“I Can’t Wait for You to Die”
A Community Archives Critique
Abstract
Stemming from conflicts over the authority of professional archives to arrange and steward community knowledge, this article outlines the limitations of the archival apparatus to produce the conditions for social liberation through acquisition and offers suggestions for how to operate otherwise, as a collaborator in forgetting. It discusses the origins and revised mission of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project (PQHP) as a reflection of the precarious definition of community archives within the discipline and field of archival science. By retracing the steps in the PQHP’s mission, as it moved from being a custodial and exhibit-focused collecting project to acting as a decentralized mobile preservation service, I argue that community archival practice is an important standpoint from which to critically reassess the capacity of institutional archives to create a more conscious and complete history through broader collecting. Specifically, I demonstrate how contemporary attention to the value of community records and community archives is frequently accompanied by a demand for such archives, records, and communities to confess precarity and submit to institutional recordkeeping practices.
RÉSUMÉ
Tirant ses origines des conflits portant sur la compétence des archives professionnelles pour arranger et gérer les savoirs communautaires, cet article souligne les limites des techniques en archivistiques à produire les conditions pour la libération sociale par l’acquisition et offre des suggestions sur des façons d’opérer autrement, en tant que collaborateur de l’oubli. Il aborde les origines et le mandat révisé du Pittsburgh Queer History Project (PQHP) comme reflet de la définition précaire des archives communautaires au sein de la discipline et du domaine de l’archivistique. En retraçant les étapes du mandat du PQHP, qui est passé d’un projet de collecte axé sur la gestion de la collection et les expositions à un service de préservation mobile décentralisé, j’avance que les pratiques des archives communautaires offrent un point de vue important à partir duquel réévaluer de manière critique la capacité des archives institutionnelles à créer une histoire plus consciente et plus complète grâce à une collecte plus large. Plus précisément, je démontre comment l’attention contemporaine portée à la valeur des documents et des archives communautaires s’accompagne fréquemment d’une demande pour que ces archives, documents et communautés avouent leur précarité et se soumettent aux pratiques institutionnelles de tenue de documents.
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