant communities they aim to support, may be marginalized and/or fail to be considered. The practical and affective challenges of activist work are augmented and the tensions around workflow can cause friction among volunteers.

Meanwhile, funding structures and decision-makers seem to remain comfortably out of reach from any accountability within the conversations among volunteer on the project.

Latinx communities frequently have to recalibrate the ways in which we understand and navigate the world in order to conform to the worldviews and biases that are incorporated into digital designs. This means, however, that we come to understand the world in more complex ways; from both our points of view and those of the current designers of these technologies. As Anzaldúa (1987) teaches us, “[the] energy [of mestiza consciousness] comes from breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm.”

Latina feminist frameworks, “[allow for] new knowledge [to be] uncovered by looking at liminal spaces and interstitial gaps for the “unheard, the unthought, the unspoken (Fierro & Bernal, 2016).” This design gap should, therefore, also be seen as a design opportunity.

Given my experience in this activist arena thus far, I (re)imagine our optimal digital records management system to address the following: • •

•

• • • •

• • • • •

7

The system needs to be conceptualized as an activist tool that participates in the network of border and immigrant activism.

The designers need to be versed in Chicana/o, Latina Feminist, and LatCrit Methodologies.7 o For example: Muxerista Portraiture (Flores, 2017), Platicas (Fierro & Delgado Bernal, 2016), and Papelitos Guardados (Latina Feminist Group, 2001).

It needs to facilitate our archival needs: including the description, storage, access, and preservation of diverse types of records. o It must allow us to create and upload written, oral, and visual records and testimonios. o It needs to allow for these diverse types of records to be shared and tracked among different stakeholders. o It must offer differing levels of control and accessibility.

The system needs to facilitate our ability to securely collect and analyze data remotely and from different sources.

It needs to be secure: Privacy concerns must be prioritized.

We also need a “fulfillment tracker” that will help us keep track of: What has been promised? o To whom? o By whom? o What has been fulfilled and/or at which stage of the fulfillment process each item is? o Expected dates of delivery and/or completion. o Who is accountable at each stage of the process?

The system needs to allow for “the Right to be Forgotten.”

It must have the capacity to operate across different linguistic, semantic, and ontological considerations.

It must be participatory, in its design.

Taking a cue from EDT, the voices of the immigrants/refugee populations we are working with, must be heard and incorporated into the system’s design (Walsh, 2013).

These individuals must also have the ability to upload their own data and be able to track their records.

I was introduced to these concepts by Yadira Valencia during her presentation in Professor Danny Solorzano’s Fall 2018 RAC.

As a new grassroots activist group in the information age working with traditionally marginalized communities, we, at LOUD, ought to be deliberate about our archival autonomy (Evans, 2015). In order to achieve this, we need a digital records management system designed to address our specific needs while being semantically, ontologically, and culturally relevant and aligned with our community-centric values.

Conclusion In this article, I have taken a look at LOUD, a Latinx-led, grassroots activist group created by entertainment professionals in response to the 045th administration’s Zero Tolerance border militarization policy. I have analyzed the ways in which the group has used social media and digital tools in the course of our activities, the records we have (co-)created, and the archival needs that these have revealed. I have pointed to the ways in which archivists trained in human rights might be key collaborators to the group, and I have (re)imagined the features required of an optimal digital records management system specifically designed to address the group’s needs and those of the populations we aim to serve and support. Though at first glance, organizing and storing records may not seem to be the most pressing concerns of grassroots activist groups like LOUD, the evidential power contained in records should be considered from the moment of their creation and thus prompt discussions of archival concerns from the outset. LOUD has worked with and (co-)created records in both our public-facing and internal-facing arenas. In each instance, specific archival needs have been revealed, thanks in part to the different ways in which the group’s activities are involved in memory work.

The social memory of Zero Tolerance as a policy enacted by the 45th administration to justify the psychological, emotional, and physical harms they have perpetrated on thousands of children and their families, must not be forgotten (Goudarzi, 2018; Wagner, 2018). As entertainment media professionals, we at LOUD feel responsible for speaking up. As caring humans, we must serve as witnesses to ensure that state records (or the lack thereof) are not the only documentary accounts of these families’ time in and out of detention (Burridge, 2009; Golding, 2015; Pratt, 2008).

As activists in this arena, we must

participate in disrupting the hegemonic control over how this crisis is historicized, extending our work beyond the present moment by deliberately archiving our activities. This is why we must make sure we participate in if, how, and when the narratives about our communities are included in the records of society, both in the physical and in the digital spaces. Archivists trained in human rights and versed in digital, Chicana/o, Latina Feminist, and LatCrit methodologies would be invaluable to these efforts.

In future work, I look forward to being in conversation with other activist groups with similar focuses in order to assess if, when, and how our data collection, digital records management system, and archival needs intersect and where they might differ.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Yareli Arizmendi, Vivianne Nacif, Maria Montenegro, Gracen Brilmyer, and Yadira Valencia for your invaluable notes. Also, thank you to my academic advisor, Professor Sarah T. Roberts, for your guidance and encouragement.

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