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Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation

Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic “reaching and ungrasping” in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions Duke University Press

Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation

positions , Volume 29 (2) – May 1, 2021

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Copyright
Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-8852098
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic “reaching and ungrasping” in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.

Journal

positionsDuke University Press

Published: May 1, 2021

References