In my research, I record oral histories of archivists and museum makers who curate grassroots minoritarian archives.
I analyze archival performances at each of their sites, naming the specific aesthetics, ideologies, and pragmatic interventions of minoritarian archives.
What are minoritarian archives?
When asked to imagine a “traditional archive,” many folks will picture a room in an esteemed university or museum: a relatively unremarkable place where academic researchers read in solitude. This idea of the “the Archive” can look very different from grassroots archives created by queer and trans archivists and archivists of color. Working outside of major institutions, they have fewer resources like permanent funding or staff. They often operate out of spaces like their own living rooms or rented storefronts. And, in creating archives and museums that honor the histories and ongoing struggle of folks within their communities, they are activists with a vested interest in the materials they curate.
I call these activist-archivists “minoritarian” as part of a tradition within the academic field of performance studies. Minoritarian, as used by scholars like José Muñoz and Joshua Chambers-Letson, can refer to folks who have been the subject of violence because of things like their race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality.
Archival violence against marginalized people takes a number of forms. Many contemporary archives and museums continue to display artifacts obtained through war and conquest, often outside of the control of impacted communities. Archival violence also means that materials of minoritarian people are frequently ignored or discarded because they aren’t deemed valuable enough to be preserved. Minoritarian communities are excluded from their own historical materials in explicit and implicit ways, both because they lack specific credentials and because their materials are housed in institutions that feel hostile. When archives and museums offer stories of marginalized people, these stories often settle in misrepresentation and tokenization. Minoritarian archivists—both inside and outside of major archival institutions—work from these conditions and create sites that honor minoritarian history and life in their own terms. In my research, I focus on work in sites specifically for and by minoritarian people.
What is minoritarian archival performance?
I define archival performance as the acts through which materials and spaces emerge as archives. These acts include interactive tours, theatrical performances, mundane moments of curation, and snapshots of curators’ everyday lives. In my dissertation, Mess: The Labor of Minoritarian Archival Performance, I analyze three grassroots minoritarian archives and museums. To understand why their curators created these sites and how their performances impact visitors, I visit each site to conduct oral history interviews and observe what makes them tick.
Archival performance means that archives are dependent on the ongoing performances of these archivists. They take raw collections and turn them into something beautiful and sustaining. I am interested in understanding the larger context of minoritarian archival performance, drawing connections between archivists’ lives, their responsibilities to their communities, the histories of the objects they collect, and the ways that visitors make meaning at each site. Understanding these entanglements is crucial to me as a researcher, as it helps me to honor the often underrecognized ways that minoritarian archivists have sustained life and history for their communities. The academic field of Performance Studies allows me to think of a host of different acts—labelling a folder, offering a public workshop, donating a cherished family heirloom, creating a dance to remember an ancestor—all as important parts of what makes a minoritarian archive a minoritarian archive. I highlight the creative, improvisational, and durational performances that create these sites of community history, knowledge, and care.