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The City Amplified: SAADA's 'Where We Belong' Project - from Theory to Practice by Samip Mallick

The City Amplified
SAADA's 'Where We Belong' Project - from Theory to Practice by Samip Mallick
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table of contents
  1. Title
  2. Center for the Humanities
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. Introduction
  5. Community Building
    1. SAADA's 'Where We Belong' Project - from Theory to Practice by Samip Mallick
    2. Archiving Black Lesbians in Practice by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
    3. Building Activist Capacity Through Memory Work by Maggie Schreiner
  6. Listening
    1. Sustaining Collaboration is a Skill by Sady Sullivan
    2. De-Radicalizing Public Engagement by Rebecca Amato
    3. NYSCA Living Traditions: Safeguarding Tradition Beyond the Physical Archive by Molly Garfinkel
    4. The Repositories of Memories that We All Carry Within by Yvette Ramirez
  7. Honoring Memory
    1. The Artist and the Radical Archive by Walis Johnson
    2. Telling Totes at the Essex Street Market by Hatuey Ramos-Fermin
    3. Juxtaposition: The Case for the Radically Open Archive by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
    4. If You're Thinking About Starting An Oral History Project by Sady Sullivan with Maggie Schreiner
  8. Resources
  9. Further Reading
  10. Contributors

Community Building

SAADA’s "Where We Belong" Project – From Theory to Practice

Samip Mallick

In this photo a young South Asian woman named Pavi Jaisankar, wears a turquoise scarf. She is pictured with a microphone in hand, giving a presentation at the SAADA Community Forum. An antique photo of a South Asian family of three is projected behind the young woman speaking. SAADA Community Forum, Philadelphia, PA. Taken by Vivek G. Bharathan April 4, 2013
SAADA Community Forum, Philadelphia, PA. Taken by Vivek G. Bharathan April 4, 2013

SAADA (the South Asian American Digital Archive) is an independent non-profit organization working nationally to give voice to South Asian Americans through documenting, preserving, and sharing stories that represent their unique and diverse experiences. SAADA’s collection of more than 3,100 items is the largest publicly accessible South Asian American archive. Used widely by scholars, students, journalists, artists, and community members, the archive includes rare photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, oral history interviews, videos, and other materials. SAADA’s website has received 617,565 visitors in the past four years. Further, through digital storytelling initiatives such as its First Days Project (sharing stories from immigrants and refugees about their arrival in the U.S.) and Road Trips Project (sharing stories of travel to reframe an American tradition), SAADA reimagines the potential of community archives in the digital era. SAADA has been recognized with awards from the American Historical Association and Society of American Archivists and grants from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and National Endowment for the Humanities.

SAADA addresses the symbolic annihilation of South Asian Americans. This term refers to the ways that members of marginalized groups are “absent, grossly underrepresented, maligned, or trivialized” from the historical narrative and popular media. As SAADA Co-Founder Dr. Michelle Caswell (Associate Professor of Archival Studies at UCLA) has shown in her research co-authored with Marika Cifor and Mario H. Ramírez, SAADA’s work has an epistemological, ontological, and social impact on South Asian Americans, demonstrating: “We were here.” “I am here.” “We belong here.” As one respondent in Dr. Caswell’s research expressed, “to discover yourself in the archive is to suddenly discover yourself existing.”

This photo shows a South Asian woman facilitating a workshop with several South Asian participants. The participants, or the audience, mirror the Facilitator’s gesture, leading everyone in the bright room to have two hands raised.
Fig. 2 Photo Credit: M. Azim Siddiqui

Building from this research, SAADA’s “Where We Belong: Artists in the Archive” project sought to understand how collaboration between artists and archives might effectively counteract the symbolic annihilation of immigrant and minority communities. Made possible with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, for this project SAADA partnered with five contemporary South Asian American artists who each engaged and responded to the archive to create new artistic works. The artist cohort included Rudresh Mahanthappa, Chitra Ganesh, Chiraag Bhakta, Joti Singh, and Zain Alam. The artists presented their new creations at a one-day symposium held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on April 8, 2017. In the photograph above, dancer Joti Singh shares her new choreography based on the story of Ghadar Party leader Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, who was also her great-grandfather.

The sense of community created at this event was profound and moving. To share this feeling more widely, SAADA invited community members across the country to organize intimate gatherings in their living rooms on August 5, 2017, the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Oak Creek Gurdwara in Wisconsin. The artistic creations and discussion sparked by this project helped community members at these gatherings engage in conversation, dialogue, and a deeper understanding of our shared histories.

Pictured here are seven South Asian young adults sitting in a community member’s living room, gathered around a coffee table and seated on a black sofa, engaging in dialogue
Fig. 3 “Where We Belong” community gathering co-hosted by Manvir Singh and Jagpreet Singh, August 5, 2017

References

Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramírez. “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives 1.” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 56-81. doi:10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56.

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