Archiving Caribbean Identity

Archiving Caribbean Identity
Author: John Aarons
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2022-06-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000590712

Archiving Caribbean Identity highlights the "Caribbeanization" of archives in the region, considering what those archives could include in the future and exploring the potential for new records in new formats. Interpreting records in the broadest sense, the 15 chapters in this volume explore a wide variety of records that represent new archival interpretations. The book is split into two parts, with the first part focusing on record forms that are not generally considered "archival" in traditional Western practice. The second part explores more "traditional" archival collections and demonstrates how these collections are analysed and presented from the perspective of Caribbean peoples. As a whole, the volume suggests how colonial records can be repurposed to surface Caribbean narratives. Reflecting on the unique challenges faced by developing countries as they approach their archives, the volume considers how to identify and archive records in the forms and formats that reflect the postcolonial and decolonized Caribbean, how to build an archive of the people that documents contemporary society and reflects Caribbean memory, and how to repurpose the colonial archives so that they assist the Caribbean in reclaiming its history. Archiving Caribbean Identity demonstrates how non-textual cultural traces function as archival records and how folk-centred perspectives disrupt conventional understandings of records. The book should thus be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of archives, memory, culture, history, sociology, and the colonial and postcolonial experience.

Decolonizing the Caribbean Record

Decolonizing the Caribbean Record
Author: Jeannette A. Bastian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 816
Release: 2018
Genre: Archives
ISBN: 9781634000598

Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader is a compendium of forty essays by archivists and academics within and outside of the Caribbean region that address challenges of collecting, representing and preserving the records and cultural expressions of former colonial societies, exploring the contribution of these records to nation-building. How the power of the archives can be subverted to serve the oppressed rather than the oppressors, the colonized rather than the colonizers, is the central theme of this Reader. This collection seeks to disrupt traditional notions of archives, instead re-imagining records within the context of Caribbean cultures and identities where the oral may be privileged over the written, the creative design over text, the marginal over the mainstream. Envisioned initially as a foundational text that supports the archives education program at the University of the West Indies and documents the history and development of archives and records in the Caribbean, this volume addresses such issues as oral traditions, records repatriation, community archives, cultural forms and format and diasporic collections. Although focused on the Caribbean region, the essays, ranging from the theoretical to the practice-based to the personal are applicable to the global archival concerns of all decolonized societies.

Archiving Cultures

Archiving Cultures
Author: Jeannette A. Bastian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2023-03-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100088905X

Archiving Cultures defines and models the concept of cultural archives, focusing on how diverse communities express and record their heritage and collective memory and why and how these often-intangible expressions are archival records. Analysis of oral traditions, memory texts and performance arts demonstrate their relevance as records of their communities. Key features of this book include definitions of cultural heritage and archival heritage with an emphasis on intangible cultural heritage. Aspects of cultural heritage such as oral traditions, performance arts, memory texts and collective memory are placed within the context of records and archives. It presents strategies for reconciling intangible and tangible cultural expressions with traditional archival theory and practice and offers both analog and digital models for constructing cultural archives through examples and vignettes. The audience includes archivists and other information workers who challenge Western archival theory and scholars concerned with interdisciplinary perspectives on tangible and intangible cultural heritage. This book is relevant to scholars involved with non-textual materials and will appeal to a range of academic disciplines engaging with "the archive".

Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts

Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts
Author: Mpho Ngoepe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2023-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1003851924

Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts revisits the definition of a record and extends it to include memory, murals, rock art paintings and other objects. Drawing on five years of research and examples from Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, the authors analyse archives in the African context. Considering issues such as authentication, ownership and copyright, the book considers how murals and their like can be used as extended or counter archives. Arguing that extended archives can reach people in a way that traditional archives cannot and that such archives can be used to bridge the gaps identified within archival repositories, the authors also examine how such archives are managed and authenticated using traditional archival principles. Presenting case studies from organisations such as Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action Archives (GALA) and heritage projects such as the Makgabeng Open Cultural Museum, the authors also analyse Indigenous family praises and songs and explore how such records are preserved and transmitted to the next generation. Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts demonstrates how the voices of the marginalised can be incorporated into archives. Making an important contribution to the effort to decolonise African archives, the book will be essential reading for academics and students working in archival studies, library and information science, Indigenous studies, African studies, cultural heritage, history and anthropology.

Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean

Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean
Author: Allison O. Ramsay
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2024-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666943983

Independence, Colonial Relics, and Monuments in the Caribbean is a collection of critical perspectives on independence and the legacies of colonialism in the post-colonial Caribbean. The contributors examine themes relating to culture, identity, gender, nationhood, heritage and historic preservation in the post-independent Caribbean. In a twenty-first century context where calls for reparatory justice for the people of the Caribbean who have been disadvantaged by the effects of colonialism have intensified, this book is quite relevant as some chapters examine colonialism through relics, laws, statues and monuments, while other chapters explore the implications of African enslavement, the role of Indian indentureship, the Federation of the West Indies and the effect of the American based Black Lives Movement on the Caribbean.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Caribbean and African Studies in Education

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Caribbean and African Studies in Education
Author: Sheron Fraser-Burgess
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2024-09-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1350373699

This handbook covers the history, policy, practice and theories of African and Caribbean education and promotes the sustainability of socio-cultural beliefs, values, knowledge and skills in the regions. Africa and the Caribbean share commonalities of the geopolitical and historical dominance by European empires and colonialism and aftereffects of anti-blackness in the global trade in enslaved persons. Indigenous religious, cultural, and ethnic currents in Africa are echoed in the Caribbean along with a strong infusion of Asian and other ethnic influences. The handbook shows how educators in both regions are grappling with Western education eclipsing indigenous epistemology and contributes to important debates and discourses including culturally relevant teaching, decolonization, critical race theory, Africana studies, Black emancipation, the African diaspora, Bi-cultural experiences, and the climate emergency. It is organized into three sections covering past issues that frame education in Africa and the Caribbean; the present challenges and opportunities of Education in the regions; and future opportunities for education post-2020.

Exhibiting the Archive

Exhibiting the Archive
Author: Peter Lester
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-06-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000597652

Exhibiting the Archive examines the role that exhibition plays in archives and analyses the impact they are understood to have on how users and visitors experience the archive. Drawing on research conducted in Europe, North America and Australia, the book analyses the key theoretical and social influences on exhibition-making in archives today and discusses the role of exhibitions in the archives of tomorrow. This is the first in-depth study to consider exhibition as more than outreach or advocacy: it frames exhibition as an encounter with archives and with people, and interprets it as a mechanism for change within the archive. Against a backdrop of increasing digital activity, Lester asks what experience within the physical space of the archive could be. Drawing on ideas of spatiality and embodiment, as well as social justice and activism, Lester considers the role of exhibitions within the physical archive and the part they can play in reshaping how experience is understood to happen within it. Exhibiting the Archive offers a new perspective on the archive that will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of archives and records. The discussions of cutting-edge practice offer new insights into how exhibitions are conceived and made, and will therefore be of interest to practitioners around the world.

The Materiality of the Archive

The Materiality of the Archive
Author: Sue Breakell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2023-10-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429557558

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation. Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes. The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.

Urgent Archives

Urgent Archives
Author: Michelle Caswell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2021-05-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000386066

Urgent Archives argues that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of more diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical archival studies, this book uncovers how dominant western archival theories and practices are oppressive by design, while looking toward the the radical politics of community archives to envision new liberatory theories and practices. Based on more than a decade of ethnography at community archives sites including the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the book explores how members of minoritized communities activate records to build solidarities across and within communities, trouble linear progress narratives, and disrupt cycles of oppression. Caswell explores the temporal, representational, and material aspects of liberatory memory work, arguing that archival disruptions in time and space should be neither about the past nor the future, but about the liberatory affects and effects of memory work in the present. Urgent Archives extends the theoretical range of critical archival studies and provides a new framework for archivists looking to transform their practices. The book should also be of interest to scholars of archival studies, museum studies, public history, memory studies, gender and ethnic studies and digital humanities.

Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Dreams of Archives Unfolded
Author: Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978806566

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.