Cultural Archives Research Articles

“Yes, I am Joseph Bhatti Choohra:” Reading Joseph Bhatti as a Palimpsest

This paper explores how Mohammed Hanif’s 2011 novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti challenges the construct of “Pak-ness” (purity), which is at the heart of the idea of Pakistan and Pakistani national identity. I argue that Joseph Bhatti, the father of the eponymous protagonist Alice Bhatti, is an intricate palimpsest of various historical, political, social, and cultural transformations in India (the Aryan invasion, the inauguration of the Varna system, the Muslim conquests of India, the British colonization of India, and the Partition), but more importantly this character brings to the fore the one constant throughout these monumental transformations – the impurity and Untouchability ascribed to the Chuhra people. In addition, the paper shows how the word “Pakistan” too becomes a palimpsest of various cultural archives, semantic reserves, and political transformations: the word “Pakistan” is acronymized in English, made semantically operative through Persian/Urdu to conflate the Pakistani Muslim identity with the notion of purity, which happens to be of Brahman origin.

Praktik Indung Beurang di Kasepuhan Ciptagelar dalam Fotografi Dokumenter

This photo creation is entitled " Indung Beurang practice in Kasepuhan Ciptagelar in Documentary Photography" aims to visualize the Indung Beurang Practice in the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar community procession after childbirth. The existence of traditional midwives may disappear if there is no successor, or its existence gone unnoticed. In other words, their existence begins to erode with the presence of modern Midwives. The method applied in this undergraduate thesis is the theory of journalistic photography in the form of serial photos that are composed into a serial documentary photography so that a story from this practice can be conveyed precisely and clearly. It can also becomes a cultural archive in a visual form. The embodiment processes such as observation, exploration, and experimentation are applied in order to obtain accurate data. Through the visualization of the Indung Beurang practice, it is hoped that its existence can be known by the community and would be continued to be existed. If the presence of modern Midwives is needed, it would be better if the two of them go together so this practice becomes a cultural archive to be known by the modern world.

Seeing Images

In the cultural heritage digital archive, descriptive metadata makes images (re)searchable. Text-based searches seek terms that match metadata terms or terms referring to aspects of images that have previously been considered essential to select and describe in metadata terms. Such considerations are bound up with historically changing institutional agendas, ideas about user preferences, and implementation of metadata standards. This study approaches image accessibility from a different perspective. It aims to investigate how the infrastructure of the digital archive, comprising metadata and interface, intervenes with, circumscribes as well as enables, the images’ visibility and knowledge-producing capacity. The starting points are: first, that images in digital archives, exemplified by the online image collections in Alvin and DigitaltMuseum, are mediated, mediating, and “mixed” media objects that simultaneously represent the past and the present; second, that the digital archive in a media history of images functions as both a tool and an object of research. Using the platforms as tools of research, this study is based on test searches that aim to find viable search strategies for mixed media objects. The chosen search terms represent media-historically significant and common traits such as images that are combined with text and images that represent and/or mediate other images. The study discloses that the platforms give both false negatives and false positives. They do not support searches that focus media terms and relations between media elements. These problems are further related both to heterogenous metadata practices and to the simultaneously restricted and broad image concept behind them. As objects of research, both platforms are considered in relation to a future construction of a media history of images, where the digital archive is a particular node. The study demonstrates how the “hypermedial” environment associated with new media is prefigured by media interrelations in analog images – or images that are accessible as mediated through the archive’s interface and as policed by the archive’s metadata structure.

Zimbabwean Popular Cultural Expressions of Alternative Sexual Identities

ABSTRACT The dominant narrative within Zimbabwean popular cultural scholarship largely focuses on the Zimbabwean socio-economic and political crisis at the expense of alternative ideologies, identities and practices. I advocate for the urgency of expansive and wide-ranging epistemological attention to alternative sexual identities as part of a cultural studies research agenda. I argue that, although Zimbabwean homophobia has generally silenced alternative voices, popular culture offers channels through which to engage publicly with that which is generally loathed and feared. I discuss three Zimbabwean popular cultural archives to make the argument that it is through every day cultural practices that Zimbabwean alternative sexual identities can meaningfully be debated and conceptualised. I discuss a Zimbabwean dancehall song titled “Kumba Kwedu” (In Our Home) by the artist named Bazooker, the reception of Facebook activist Tatelicious Karigambe-Sandberg, and Tracy Kadungure’s novel Tanaka Chronicles: The Sexual Awakening. Through the selected popular cultural texts, I show how some Zimbabwean popular cultural expressions of alternative sexualities cleverly undermine heteronormative official values by constantly challenging the assumed heterosexual norm.

ПАМ’ЯТЬ ПРО ІІ СВІТОВУ ВІЙНУ В РОМАНАХ КЕЙТ АТКІНСОН

The article analyzes Kate Atkinson’s novels «Life after Life», «Ruins of God» and «Transcription» in terms of memory studies. The current objectives of the study were: 1) to outline private memories in the textual structure (these are the main correlates of individual and collective memory); 2) revealing the relationship between the injuries suffered by the heroes and the «wounds of time» inflicted by World War II; 3) understanding the mechanism of «crystallization» of collective memory in a particular cell («place of remembrance» in novels); 4) delineation of the boundaries of the cultural archive, which is reproduced by the author. The study found that the main message of the novels is focused on the theme of World War II, its understanding and reflection in the collective memory of the British. Through the images of the main characters, the author recreates the memories of wartime. It is noticed that in all novels the chaotic, instead of chronological principle of reproduction of the past is applied: the plot acquires cyclic character. This image principle mimics the work of the human brain, which sporadically emits layers of memory. This kaleidoscope of memories follows the author’s logic: the scattered fragments of memory form a coherent history, correlated with the national archive. Teddy Todd is a survivor who survived to preserve the memory of his fallen comrades («places of remembrance») and to testify about war crimes, as well as to nurture a new generation of Britons. At the same time, Ursula Todd and Juliet Armstrong present a feminine but polar experience of war. At first glance, there are no significant differences between the heroines: both work for secret military departments, contributing to the approach of victory, both took the place of men who went to the front. At the same time, Juliet Armstrong is a double agent recruited for espionage in favor of the Soviet Union, who, through her own betrayal, separates herself from the collective memory. Miss Armstrong’s memoirs do not correlate with the National Archives, but are the antithesis of the British collective consciousness, constituting an unexplored «white spot» (the phenomenon of betrayal is indeed something of a native «stain»). The post-war duty of Teddy and Ursula Todd, the true heirs of national values, is to heal the «place of remembrance» and to preserve the memory of the fallen. Todd’s memories should be embodied in «places of remembrance» (monuments, museums, military burials, works of art, etc.). The conditional archive of the novel, the «place of remembrance» recreated in it, correlate with the collective memory of the peoples of Britain, thus encouraging the understanding of the traumatic experience of World War II.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mathematics, Therapy and Life: research from the group on Education, Language and Cultural Practices in Brazil

This article aims to describe discursive regularities of theses and dissertations by researchers from the Group “Research, Education, Language, Cultural Practices” - Phala and their effects for / on Mathematics Education. Due to the nature of the proposed study, three axes of description emerged: (1) starting cultural archive and the literatures-traces triggered with respect to Mathematics; (2) therapeutic analog movements operated in research, and (3) aesthetics and writing style. We identified that the archives, taking deconstructionist therapy as a research lens, expand the debates about the understanding of Mathematics as a fixed, linear, compartmentalized, abstract and hierarchical set of knowledge, shaped to meet cognitive, structuralist and neoliberal school learning projects; as well as they broaden the debates about the ways of practicing research in a hermeneutic-analytical way, addressing problems that involve modern schooling, teacher training, indigenous and non-indigenous education, assessment of learning and historiographic and non-historiographical aspects of undertaking research in Mathematics Education.

Hydrocolonial Johannesburg

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

Virtual Art Innovations for Maintaining the Existence of Riau Malay Culture

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic affects all aspects, including cultural arts. Cultural arts have an important role in human civilization as a result of thoughts and traditions from ancestors. The existence of the cultural arts of Malay Riau is decreased during the pandemic. All cultural arts activities have been shifted from the offline stage to the online stage so that the efforts to inherit and develop the cultural arts of Malay Riau are hampered. This research aims to determine the differences in the existence of Malay Riau cultural arts before and after the pandemic in Riau students at the Malay Riau Cultural Unit, Bandung Institute of Technology (UKMR ITB) and in Riau people in general. This research also aims to gather the opinions from Riau students and Riau people about innovations to inherit the Malay Riau cultural arts during the pandemic. The methods which are used in this research to gather the data: study literature, interviews, and questionnaires. Based on this research, Malay Riau Cultural Unit has made an innovation to inherit the values of Malay Riau cultural arts through making cultural archives so that the inheritance of traditions can be carried out, even though the pandemic is still undergoing. Through this research, we hope that the existence of Malay Riau cultural arts can be maintained through continuous innovation, especially in Riau students at the Malay Riau Cultural Unit and in the Riau people.Keywords: Cultural arts; Malay Riau; Existence, pandemic; Innovation

Hotspots for textual dynamics: cultural semiotic approach to digital archives

Abstract Digital cultural archives and databases are promising an era of heritage democratization and an enhancement of the role of arts in everyday cultures. It is hoped that mass digitization initiatives in many corners of the world can facilitate the secure preservation of human cultural heritage, with easy access and diverse ways for creative reuse. Understanding the dialogic processes within these increasingly vast databases necessitates a dynamic conceptualization of data they contain. The paper argues that this can be found in Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of text and text’s functions in culture. It elaborates on the three key characteristics of text – expression, boundary, and structure – as manifested within the digital semiosphere. At the same time, the textual dialogues within digital archives are increasingly conditioned by metadata, which is hereby conceptualized as metalanguage inducing a modeling effect on archived texts and defining their possible sphere of dynamics. To balance the explanations of creative operations of digital archives, the paper also demonstrates their auto-communicative mechanisms for facilitating cultural continuities and stability.

Acoustic to Electronic and Public to Private: An Introduction to Music in the Great Expansion (1700–2100 CE)

Acoustic to Electronic and Public to Private: An Introduction to Music in the Great Expansion (1700–2100 CE)

Textualization and Archive in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos

This article argues for a new way of reading Hellenistic “literary” hymns, one that situates them in contemporary religious and cultural discourse through the notions of “textualization” and the “cultural archive.” I apply this framework to Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos and show how this hymn became an important part of the articulation of Ptolemaic religion in the context of ritual politics in the third-century Aegean, as well as how it had a lasting impact on the way that the ritual geography of the Cyclades was imagined. Specifically, the analysis spotlights how the hymn successfully links historical and contemporary theoric choral activity with the etymologization of the Cyclades; how it textualizes the island of Kos within the ritual nexus of Delos; and, finally, how it becomes an important part of Greek cultural memory about Delos.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

The value of digital archive film history: willingness to pay for film online heritage archival access.

With the passage of time, celluloid film degrades and valuable film history is lost, resulting in loss of cultural history which contributes to the shared sense of community, identify, and place at a local and national level. Despite the growth in digitised services for accessing cultural resources, to date no economic valuation has been performed on digital local history resources which are accessible online. Despite the recent emergence of online portals for digital cultural services in many countries (such as virtual tours of art galleries and digitisation of cultural archives) a shift which has accelerated in response to the Covid-19 epidemic, there remains a major literature gap around the value of digital culture. Failure to account for the value of digital archives risks sub-optimal allocation of resources to accessing and preserving these aspects of local cultural history. In response, we performed the first contingent valuation study to estimate willingness to pay for a free online film archive portal containing historical film footage for localities throughout the United Kingdom. Users were willing to pay an average hypothetical subscription for digital archive film services of £38.52/annum. Non-users in the general population were asked their willingness to pay a hypothetical annual donation to maintain free public access (£4.68/annum on average). The results suggest that positive social value is gained from online access to digital archive film, and from knowing that the cultural heritage continues to be digitally accessible by the public for current and future generations. We outline how this evidence aligns with a theoretical framework of use and non-use value for digital goods and services extending beyond those who currently use the portal, to those introduced to it, and those in the general public who have never directly experienced the online archive service. We also report what we believe is the first application of Subjective Wellbeing analysis to engagement with a digital cultural service. The advantage of applying methods from economics to value cultural activities in monetary terms is that it makes emerging modes of digital cultural goods and services commensurable with other costs and benefits as applied to cultural policy and investment decisions, putting it on a level footing with physical cultural assets.

THE ROLE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CURATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

The article analyzes phenomenon of the «principle of curation» in historical and philosophical development. In the modern world, overloaded with large volumes of information, it is not just access to information that becomes important, but the ability to navigate it. Problems of critical reflection, choice, interpretation in the information space are gaining in importance. That is exactly why the use of the principle of curation is proposed to implement these processes. The authors consider history of the emergence of the concepts of «curator» and «curatorship», delineation of the features of curatorial principle and differences in meanings and understanding of the principle of curation. Having considered the history of transformation of these concepts, having analyzed their use in various fields, the authors come to the conclusion that semantic component of the curator changes over time. If initial connotations were limited to the view of the curator as a guardian and caretaker of collections, then in the modern sense curator him/herself is a creative subject. Therefore, the interpretation of works of art essentially depends on the creative activity of the curator and the space that he creates for presentation. Modern practice of curation should be considered as a newly formed field of activity, which is fundamentally different from the forms that preceded it. In the 21st century, the principle of curation is becoming a universal and necessary method of presenting selected and orderly information, which aims to solve the problem. Curators are the ones who work with this flow of information in the era of information overload: they process it, systematize, organize, conceptualize and present it to the public, thus becoming liquidators of the problem of information overload. The article puts forward a hypothesis for further philosophical reflection: the curatorial principle is a necessary component for organizing the presentation space of a cultural archive.

Text as a Cultural Archive

The article examines text as a cultural repository of the memories and consciousness of a milieu. What it argues is that individual narratives of pain and suffering have the potential for foregrounding the world view of a community and for resistance to inherent social and cultural stereotypes and oppressive social structures. Madan Vasishta’s Deaf in Delhi: A Memoir (2006) is a remarkable work of literary disability scholarship, informed by the author’s saga of pain, struggle, and triumphant march in life. In this memoir, the author is described being a deaf boy in his homeland of India, where “deaf” meant someone who is not human. The author’s narrative is lined up with many facets of deafness as a cultural and social signifier. Though the article’s point of focus is upon the social and cultural representation of disability in the context of a community through the text as an archive, the study tries to examine how the understanding of the society/community at large inflects and complicates disability representations of an individual text.

Marking men, affect and care work: a study of middle-class Bengali masculinity in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

ABSTRACT This article examines Pulitizer prize-winning Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's engagement with masculinity and care-work in The Lowland (2013). Situated in a middle-class Bengali family, the novel revolves around the individualistic aspirations and intellectual motivations of the three main characters – the two brothers Subhash, Udayan and the woman they eventually marry, Gauri. This article first draws attention to the cultural archive of middle-class intellectual Bengali masculinity and then proceeds to delineate Lahiri's inscription of Bengali middle-class masculinity through her specific focus on Subhash's feeling masculinity. Affect theory is considered a necessary heuristic to situate this theoretical examination and further unpack Subhash's complication of reproductive heteronormativity. In doing so, this article also considers the gendered nature of care-work within the Bengali heteronormative family while at the same time positing Subhash's masculinity as a case in point, where naturalised gendered ideas are successfully blurred. By no means representative of all kinds of middle-class Bengali masculinities, this article's focus on Subhash's masculinity mainly situates a road map to theoretically mark heteronormative middle-class masculinity through the lens of affect theory.

Epistemology of the Locker Room: A Queer Glance at the Physical Culture Archive

A room of naked bodies, dirty and clean, the locker room is the most obvious site of the homoeroticism of sport, as illustrated in a scene from Top Gun (1986), directed by Tony Scott. The scene ope...

Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

FUNGSI DAN NILAI DALAM CERITA RAKYAT BENDE DAN POKAE PADA ETNIK TOLAKI MEKONGGA (Function and Value Contained in Bende and Pokae Folklores in Tolaki Mekongga Ethnic )

Folklore is an important source of regional cultural information as well as a cultural archive storing various data and information on regional culture. This study aims to analyze and to describe the functions and values ​​contained in the folklore of Tolaki Mekongga ethnic group in Wundulako District. This study uses a qualitative method. This research was conducted in Wundulako District, Kolaka Regency. Data collection was carried out through in-depth interviews, and document and literature study. The data analysis is carried out by transcription and translation procedures or stages, followed by heuristic and hermeneutic reading, and then ended by identifying the part (variant) of the story having a socio-cultural function and a variant of the story containing cultural values ​​with appropriate interpretation. Based on the results of the research, in the folklore Bende (Benteng) and Pokae (the name of the spring) there are social functions and cultural values. The social functions contained in these stories are: as a media for delivering information, as a means of preserving the language / dialect of the Mekongga area, as a means of preserving Tolaki Mekongga culture, as a means of legitimizing power, and as a source of local history. Meanwhile, these cultural values ​​consist of three values: religious, social, and moral values.

Against Whitewashing

This article is an account of recent activity in the U.K. archives sector against white supremacy which is written by a number of people active in the work. Through our work, we are aware of previous initiatives in this area, but written sources about the history of this work are patchy at best. This account offers a description of recent activity so that it is “on record”. We recognise that a historical account of previous efforts would be valuable, but that is not our objective here. This article offers a statement of the problem of white supremacy in the U.K.’s archives sector. It then provides an overview of the work of organisations such as the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), The National Archives (TNA), and the Archives and Records Association (ARA). This is background for more grassroots activities and networks, which are described in the article. The article discusses the events at the ARA 2019 conference, which was a flashpoint for resistance to white supremacy in the profession, before discussing a number of subsequent activities that sought to define a vision for the profession in which white supremacy and other violent power structures are abolished. The article concludes by offering some thoughts about the future of this work.