Global context and diversity of community archiving: memory, identity, and representation in community digital archives of the South Asian Diaspora

Abstract

Over the past century and a half, archival practice has undergone paradigmatic shifts from juridical legacy to cultural memory to societal engagement, and most recently, to community archiving. These transformations reflect broader cultural shifts in how societies understand evidence, memory, identity, and power. Community archives, as participatory and identity-driven spaces, challenge traditional custodial and interpretive authority by enabling marginalised groups to construct, preserve, and interpret their own histories. As archival forms diversify and digital technologies expand possibilities for record creation and dissemination, community digital archives have emerged as a significant yet understudied field. This paper argues that community digital archives constitute vital objects of sociological and historical inquiry. Focusing on two major initiatives documenting the South Asian diaspora the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA n.d.) and the 1947 Partition Archive while drawing comparative insights from other significant archives like the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA, n.d.) and the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA, n.d.), we examine how they generate insights into migration histories, affective ties, and evolving notions of identity and belonging. These archives reveal not only the content of diasporic memory but also the sociotechnical processes through which it operates, mobilises participation, and forges digital connectivity. An interdisciplinary lens drawing on archival studies, digital humanities, and diaspora studies is essential for critically engaging with these dynamic archival forms as active systems of diasporic world-making, a concept developed in contemporary literary studies to describe the creative practices through which dispersed communities imagine and materialise alternative social worlds (Ellis, 2023).