Project Description

Documentary Focus

The focus of our archive is to reclaim and more accurately represent the history of SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African Americans, particularly in relation to their activism, experiences of bias in America, and their accomplishments and contributions as immigrants. The predominant representation of SWANA individuals in American history has been controlled white narratives. Much of the discourse surrounding our position in this country is heavily influenced by western hegemonic ideologies (particularly the war on terror and secular liberalism). As noted by McKemmish et al. (2020), "the primary purpose of recordkeeping in colonial times was to provide critical infrastructure that enabled imperial control and exploitation." Therefore, a key goal for this archive is to empower SWANA communities to engage with and disseminate our history in ways that challenge the historical silencing and marginalization of our narratives. As representatives of the main user group(s) we envision, we seek access to a resource that presents honest and educational information about our community while being mindful of the trauma that many have experienced.

With these goals in mind, we've organized our archive into four major categories we believe are particularly rife with disinformation within the American consciousness -- SWANA Experiences in the Diaspora, SWANA Women and Feminism, Anti-SWANA Censorship and Bias, and Legal Policies and Advocacy regarding SWANA individuals and communities.

Consideration of Archival Practices

This digital archive is best characterized as a community archive. Our goal is to repurpose materials that represent SWANA Americans in order to reframe the narratives associated with our community in this country. We selected this focus to create a compilation of information that is more accessible than what traditional institutional archives provide. Additionally, we aim to empower SWANA individuals to reshape their narratives, reclaiming their history and amplifying their voices.
 
In our efforts to address inherent power imbalances and reduce the social distance between our team as creators, archivists, and custodians, and the users of our collection, we are committed to incorporating community participation as a fundamental aspect of our archive's design. We believe that fostering collaboration between custodians and users is essential. As Williams (2015) describes, “the defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group and/or locality on their own terms,” (Flinn, Stevens, & Shepherd, 2009).
 
“The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community.”
-Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (pp. xiii, 1993)
 
In the case of our digital archive, we've integrated as many collaborative features as possible using the built in modules and plugins that Omeka S offers so that users may double as co-creators -- participating in the collection, representation, and dissemination of their cultural heritage and community knowledge as a means of deconstructing orientalist perspectives (i.e. collaborative processing and description, creating culturally responsive metadata, etc.). Specifically, our archive employs the Image Annotate Plugin, allowing them to respond to materials — adding commentary or additional context that is crucial for nuanced and culturally sensitive understanding of the archival items. Moreover, we've included the Sharing Plugin so that users can control the further dissemination of their community knowledge. It is our intention that these features of the archive will encourage and facilitate user participation in the curation and refinement of the archive. Otherwise stated, we hope these aspects of our digital collection contribute to the development of our archive’s reciprocity, or the cultivation of “relationships, practices, and projects that give back (and recognize power dynamics), share knowledge, are held accountable, and are continuous (or sustainable),” (Punzalan & Marsh 2022).

 

Criteria for Record Selection

As stated above in our Documentary Focus, we prioritized selecting records on SWANA topics we believe are especially under-or-misrepresented by traditional information sources and institutions -- SWANA Experiences in the Diaspora, SWANA Women and Feminism, Anti-SWANA Censorship and Bias, and Legal Policies and Advocacy regarding SWANA individuals and communities.

Since our archive serves as a chance to (re)tell these stories about the SWANA community, we've selected our records from predominantly white institutions, SWANA organizations, as well as personal collections. The array of sources we've pulled from have allowed us to both tell our stories organically (particularly things that have no been shared widely) as well as correct the stories that have been told about us. These methods working in tandem ensure we create a fuller picture of our community.

 

Target User Group

We anticipate our primary user group consists of SWANA Americans, particularly SWANA activists and community leaders. We expect a significant portion of our users to be casually browse our collections, typically accessing materials by category or via general search (Smith and Villata 2020). However, given that our target users are likely to possess some subject matter expertise, they may find value in utilizing more detailed searches and complex filtering options, such as geospatial or subject metadata. To accommodate this need, we have incorporated the Advanced Search Plugin into our Omeka site, enabling users to perform more refined queries and thereby minimize the occurrence of irrelevant results while navigating the archive.

Furthermore, it is likely that many SWANA users' first language is Arabic -- or they wish to share the archival material in the collection with loved ones who do not speak English. In order to expand to meet the unique needs of our community, users and co-creators of the archive can utilize the Scripto Plugin to add translations and transcriptions to archival records in our collection. This way, the information shared within our archive -- especially information that has historically been gatekept --  is accessible to more of our community.

Additional potential users of our archive include activists, students, researchers, and legal professionals who wish to learn more about our perspectives and experiences as SWANA Americans (and allies).

 

Perspectives

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”
Edward Said - Covering Islam (pp. 154–155, 1981)
While we've selected materials from a range of authors/contributors, both SWANA and otherwise, we made the conscious effort to forefront SWANA voices in this archive as most information in circulation about our community is communicated through the lense of whiteness (e.g. government entities, white academics, researchers, and politicians) and thus shaped by Orientalist frameworks. The records we've chosen to include that were not created by SWANA individuals have been recontextualized via organization and description (i.e. item groupings, location on the site, text exposition, and metadata) to highlight their positionality and give priority to our perspectives as a community.
 
The manual (re)arrangement and (re)description (aka reframing of perspectives) of these resources is exactly what makes the creation of this archive such a powerful act for us. As articulated by Yakel (2003), “Each successive representation and representational system [of a set of records] builds on its predecessors, recovering what was judged valuable in a given temporal and cultural context, incorporating or discarding what was deemed essential or not, respectively.” The (de) and (re)contextualization of the materials in this archive have empowered us to discard what white supremacy has deemed valuable information about our community and instead privilege what we consider valuable.
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