In this post, guest blogger Zelmarie Cantillon provides an overview of a recently published book by Deborah Withers called 'Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage'. The principal focus of this book is the Women's Liberation Music Archive.
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Digital cultures and tools have significantly altered the ways in
which heritage may be constructed, curated, communicated and engaged with.
While it is widely understood that modes of historical preservation such as
archives work to transmit particular values and knowledges, the technical
processes of this transmission are often overlooked. In her book, Withers
considers how transmission of feminist knowledges (what she terms feminism’s
‘already-there’) operates in a digital context, drawing on her experience as
co-founder of the online Women’s Liberation Music Archive.
Music-making during the UK Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was
ephemeral, anti-commercial and practice-based. The women involved produced few
‘finished’ recordings, let alone professionally-recorded tracks, and had garnered
little exposure beyond an audience of feminists who were already directly involved
in the movement in specific places and times. Since popular music heritage is
conventionally thought to be grounded in materiality, Withers suggests that
these more ephemeral practices can be deemed ‘intangible cultural heritage’. Central
to this kind of heritage are performative practices and traditions (for
example, storytelling, dance or music-making) which are passed down
(transmitted) to future generations. Intangible cultural heritage is always
flexible as traditions are continually re-enacted, re-shaped and transformed
through practice.
The Women’s Liberation Music Archive (WLMA) is an example of a
digital repository for intangible cultural heritage. Withers explains that she
was compelled to start the archive out of a feeling of frustration with the
inaccessibility and inactivity of WLM artefacts in physical archives. Using
freely available digital tools like Wordpress, SoundCloud and YouTube, Withers
was able to start her own archive with co-founder Frankie Green, a musician from
the WLM era. Choosing a digital medium was especially appropriate for a
repository of this kind – both the content and form of the archive are
processual in that the artefacts are incomplete, rough works-in-process, and
the blog is dynamic and characterised by a temporal ‘liveness’. This is what
Withers calls an ‘archive of process’.
In a broader sense, the digital sphere offers the possibility to
increase visibility of marginalised groups and cultures which have lingered on
the periphery of cultural memory, at risk of being lost and forgotten. A
digital archive can be created by an enthusiast with little to no archival
training or funding, and with a significantly larger potential audience than a
physical archive. Further, and of particular importance to feminism, the grassroots
digital archive allows for self-determination and independence from
institutional constraints. There are, however, limitations to digital archives.
While digitisation may temporarily extend the life of analogue materials, rapid
advances in technology mean tools and file formats can quickly become obsolete.
For example, Withers recalls errors she made as an amateur archivist, such as
making low resolution scans of photographs and digitising audio into low
quality MP3 files.
In any case, preservation is not the only concern for
community-based archives like the WLMA. By placing the archive in the digital
realm, the archivists are re-circulating and transmitting feminism’s past so
that it can be used. They are making
traditions, practices and knowledges available to be re-interpreted, re-enacted
and transformed in the present and into the future. As Withers argues, this
access and engagement is essential for the continuation of feminist thought and
activism.
Reference:
Withers, Deborah M 2015, Feminism,
Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural
Heritage, Rowman & Littlefield International, London.
