9 - Intersectionality in Digital Archives: The Case Study of the Barbados Synagogue Restoration Project Collection

Summary

Situating the Author

I write this essay as the archivist who processed (arranged, described, digitized, and put online) the Barbados Synagogue Restoration Project papers. I am situated in and defined by my European upbringing and Jewish background and by being a transplant to Barbados, the history of which I have humbly tried to learn and understand. Although I do not carry in me the legacy of a colonial past, I have arrived in Barbados after long journeys, and along the way have lived as a minority in diasporic settings for most of my adult life. I float among several, at times conflicting, identities and carrying them successfully has always been an act of sensitivity and respect.

Working with this archives, I have tried to reconcile multiple values: my personal and professional ones, the values of the funding body, the records that I processed, and the community they belong to. I performed my work as best as I could, albeit constrained by the tools available to me and the professional standards to which I try to adhere. Where possible, I strove to overcome such limitations. I constantly interrogated the ways our archival practices affect the stories we tell about the past. I have been acutely aware of voices that are there, and those that are not, of voices that I tried to bring to light and others that I consciously or inadvertently overshadowed and made untraceable. The findings and recommendations of this paper, founded on interrogating assumptions and practice, are based on self-reflective work that necessarily started after the completion of the project, when I was able to have a panoptic view of this archives.

Introduction

Archival science and digital humanities share a common interest in making visible groups and identities that have been marginalized or misrepresented in scholarship and memory institutions. Archival science has now gone beyond interrogating archival silences and actively seeks ways to create a more inclusive and representative historical record, particularly through identity-or community-based digital archives. Digital humanities scholars have recently employed intersectionality as a method to transform the representation of multiple identities in digital humanities projects.