FORTHCOMING: 2020 Fall Issue: Invisible City, October 29th
“… there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
— — Italo Calvino, “Hidden Cities,” from Invisible Cities
The opening of the academic year and the fall season of the Archivists Round Table’s programming looks strikingly different from years past. The pandemic has halted our ability to gather together and socialize. The landscape for cultural heritage institutions and universities is unrecognizable from what it was only months ago. The city itself has emptied out in some sectors and spilled into the parks and streets others. Our lives have been radically transformed.
Despite the disruption and social isolation, the pandemic has had the effect of revealing and foregrounding aspects of everyday existence that for too long have failed to register in the mainstream consciousness. In the wake of mounting personal and communal losses triggered by COVID-19 and the groundswell of public demonstrations over the loss of Black lives at the hands of the police, we can no longer ignore the inequities that disproportionately burden communities of color or be silent to the violence they have endured.
Archivists and special collections librarians know firsthand the gaps and silences that profoundly shape the historical record and the narratives it supports. Community-based archives have long provided a vital counterpoint and safe haven for records of groups that society has undervalued and history has overlooked. Scholars and archivists of color who have attempted to raise awareness about the structural racism made manifest in these lapses have often gone unheard. The pandemic and its effects have exacerbated the precarity these smaller organizations contend with, even as the shift of in-person activities to virtual has underscored the resource divide that exists between institutions able to support digital collections and virtual reference, and those that cannot.
All of this begs the question: When we think of the historical footprint of New York City, what image comes to mind now and into the future? What stories will records created during this pandemic tell? Of whom and for whom will they be?
This issue of The Metropolitan Archivist reflects on the many ways in which visibility does and does not manifest in the archives. In some cases, visibility requires the recuperation of historical memory through community archiving practices and scholarship, and necessitates acknowledgement of the lived experience of both those represented in the records and those performing vital memory work. In others, visibility is an imperative as technology subsumes and obscures archival labor and as archival ethics become all the more essential to a historical moment where surveillance and accountability, documentation and personal risk are in constant tension.
In this moment where invisible aspects of our collective history have suddenly come to the fore, archivists are poised to meaningfully contribute to our understanding of the past and its aftereffects in our present moment. By restoring lost aspects of the historical past and centering ethics of care in contemporary practice, archivists help to shape a more ethical and equitable future.
