Cultural Archives Research Articles

(Un)dead past of 1984 Sikh massacre in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium

ABSTRACT Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination followed the 1984 state-sanctioned massacre of Sikhs. This historical violence haunts survivors, and its mediation in cultural texts reshapes the interplay between history and memory, voicing forgotten narratives. However, the complex historical agency and collective silences on the 1984 Sikh genocide leave its cultural and literary representations undertheorized. Jaspreet Singh's Helium (2013), serving as a cultural archive, delves into the haunting legacies of this genocide, highlighting its role in memorializing historical loss. Applying hauntology and Agamben's homo sacer, this article investigates how spectral wounds reveal dystopic violence, excluding Sikhs from legal protection.

Cultural archive: the historical alternative in the process of post-conceptual painting

Cultural archive: the historical alternative in the process of post-conceptual painting

Suspended Spaces of Global Việt Nam: KT Food Stories and Gastro Cartographies of the Inscrutable

Abstract: Vietnamese refugee cultural archives reveal indifference to prevalent linguistic racial homogenization using monolingual Vietnamese in digital space. By analyzing the food vlog KT Food Stories as a case study, this article demonstrates that the YouTube food channel is not unlike some restaurants or shopping centers in the physical Little Saigons across the globe in its use of nontranslation. But when English-language dominance becomes peripheralized within the suspended diasporic space of Vietnamese food vlogging, the problem of linguistic inscrutability–particularly as a basis for ridicule in dominant American popular culture–becomes reclaimed through indifference, and Vietnameseness has the potential to expand globally through intimate gastro cartographies of refuge.

Postures littéraires: il gioco dell’autocreazione letteraria

Starting from the consultation of the materials preserved in the Italian-Romanian cultural archive of Rosa Del Conte, the present study aims to seek an answer to the question on which and how much control Rosa Del Conte has on the self-image that the archive conveys.

The Concept of Equality under the Indigenous and Western Legal Systems: Issues and Challenges on Sustainable Development of Africa

Communities in Africa in the pre-colonial days lived with one another in a just and equitable manner, in love, on the principles of ubuntu. The way of life was further sustained by the communities’ perception and equation of the land with humanity, where everyone had equal access to the land as factor of production. The communal system which assured of equal treatment of everyone suffered a set-back, through centuries of slave trading and the colonization and the eventual imposition of western laws on indigenous peoples of Africa, these transformed the indigenous communities from their classlessness into stratified un-equal societies of those who have and those who do not have. Corruption evolves as a result of private property ownership and this further compounds in-equality, such that communal properties are unfairly taken over by few individuals, under non-transparent privatisation of public utilities. Access to factors of production and to justice in the post-colonial Africa is a myth on account of technicality and cost. The prospect of sustaining the pre-colonial equitable access to factors of production and to justice through oral tradition suffers a setback on account of the loss of cultural archives like the African traditional religion and the indigenous languages.

The cultural policy of Central Asia countries in the sphere of museums

ABSTRACT The focus is the museum development in Central Asia from 1991–2022, with the intent to identify the current trends in the development of museums, and to explore issues of museum cooperation in these countries. The main research method was historical periodization. This article includes information on the development of museums in five countries since 1991, the change of cultural policy with independence, general problems of museums, differences in the cultural policy of Central Asian countries, statistics on the number of museums, and funding issues related to museums in the region. The central thesis asserts that museums play a central role in cultural and historical conversations in Central Asia, emphasising their significance as cultural archives and vibrant hubs for education, interaction, and the development of identity.

Ontology-based knowledge representation for traditional martial arts

Abstract Traditional martial arts are treasures of humanity’s knowledge and critical carriers of sociocultural memories throughout history. However, such treasured practices have encountered various challenges in knowledge transmission and now feature many entries on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. In tackling the urgency of knowledge preservation through digital means, this project employs an ontology-based approach to model the conceptual realm of traditional martial arts. Accordingly, it creates the Martial Art Ontology (MAon), a comprehensive domain ontology with an annotated data resource incorporating entities and relations from embodied, epistemic, and sociocultural facets. MAon underlines the significance of embodied qualities and addresses relevant dimensions, such as kinesthetics, techniques, mnemonics, and tactics, along with stylistic, interpretative, and ideological components. It features scholarly terminology developed through literature analysis, interviews with masters, and expert validations. The instantiation of MAon is realized through annotating three archetypal Southern Chinese styles, offering exhaustive descriptions concerning techniques, forms, principles, and form sets, amongst others. In summary, the reported approach encodes the manifold of martial arts into a structured vocabulary and an interlinked data resource, accessible to both human-reading and machine-operating applications. By applying it to manifest a range of knowledge concepts, we demonstrate the potential of ontology-based datafication to create coherent representations for intangible cultural entities and to enable an interoperable data infrastructure across multimodal cultural archives.

Role of the National Archives of South Africa in promoting human rights

Purpose This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection. Design/methodology/approach A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews. Findings This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection. Research limitations/implications The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa. Practical implications The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records. Social implications Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion. Originality/value This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

‘When Mom left for Mars’: Life narratives of first-generation Moroccan migrant mothers in Flanders

Current discourses in Belgian politics about Moroccan Muslim women are deeply rooted in the first-generation family reunification policies of the 1960s. Today, (marriage) migrant women are still commonly described as victims of their ‘backward’ religious traditions and in need of protection for the sake of themselves, their children and society. Looking at the implications of these views for the women concerned, this article discusses the unique docufilm ‘When Mom Left for Mars’, which documents the life narrative of a first-generation Moroccan woman in The Netherlands. Based on this docufilm, we aim to (1) document how Belgian and Dutch first-generation migrant women can be compared with each other using Karl Mannheim’s ‘theory of generations’ and (2) engage in an intergenerational conversation with first-generation mothers and their daughters, as well as with mid-generation mothers, to gain more insight into their similarities, heritage and differences. More specifically, we explore the agency of these mothers using the analytical lens of ‘affective citizenship’, particularly attending to how they centralise mothering and care work to negotiate gender and belonging, and counter the challenges of marriage migration, motherhood and integration. The docufilm is, thus, used as a case study from which we consider the first-generation women as ‘cultural archives’, and as a methodological tool in facilitating in-depth interviews and group discussions.

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the ‘common man’ and ‘vote bank’ through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman’s Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

Killing the Angel in the House: The Marble Faun and the Imagination of Violence

ABSTRACT The article offers a specific investigation of female violence as both an explicit and a covert theme of The Marble Faun. Woman’s capacity to inflict harm is not just adumbrated in Miriam’s instigation to murder, but keeps resurfacing in multiple images, fragments, and allusions that mobilize a vast cultural archive. Unlike most readings of Hawthorne’s last completed novel, this article argues that the paradigm of active violence fails to successfully separate the sinfulness of the “dark lady” Miriam from the purity of the “fair maiden” Hilda. Rather, the specter of disruptive agency haunts both characters and appears to be inextricably associated with their identity as self-dependent artists living abroad, inhabiting studios that subvert the nineteenth-century definition of women as private domestic subjects. The symbolic association between female artists, violence, and the erosion of the domestic ideal is further explored through Hawthorne’s subtly unsettling encounters with actual women (Harriet Hosmer, Anna Jameson, Fredrika Bremer) living in Rome, as reported in his journal.

Looking back from the periphery; Situating Indonesian provincial museums as cultural archives in the late-colonial to post-colonial era

Looking back from the periphery; Situating Indonesian provincial museums as cultural archives in the late-colonial to post-colonial era

The Faroese Cultural Archive: The Archive as a Source and Theme in Local Historical Writing

The cultural Faroese archive consists mostly of local historical writing. This article focuses on works of local history and claims that the local historical part of the archive constitutes the most extensive part of Faroese writing conventions. In publications on local history, the archive progresses into book form without undergoing any significant interpretation. This phenomenon is examined here as an expression of the archive as active and as an element of access, but one that is still used in a traditional cultural-historical context. However, what does “archive” really mean in this context? As a central writing convention, the cultural Faroese archive transcends common notions of the archive as collection, registration and unpublished source material. The article examines the cultural Faroese archive as both source and theme. In other words, it distinguishes between 1) the original archives as sources, which are kept in museums and libraries without being published, and 2) the use of archival sources as topics and cultural resources within published works. Through employing an elastic conception, the article understands the archive as a metaphor in Faroese writing conventions. On this basis, it argues that Aleida Assmann’s distinction between the archive as a source and subject cannot be maintained in a Faroese context because the sources per se are treated as a cultural-historical subject. Finally, it contends that the active and totalizing dimension in the cultural Faroese archive transcends abstract notions of the archive among leading archival theorists, who potentially disregard the cultural archive. Their view is countered by a study of the archive as a felt, experienced and interpreted cultural reality related to the Faroe Islands as a specific, ultraminor, geographical entity. By making geography an independent explanatory factor – and not only as a metaphor for a powerful centre and a powerless periphery, as in classical postcolonialism – it is possible to see connections between size and structure. In the case of the Faroese archive, the (colonial) order of things cannot be understood fully without acknowledging the relations between size and structure. The size of the Faroese cultural archive is associated with a lack of capacity, which in turn contributes to an understanding of Faroese uses of it. This power of action in ultraminor cultures is treated as a willingness to compensate for their shortcomings. Thus, what seems to be deprivation only turns out to be cultural capital.

Making Meaning across the Frame: The McKenzie Heritage Picture Archive at Black Cultural Archives

This article begins by providing a short history of the national heritage centre Black Cultural Archives, located in Brixton, London and founded in 1981. Also discussed are the social and political contexts which contributed to its inception. This piece then provides an overview of the organisation’s collections and collecting methods. We foreground Black Cultural Archives interventions in the construction of narratives around Black life and culture and the importance of self-representation. Moving outwards we introduce the McKenzie Heritage Picture Archives, a collection on loan from photographer Anita J. McKenzie to Black Cultural Archives. The McKenzie Heritage Picture Archives was a commercial photographic agency specializing in images of Black and Asian life. The collection is currently being catalogued through a cataloguing grant provided by The National Archives. We provide biographic information on McKenzie and discuss her decision to found the agency. Finally, we discuss the types of material within the collection and the aims of the cataloguing project.

What is a Swedish Ethnology in Finland?

In his article Five ethnologies – the rise of Finnish ethnology from a Finland-Swedish point of view, prof. Nils Storå has characterised the development of Ethnology in Finnish and in Swedish not as dichotomised striving for two unique kinds of ethnology based only on two languages in Finland but as five paths that together make the history more diverse and sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. The article looks for the roots in different spheres: antiquarian interests, languages, regionalism, an interest in cultural history and in anthropology. Prof. Storå takes us up to the 1960s. The starting point is of course language based disciplines where the need for this emphasis was felt very strongly. In Finland almost 5.9% of the population has Swedish as their mother tongue; in the beginning of the 20th century the percentage was 12,9. A result of the fact that the Swedish speaking also under the Russian rule until the late 19th century held important civilian and political posts, was that Finland after the independence 1917 was declared a bilingual state (1919). This meant and means that the Swedish speaking have a strong guarantee when it comes to their linguistic rights. Also strong institutional support make a Swedish or bilingual life especially in the Swedish coastal regions and towns possible. My intention is to look to what has happened in ethnology since 1960 in this Swedish context and what actors where and are working and also in which scientific context one can look at the ethnology that is carried out at the Åbo Akademi University in Åbo (Turku), that is the Swedish university in Finland. But I will also consider the ethnological work at the Folk Culture Archives in Helsinki, since a similar documentation and research work has been made there. A third actor is the Scientific section of the Brage Society also situated in Helsinki.

Argentine Fin-de-Siècle: Melancholic Decadence and the Rise of the Popular

Argentine Fin-de-Siècle:Melancholic Decadence and the Rise of the Popular Alejandra Uslenghi KEYWORDS Fin-de-Siecle, Fin de Siglo, Modernity, Nation Building, Oligarchy, Queer Studies, Joven Moderna, Modern Femininity, Drama Criollo, Gaucho, Literatura Gauchesca, Juan Moreira, Mass Media, Female Magazines, Octavio Bunge, Delfina Bunge, Manuel Galvez, Podesta Circus, Jose Podesta, Nini Marshall, Tita Merello WILLIAM G. ACREE, Jr. Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. U of New Mexico P, 2019, 288 pp. JOSEPH PIERCE. Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910. SUNY UP, 2019, 336 pp. CECILIA TOSSOUNIAN. La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture. U of Florida P, 2020, 184 pp. The long turn of the century in Argentina has continually claimed nostalgic narratives, fierce ideological impeachments, and abundant scholarly attention. It is indubitably one of the foundational periods of the country's modernization and of the transformations Latin America would undergo in the twentieth century. The increased flow of European immigration—a product of the 1929 hemispheric economic collapse—and the subsequent military coup that inaugurated "an infamous decade" resulted in a retrospective and conservative characterization of a time of unprecedented accumulation of wealth and demographic growth. This idealized period would come to be known as the Argentine Belle Époque, the Age of Splendor, or una época brillante. The ascent of the country's landed oligarchy to power and their control of the nation-state apparatus, alongside their subsequent decline and collapse opposite the Peronist party and the popular masses, who had been politically disfranchised, culturally manipulated, and brutally repressed, sedimented a historical narrative. Although this narrative has often changed narrators and central characters, it remains a hegemonic pole of attraction for many scholars from various disciplines. Historians and philosophers have traced the constitution of the modern nation-state under worldviews shaped by positivism and eugenics; political scientists have examined the power dynamics that informed a new centralized state apparatus; literary critics and art historians have analyzed the rhetoric and ideological trappings of the brand of cultural nationalism that [End Page 95] became hegemonic; and, more recently, cultural studies scholars have brought interdisciplinary approaches to redefine the cultural divide between "high" and "low" cultural practices in light of the increased literacy, new media, and novel forms of sociality in modern urban life. Joseph Pierce, one of the authors under review here, hints in his introduction that we "are still under the spell of that turn of the century, that age of splendor in which the matter of kinship was cast anew as something that had been and could be again but different, modern" (2). The three works under consideration examine the cultural history of the decades between the Argentine fin de siècle and the interwar period in different yet interrelated ways. Staging Frontiers historicizes the phenomenon of the drama criollo since the wars of independence and focuses on the widespread popularity of these performances between the 1880s and 1910s. This period overlaps with the focus of Argentine Intimacies. La joven moderna extends beyond the chronological limits of the fin de siècle and into the mid-twentieth century as it considers the emergence of Eva Perón as a political figure. The confluence of these studies bears witness to the continuous spell of the age of splendor and highlights the significance of the Argentine case in Latin America. These books, however, suggest that it is not merely the charm, glamour, or enchantment of the long turn of the century in Argentina that continue to captivate scholars, but rather the far-reaching effects of the collapse of the political and ideological edifice of the nation. The legal, political, and cultural infrastructures built by the intellectual elite of the 1880s, closely aligned with the interests of the landed oligarchy, constitute a most troubling legacy, a politicized cultural archive, and a pervasive nationalistic discourse that continues to haunt present-day Argentine society. These three authors delve into the problematic nature of the period in question during which the intellectual elite who sought to exercise control over the political system and public life was confronted by all kinds of responses: The two decades that...

Introduction: Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone

This special issue of Interventions presents essays from twelve scholars from the field of Arctic Humanities that collect, contextualize, and theorize micro-histories of encounters between Arctic Indigenous people or Arctic animals and European, Russian, and North American agents of empire in the long nineteenth century. In bringing out from Arctic archives Indigenous agencies, voices and aesthetic productions, animal presences and fates, the essays collected here contribute to ongoing academic efforts to decolonize knowledge on the region. This, in our case, means to (1) document the impact Euro-American and Russian imperialism had on human and animal life in the Arctic region; (2) foreground the knowledge, creative expressions, experience, resilience, and resistance of Indigenous individuals, peoples, and communities; and (3) expose the illusions of modern progress narratives (scientific, material, moral) that accompanied colonial ventures in the Arctic region. The Introduction to this special issue on “Counter-stories from the Arctic Contact Zone” presents a broad overview of the history of colonization in the areas of the Arctic (today’s Canada, Inuit Nunangat, Alaska, Kalaallit Nunaat [Greenland], Svalbard and Sápmi) that the essays address. It then sets the methodological framework for the essays through a discussion of postcolonial theory concerned with the politics of knowledge production and the possibilities and challenges of contrapuntal re-readings of the cultural archive. Central here is a discussion of how Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone aids the discovery and documentation of counter-narratives that challenge and disrupt the colonialist meta-narratives that then supported empire and today continue to impact how dominant, capitalist cultures relate to, exploit, and extract from the Arctic region and its peoples.

Mapping the Poetics of Memory: A Critical Reading of Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life as Cultural Archive

The article analyses the idea of a text as a cultural archive by mapping the question of personal and collective or social memory with particular reference to the acclaimed Bengali Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit. The memoir is a chronicler of the collective history of the marginal Namashudra community/ties of Bengal, their saga of pain and excruciating experiences of peripherality of existence that is perceived through the lens of the author. Located in the historical centre of the Dalit worldview, the autobiography investigates how the trajectories of collective histories, memories and shared identity of the Dalit community result in the emergence of what Derrida calls an ‘archive’ or a ‘palimpsest.’ Drawing on theories with regard to the role of cultural memory in the formation of a cultural archive, this article addresses questions as to how a text becomes a cultural archive and testimonies to history through the excavation and circulation of knowledge of the collective historical past.

Crystal Labeija, Femme Queens, and the Future of Black Trans Studies

Abstract This short essay springs from the question, Why has trans studies sustained a silence around Black elders in general, and Black femme queens in particular? The author reflects on the interventions of current scholars in Black trans studies and their import to the historicization of the house/ball culture or house-structured ballroom scene. Through a Black feminist imperative, this essay calls on trans studies to refuse the necropolitical logics that assume all the progenitors of the ballroom scene have died. In revisiting the rich cultural archive of the house-structured ballroom scene, such as the 1982 film T.V. Transvestite, this article reminds the reader that Black trans studies remains an archeological project.

Menelusuri Makna Penamaan dan Bentuk Kaddoq Minynyaq Bugis dalam Perspektif Semiologi

Food is one of the basic needs for fulfilling human nutrition. Especially in traditional food, the Bugis people have a habit of symbolizing the cultural cuisine they prepare. The purpose of this study is to explain the meaning of culinary through the name and form of kaddoq minynyaq. This is a descriptive qualitative study that employs Roland Barthes' semiology approach. The data collection technique applied was an interview technique with the aim of obtaining public opinion regarding the customs and beliefs of the Bugis tribe and the application of documentation techniques to obtain cultural archives in the form of images. Data analysis techniques began with data classification and continued with Roland Barthes' significance analysis. The results of this study are process-oriented; through the rampa aroma that is smeared on the kaddoq minynyaq culinary, it is hoped that the secret, in this case palliseq, will not be known by other people who do not know the people who carry out the tradition well. Through the analysis of témpa-témpa and kaddoq, it is hoped that society can uphold awareness of good behavior and the value of unity in order to obtain harmonious relationships.Keyword : Bugis, Kaddoq Minynyaq, Meaning, Naming, Shape