20 Years of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective Sarah Burney and Ambika Trasi
We live in the age of the archive. We have the luxury (and burden) of seemingly infinite streams of information available to us through the mere touch of our fingertips and, at a moment’s notice, have access to innumerable articles and resources. Google, the most widely known and used online search engine, has become an official verb for seeking out an answer to a question, a fact, or any article on the web. Wikipedia, which defines itself as “a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” is a website we now almost unquestionably accept as a reliable source. Anyone with an email account or a presence on social media has the ability to archive a conversation or post, making anyone who possesses such an account an archivist of their own material. This is in stark contrast with how archives have been considered traditionally—stockpiles of records and historical accounts, written and stored by scholars and academics, which remained unattainable to those outside of privileged networks. Yet while the advent of the Internet promised a democratization of knowledge-building and accessibility, with new avenues for telling and disseminating the untold stories and buried histories of marginalized people, it did not take long for capitalism, increased privatization, government surveillance, and supremacism to enter and establish virtual hierarchies and enclosures and to practice exploitation and policing in the same ways they are exercised offline. With current manipulation tactics ranging from “clickbait” articles to algorithms that influence and control what we see—based on our own biases—navigating the web is a much murkier experience than it has ever been before. What’s more, the gatekeepers operating from behind the screens belong to privileged groups, intending to influence not just which narratives get exposed and gain traction over others, but also what we share and consume—even how we vote and think about our neighbors and fellow citizens.
(4)
For South Asians and othered communities—particularly those who have grown up in the diaspora—questioning and doubting the knowledge and propaganda that we receive and are asked to absorb everyday is not an unfamiliar task. With some exception, nearly all of us at some point in our lives became imbued with the understanding that history has always been narrated and circulated through one dominant (white, male) perspective. Upon this realization, we learned to look at the world through suspicious lenses, to unlearn lessons we were taught in our schools and universities, and to let go of certain absurd