Kameelah Janan Rasheed introduced the key issues of this panel discussion by highlighting the productive possibilities of the archive for radical visibility. She noted the significance of authoring and collecting texts and records as a way of leaving traces therefore resisting erasure. At the same time, however, she acknowledged three key areas of concern: audience—who is the archive made for?; use—who is using the archive?; and scope of collecting—how can marginalized histories be collected while also mitigating their potential utilization for harm?
Bergis Jules, University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside, spoke about his work with the DocNow project. DocNow is a tool and a community focusing on the role ethics play in the long-term archiving of social media. Inspired by the Ferguson protests in 2014, DocNow started with an archive of tweets around the protests (outlined in this blog post by Ed Summers). The collaborators in the project quickly realized that this data could be rendered dangerous when collected by commercial companies and sold to the police. After an ACLU report was published, revealing that social media companies provided user data to one such company – Geofeedia, Twitter shut down access to its data for this company. But later Twitter also disclosed that data had been provided to the FBI. Jules stressed the importance of developing ethical archiving tools for social good. Such tools should enable individuals to have more agency and control over how their data is collected.
Simone Browne, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press), presented on issues of surveillance in relation to archives of black culture. She argued that artists do much heavy-lifting and theorizing when it comes to questioning surveillance in the contemporary context (Robin Rhode, Pan’s Opticon). Browne continued to speak about the potentialities of the oppositional gaze and the resistance to biometric measurements in challenging surveillance. She raised the controversial issue of the TSA’s discriminatory practices with regards to black women’s hair in particular. However, Browne also argued that the airport can become a site of contestation, where bans, deportations, and detentions are met with resistance and activism.
Doreen St. Felix, contributing writer at the New Yorker, spoke about the ephemerality of black cultural production and processes of archiving. Quoted from her article in Fader, the cases of Vine artists like Peaches Monroe exemplify the common lack of attribution and recognition of acts of creative production among young artists of color, who rarely receive endorsement deals or monetary compensation when their works go viral. In the article, St. Felix also quotes an essay from K. J. Green which predates the Vine issue by a century, noting that copyright laws intentionally precluded black blues artists from protecting their musical ideas. Referring to Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, St. Felix then addressed the question of impossible speech, that is, speech which has occurred without any possibility of being recorded. She linked this concept to the cultural production of young musicians who may intentionally keep their work illegible to a majority of their audience. This connects to the question of contextual integrity: at times music lyric, can be decontextualized from their place of origin (for instance, on social media), and used by the police or other institutions as criminalizing evidence. St. Felix argued for the significance of retaining intended illegibility within archival records.
This issue was addressed in the discussion following these presentations. Jules discussed the existence of protective measures for physical archives, such as a deed of gift, considering how they could be implemented for digital archives, as well. More agency for individuals increases the potential of archival practices to resist surveillance. Increasing the usability of data archiving tools, and putting them in the hands of communities who can create their own archives, could meaningfully diversify the historical record. St. Felix closed the discussion with a call to look beyond American- and Anglo-centric archival practices for non-oppressive models of operation.
Discussions on Twitter throughout the symposium reflected on these issues as well.
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