Abstract
Based on the author’s experience of curating a collection of migrant community web objects within the UK Web Archive, this paper combines conceptual interrogation with empirical analysis. The central premise is that the incorporation of multilingual, diasporic micro-archives serves to queer the anglophone UK Web Archive, or “patriarchive”, by dismantling steadfast binaries and implicit postcolonial hegemonies. The article challenges Jacques Derrida’s contention that the mal d’archive is the result of the archive’s ‘troubling’ duality, and posits, on the contrary, that such boundary-crossings are the very incarnation of a positive, transgressive form of xenofeminism (XF). From the dualism at the origin of the archive itself, to that comprised in the concept of genre/gender, and from the spatiotemporal in-betweenness of the archived diasporic (web)site to the translanguaging present therein, the article demonstrates how the diasporic micro-archive is the embodiment of a non-binary, trans-inclusive XF ideology. Taking French migrant women’s blogs preserved in the London French Special Collection as a primary source and examining their transformation over time, the paper explores how blog repurposing can be apprehended as a technomaterialist XF act and how the blogs’ increasing multimodal translanguaging bears witness to a form of culturo-linguistic transitioning that transcends binary hybridity.
Highlights
Based on the author’s experience of curating a collection of migrant community web objects within the UK Web Archive, this paper combines conceptual interrogation with empirical analysis
Almost a decade later, concerned about the custodianship of UK resources held by the Internet Archive, the British Library began collecting webpages located in the UK domain to ensure their long-term preservation and accessibility (British Library, no date), while similar initiatives were being rolled out in other national libraries (Milligan, 2019)
To minimise the paradoxical risk of web archives becoming the very digital ‘black holes’ they were built to prevent, the British Library developed its Special Collections. These Collections present users with thematically curated, downsized datasets, whose targeted scope makes them navigable and meaningful on a human level. It is within this context that I curated the London French Special Collection (LFSC) and that this article, in which I take a critical xenofeminist approach to the purportedly universal web archive, is situated
Summary
The world’s first web archive, the not-for-profit Internet Archive, was created in the United States in 1996, only 3 years after the public launch of the World Wide Web by the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (better known as CERN). I posit that, together with the multilingual women curators of the UK Web Archive’s other translingual diasporic micro-archives (Brügger, 2012), the curators embody difference through their agentive incorporation of languages from ‘other’ cultures; and that their curatorial work on minority digital diasporas shakes the patriarchal, neo-colonial hierarchies that tacitly underpin national memory institutions.. I posit that, together with the multilingual women curators of the UK Web Archive’s other translingual diasporic micro-archives (Brügger, 2012), the curators embody difference through their agentive incorporation of languages from ‘other’ cultures; and that their curatorial work on minority digital diasporas shakes the patriarchal, neo-colonial hierarchies that tacitly underpin national memory institutions.3 By creating these diasporic corpora within the framework of the UK Web Archive, the curators deviate from the monolingual anglophone norm dominant in computer studies, internet repositories and the wider web (Fiormonte et al, 2015; Mizumura, 2015; Schroeder and Brügger, 2017; Giannakoulopoulos et al, 2020; Huc-Hepher and Wells, 2021), but they challenge the male tech stereotype and chronic IT gender bias (Pot’Vin-Gorman, 2019). In the footsteps of Haraway, this article ‘is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’ (1991, p. 151)
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