Abstract
This paper engages with the efflorescence of South Asian history wrought by the rise of ‘citizens archives’, ‘picture libraries’ and ‘memory projects’. I first encountered these crowdsourced platforms, which mobilise visual and material artefacts and a language of civic participation, and range from purpose-built websites to Instagram handles and Facebook groups, whilst researching the development of amateur and domestic photography in the subcontinent. I learnt, for instance, of Haleema Hashim, a woman from the close-knit Kutchi Memon community in the port city of Cochin who commandeered a camera gifted to her husband and taught herself how to use it, and began tracking how her intimate portraits of the children and women were not only tenderly stored in albums but also sent to magazines and pen-pals living in Lahore and Rangoon, lost in the family’s moves across the city, burnt by relatives who objected to them on religious grounds, and most recently, digitised and distributed by her artist great-grandson, becoming sites of public inquiry and contestation. Here, I move beyond the ebb and flow of Haleema’s photography to think through this will to ‘crowdsource’ the past. I probe the logics, aesthetics and anxieties attached to emergent archives, in the process also looking at older, institutional and/or stubbornly analogue initiatives in and beyond the region. In providing an ethnography of archival imaginaries and agents, I hope to deepen our understanding of history - and of the image- as everyday matter, and everyday politics.
Presenters
Mallika LeuzingerFellow in Colonial and Global History, German Historical Institute London, London, City of, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture
KEYWORDS
Archives, Citizenship, Image, Crowdsourcing, Popular History
