The Liberatory Promise of Archives of Survival
TAVP executive director Gabriel Daniel Solís delivered this lecture on April 13, 2023 at UCLA for the University of California Regents Lecture in Information Studies. In the talk, Solís considers the role of truth and imaginary in the liberatory promise of archives of survival, where “memory and survival, shadows and healing, fade into each other and become one.”
I’d like to use this opportunity to reflect on what I see as the liberatory promise of archives of survival. My main point is that archives of survival — far from just being collections of records — are essential in our struggles for justice and liberation. To help make this point, I will focus on the role of truth and imaginaries in our liberatory memory work.
When I say ‘archives of survival’ I mean archives that fight for the survival of marginalized and oppressed communities in the most expansive sense: not only the survival of our memories, cultures, and histories, but also our survival against domination, including the carceral state, white supremacy, patriarchy, racial capitalism, and environmental catastrophe. By survival I don’t just mean the ability to keep breathing. I mean truly living, thriving, and creating with purpose, meaning, and joy.
In my experience doing this work for the last fifteen years, I have seen how archives of survival create networks of solidarity beyond borders. They help disrupt cycles of violence and trauma. They help oppressed communities reclaim and build new power — narrative power, political power, cultural power.
More important than their technical infrastructure is their moral architecture: by centering community and care, archives of survival actualize the relationships we want to see across our communities; relationships built on understanding, truth, and accountability.
Let’s start with the premise that state violence both resists and is sustained by documentation. It is sustained by documentation that justifies its existence and legitimizes its violence (such as criminal records and surveillance records). It resists documentation — as memory worker Zakiya Collier reminds us in a powerful call to document state violence against Black communities — that challenges its existence and legitimacy (such as counter-narratives, counter-records, and even some state records). By resisting documentation, dominant narratives of violence, criminality, and the purported need for retributive punishment can flourish unimpeded. This results in the enduring destruction of state violence against BIPOC, trans, and other oppressed communities.
Police and prosecutors destroy, fabricate, and manipulate records and narratives to justify or conceal their violence. Let me give a few examples.
Minneapolis police initially said George Floyd died due to a “medical incident.” Charlottesville police officer Michael Slager initially reported that Walter Scott stole his taser and that he feared for his life before he fired eight shots into Scott’s back. The Memphis police officers that savagely beat Tyre Nichols earlier this year initially said Tyre was fighting them.
In 2017 the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to destroy detainee records related to in-custody deaths, sexual assault, and the use of solitary confinement (Washington 2017).
In Texas, there is a bill currently pending in the legislature that would roll back key provisions of the 2017 Sandra Bland Act, named for the young Black woman who died in a county jail under mysterious circumstances after a violent arrest by a Texas State Trooper during a routine traffic stop. Among other changes, the Sandra Bland Act required Texas sheriffs to commission independent investigations whenever a person dies in their custody. The pending bill would reverse this and allow sheriffs to investigate themselves when someone dies in their jails. And we already know how that goes.
When a Polish court sought to investigate allegations of abuse and torture at a secret CIA site in Poland during the so-called global “war on terror,” the US Department of Justice tried to block the testimonies of two former CIA contractors by invoking the “state secrets privilege.” The US government also asked the US Supreme Court to prevent the testimony of Abu Zubaydah about the abuse and torture he experienced at a CIA site in Poland and then at the prison camp at Guántanamo, where he has been held since 2006 without ever being charged with a crime. I won’t go into detail here about the torture Zubaydah experienced, but it is truly horrific. Even Trump-appointed Justice Gorsuch was dubious of the government’s argument, asking the DOJ lawyer: “Why not make the witness available? What is the government’s objection to the witness testifying to his own treatment?”
The strategy of state actors to pursue legitimizing information and to destroy, fabricate, and manipulate information that undermines its legitimacy has resulted in the near impenetrability of dominant narratives of violence, criminality, and punishment. While there are occasional ruptures in these narratives, it is all too rare for these ruptures to translate into narrative change and cultural transformation. When ruptures occur the US public may offer a glance, maybe even a momentary stare, but ultimately settle right back into old habits.
The rupture that occurred in 2020 as a result of the collision between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings across the US after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery by white vigilantes and the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others, appeared to be an outlier. In an essay published just weeks into the pandemic, Arundhati Roy wrote: “Coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality,’ trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
In a 2020 interview with formerly incarcerated advocate Maggie Luna as part of TAVP’s Sheltering Justice project, Maggie discussed how advocates and abolitionists immediately recognized this rupture, a rare opening, and worked intensely to translate the moment into sustained momentum for decarceration and abolition movements at the same time that they worked tirelessly to get people out of confinement as fast as possible as part of the #SaferAtHome national campaign. “I hope the fire doesn’t die,” Maggie told me during the interview. “As long as I continue to be as loud as I can and bring people in and let them know, hey, you showing up today isn’t going to change everything, but if you keep showing up we can make a real difference. We can do anything.”
As it became increasingly clear in the early months of the pandemic that elected leaders refused to intervene to save people confined in jails, detention centers, and prisons from becoming infected by the virus, even those who otherwise supported tough-on-crime policies were concerned, even outraged, by this inhumanity. At the very least, the US public understood that incarcerated people could not physically distance from one another and wouldn’t have access to adequate personal protective equipment. As the late radical organizer Kathy Boudin observed at that time, the pandemic was forcing the US public to finally see the connections between mass incarceration, racial capitalism, and access to healthcare. The US public was finally paying attention.
Yet, despite effective strategizing and organizing by decarceration activists and abolitionists, the rupture in dominant narratives about mass incarceration, racial capitalism, and access to healthcare was not sustained beyond a few months. In the Truthout podcast Movement Memos, writer and activist Kelly Hayes reflects on this moment: “Grand transformations seemed possible. Almost three years later we are not living in that transformed world that many had hoped for, and in fact we are faced with the further normalization of mass death as hundreds of people die from Covid each day without mitigations, as though these losses have been sanctioned by the government for the sake of capital. We have seen a deterioration of empathy on many fronts.”
It often makes me wonder: What will it take to shake awake a public that is obsessed with the spectacle of violence yet numb or apathetic about what to do about it beyond bullets, cages, and needles?
It seems to me that, at the root of our deeply-entrenched divisions about everything from how to address violence in our communities to how to understand the past and its role in the present, is fundamentally a battle over truth. Framing the problem this way reveals the deep connections between violence and knowledge, resistance and information. There is a straight line connecting the endurance of state violence today with intensifying efforts by neo-fascists to defund libraries, ban books, whitewash history, and outlaw Critical Race Theory. Anti-memory is the lifeblood of white supremacy; and state violence its most loyal guardian.
When I talk about truth for liberation, I’m not talking about the “truth” pursued by the criminal punishment system. This “truth” is actually just the relentless pursuit of vengeance disguised as the pursuit of justice. As the late Dutch criminologist Herman Bianchi writes in Justice as Sanctuary, “the main justification for the existence of repressive procedures is the attempt to find the truth, that old objective of the Inquisition. The means by which the repressive system seeks its truth are overwhelming in their destructive force. There is nothing admirable in the longing for [this] ‘truth’… It does not serve justice but only the conscience of the controllers” (60). Even when the repressive procedures of the criminal punishment system find “truth,” it’s quickly tossed aside when it undermines the broader trifecta of the carceral state, white supremacy, and racial capitalism, revealing its fragility and malleability. Consider, for example, the recent pledge by the Governor of Texas to pardon a white man that a jury convicted for the 2020 murder of a Black Lives Matter protestor. The “truth” here is clear: if you kill to protect white supremacy, you’re innocent; if you protest to protect the survival of Black people, you deserve to die.
Dominant narratives that legitimize state violence are fueled by the criminalization and disposability of BIPOC people and communities. We have never been bestowed the gift of innocence in a country that is captivated by innocence. We are outraged when an innocent person is sent to prison or executed. We are outraged when innocent children are harmed or worse. As we should be. Though we seem to weigh the dead on an invisible scale of innocence, which we usually measure by age. Except when we don’t: Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Adam Toledo. Ma’Khia Bryant.
Truth for liberation, in contrast to carceral state truth, serves accountability and healing in the aftermath of violence. Even documentation that sustains state violence, including state records, can reveal truths for accountability. Memory workers and community archives often obtain, analyze and, when appropriate, make state records of abuse, surveillance, and killings accessible to their communities for accountability and to strip narrative power away from the carceral state. Even state records that appear to be mundane (internal memos, plans, reports, budgets) tell stories. As curator and theorist Ariella Azouley reminds us, records need not be graphic to reveal atrocities.
TAVP has used public information requests to obtain records from the state to inform our research, help us plan projects, and prepare for interviews. My colleague Hannah Whelan is also leading a project that digitizes and analyzes historical state records related to state violence and is preparing to bring together a working group of descendants of the people represented in the records to help make key decisions around analysis, description, access, and public use.
Here at UCLA, the Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration project is analyzing and archiving thousands of LAPD records and working with directly impacted communities to determine what records will be publicly accessible, when they’ll be made public, and how they should be used. The project also includes oral histories with Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities that have been targeted by the LAPD for decades.
In Puerto Rico, the advocacy group Kilòmetro Cero obtained government documents in response to the Puerto Rico Police Bureau’s lack of transparency and accountability related to police use-of-force deaths. Like TAVP and Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration, Kilòmetro Cero also leads the Cuéntame project, which uses family narratives, newspapers, and other sources to tell the “invisible” stories of victims of lethal police violence.
But it’s not just a matter of obtaining revealing state records and documenting the experiences of people and communities impacted by state violence. Community archives increasingly need to be prepared to protect the integrity and credibility of our collections against threats old and new. While new advances in tech allow activists and organizers to reach millions of people and have expanded the use and reach of documentation, preservation, and access, those same advances also pose serious threats to archives of survival and liberatory memory work generally. From the ubiquity of mis- and disinformation to AI-generated “synthetic media” to sophisticated surveillance technologies to the widespread use of crypto to fund white supremacist groups, we must be prepared to protect the communities we serve and to fortify the truth, as our friends at WITNESS (a global human rights network) are spearheading.
There is an important difference between truth for accountability and truth for healing. Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s work on impossible archival imaginaries has been instructive for how we understand the importance of truth for healing, and the role of archives to support it. Here, in contrast to truth for accountability, verification is less important than how people survive and make meaning of their experiences of violence and loss.
Throughout my years at TAVP I have seen impossible archival imaginaries appear in our archives again and again. It’s the nonexistent jail surveillance video. The missing police body cam footage. The silent eyewitness testimony. It has also shown me how the imaginary sometimes manifests not as an archival imaginary but as a question, a possibility, an escape. Sometimes the imaginary is a letter that never came, when our mail is returned to us because the intended recipient was executed before it arrived to their cell. Sometimes the imaginary is what if? What if my son could have gotten mental health treatment before it was too late? What if my daughter didn’t leave the house that night? What if the jury knew he was a victim of child abuse before they sentenced him to die?
Sometimes the imaginary is the continuation of a life after it was taken, like with the mother we interviewed several years ago who still communicated with her son after he was executed by the state. “I have a notebook, and for about a year I would talk to him,” she told us. “I would write it down and talk to him. If I had a bad day, I would tell him about it. I still have that notebook.” (TAVP’s interview with Tammy Anderson)
Sometimes the imaginary is transcendent. I often think about a conversation I had with the father of a young Black man who was executed for a crime he committed as a minor. After our interview, we sat together on his porch drinking iced tea. I remember how he asked me a lot of questions about the metaphysics classes I’d taken in college. Perhaps he’d been wondering, Could he escape the reality he’d been living? Or could his reality be altered, rearranged, undone?
No matter how it manifests, in their search for truth and justice, in the midst of unimaginable loss and grief, survivors and loved ones must fill the gaps and silences and unknowns: the imaginary is the light. It’s where memory and survival, shadows and healing, fade into each other and become one.
Like the imaginary, the stories of survivors and others who are directly impacted by state violence confront and challenge dominant narratives about violence, criminality, and punishment. TAVP creates space for people to tell their stories of loss and survival with dignity, humanity, and trust. In their own words, in their own way, on their own terms. Where the criminal punishment system regulates or prohibits the retelling of one’s experiences with violence and loss (such as police investigative interviews, trial cross-examinations, state secrets), archives of survival practice an expansive approach to bearing witness that allows survivors to make meaning and cultivate new understanding in real time.
Archives of survival recognize the wisdom in the silences, the sighs, the deep breaths, the whispers, the what ifs.
Whether it’s truth-telling in directly challenging state records and “official” narratives, or the deeper truths of what philosopher Kristen Brown Golden calls the “intense demand of pre-reflective traumatic wound[s],” archives of survival show us a way out.
So, to return to the question of how to awaken the US public from a deep moral sleep. Archives of survival don’t let us look the other way. They inform and educate. They create openings for everyone to learn, to challenge their beliefs and assumptions, and to change. They provide space to be outraged by what we encounter and, as Professor Caswell writes in Urgent Archives, they allow “people to see themselves in a new light across space and time, then catalyze this new self-reflection into action” (6). We never know what story or document or artwork in the archives will transform someone’s understanding, worldview, life.
I have written before about how doing this memory work destroyed me and, in the process of that destruction, transformed me and my worldview. I’ve written about how the dynamics between archives and communities can mirror the relational, intersubjective dynamics between the witness and the person sharing their story of loss and survival. I imagine it to be something like the process of mediated restorative dialogue between a person who was harmed and the person who harmed them. In the process of that restorative dialogue, the person who was harmed tells of the impacts of that harm on their life, and the person who did the harm listens and accepts responsibility. When this happens a transfer of pain occurs, it returns to the person who did the harm, creating an opportunity for accountability and healing. I can’t help but think this is also what happens with archives of survival; when communities open themselves to the suffering of others, when we accept responsibility for the harm that is carried out in our names, there is a transfer of pain, a pain that will shake us awake. The pain belongs to us.
Let me end by acknowledging that our liberatory memory work is possible because of generations of truth-tellers that came before us. For hundreds of years, oppressed people and communities have worked to document violence and preserve sacred knowledge, usually in the face of threats and danger. Resistance knowledge has always been endangered knowledge.
Many of us approach our liberatory memory work not with fear but with some caution because, as my friend Celeste Henery reminds me, our ancestors were punished or killed for telling the truth. And maybe that’s why we are drawn to this work; maybe they guide us toward it.
We do liberatory memory work because we know that we have a deep responsibility to do it. To push ourselves creatively and constructively but also to take care of ourselves. We owe it to those who came before us, to the communities we serve, to our children and grandchildren, and to those still yet to come.
Thank you.
