Michelle Caswell. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. Milton Park, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2021. 142p. Hardcover, $160.00 (ISBN 978-0367427276).

Abstract

Michelle Caswell’s Urgent Archives is a powerfully persuasive book, challenging some of the most fundamental principles of Western archival tradition through a deep exploration of the theory and practice of community archives. Caswell is an archival studies scholar and a co-founder with Samip Mallick of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). These dual perspectives shape the book’s running themes as Caswell draws on her work with graduate students, her own evolving scholarly work, and her relationships with community archivists and archives users to develop her challenge to the Western archival tradition. The deep theoretical work of Urgent Archives is grounded throughout by descriptions of actual and potential ways that community archives constitute profoundly important sites of liberation.