Diasporic Archives and Hauntological Accretions

Centering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers. 

interviewed, and some of their narratives were included along with their home movies. Altogether, there are over nine hours of donated footage, of which a portion has been made available on the HMV website, where users are able to view the digitised archives of fifteen families. 5 While similar, these are not identical projects. Whereas the entire collection of digitised home movies garnered by HMV were acquired by York University Libraries, where they will be held in perpetuity in the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collection, the photographs for MoaA are part of a more amorphous and ongoing artist project. 6 Further, while HMV also has a number of the digitised collections available on their website in a systematised yet incomplete archive, the MoaA website does not contain a publicly accessible archive. Nonetheless, both projects are mobilised around the stated importance of excavating and protecting the quotidian histories of minoritised communities across Canada, and recontextualising these histories for an expanded public imaginary.

Counter-Archives
HMV and MoaA are examples of counter-archives, or creative remonstrances against national archives shaped by longstanding settler colonial histories. 7 The counter-archive, Brett Kashmere writes, "represents an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play." 8 Similarly, Paula Amad describes the counterarchive as a "challenge to the positivist archive's sacred myths of order, exhaustiveness, and objective neutrality." 9 Counter-archiving thus implies an insurgent action or hermeneutics that approaches archives as paradoxically structured around the very qualities they attempt to negate or repress: (im)permanence, (in)stability, (in)completeness. Crucially, in Kashmere's conceptualisation, the counter-archive is less about complete opposition to any official archive, than an invitation to directly engage official archives through creative experimentation, negotiation, and potential subversion. 10 In this vein, HMV and MoaA do not renounce the nation so much as they exist in tension alongside it, and point to its inherent contradictions and intractabilities.
Considerations regarding these projects' in/direct relationship to nation are especially complex given that they are both funded by federal arts grants. 11 One assumes that HMV in particular needed to be legible in specific ways to be granted the significant amount of Sesquicentennial federal funding that it received. Official recognition through a federal arts grant would seem to hinge on the project's demonstrated adherence to the aim of archival accommodation for the minoritised presencea decipherable aim within the liberal multicultural model of inclusion catalysed around perpetual promises of minor reforms rather than structural overhauls. Strategic legibility can thus provide a vehicle for more complex and even potentially fugitive elements within the archivethose counterarchival threads inadvertently filed alongside more sanctioned artefacts and histories. Thus, while counter-archives can exist external to state support, they can also channel received state resources towards challenging the state's inviolability, including through focusing on histories and narratives typically excluded from institutional archives. Further, rather than being permanently housed in institutional settings, counter-archives can be enacted in more mobile and ephemeral contexts, including through digital platforms, community gatherings, workshops, performances, etc. These more flexible and informal configurations allow for capillary dispersions of archival knowledge back to communities. Relatedly, counter-archives often depend on alternate networks of care and relationality.
The endurance of the records held by HMV and MoaA indicate how counter and amateur archives can bypass official archival structures and travel along divergent routes of care and stewardship, with family and community members often becoming inadvertent archivists whose labours enable the records' survival.
Counter-archives emerge from particular technological, social, and political contexts. In her study of the history of amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann explains how the momentous convergence of consumer culture and the nuclear family gave rise to recognisable discursive and aesthetic forms in home videos from the 1950s-1960s. 12 Amateur film can be considered counter-archival insofar as it falls outside the traditional ambit of institutional support and capture. Certainly, much of HMV's home movies, gathered between the 1960s to the mid-2000s, dovetail with the emergence of portable film cameras from the 1960s and video from the 1970s-80s, and waned with the inundation of digital selfimaging, which irrevocably altered the processes of personal and familial "archiving." Alongside this convergence of technological and social formations, the HMV's and MoaA's visual records were also produced in specific political and economic contexts. Much of these projects' still and moving images emerged from post-1960s Canada, an era marked by a shift in immigration policy, resultant demographic changes, and the inauguration of state multiculturalism. 13 As counter-archival projects, HMV and MoaA call attention to the contradictions inherent in official state multiculturalism's public declarations and private erasures, echoing broader critiques of the ways in which state multiculturalism masks distinctly colonial and neoliberal imperatives through a façade of benevolence and inclusion. 14 More specifically, both projects aim to rectify multiculturalism's lacunae and elisions by helping to safeguard minoritised archives.
In contextualising her contributions, HMV participant Stella Isaac describes the importance of inscribing experiences of Black families in Canada and making their presence visible to wider publics: "It's great to allow families the opportunity to revisit old footage, explore their history and share that. A lot of people don't think of Black people in Canada just existing. It's a great way to change the Canadian narrative." 15 Another contributor from the Khmer-Krom community, an ethnic minority group from South Vietnam, recounts how their mother, Trinh Nha Truong, views their footage as a reminder that members of their community "live in narratives that disclose the "complicated histories of migration." 17 These are histories that, along with the analogue and celluloid media on which they are carried, face obsolescence in the absence of institutional recognition and support. Nguyễn's aim is thus to create "a new archive that seeks to represent the fractured ideology of multiculturalism from the bottom up." 18 Departing from multiculturalism as official state technology and discourse, then, this "new archive" is understood as the potential site for more contingent and complex articulations of multiculturalism as lived difference.
In Zimmermann's consideration of the ways in which amateur film prompts a rethinking of the archive, she points to how "the multiplication of practices, technologies, zones, and representations" can work to move us "beyond the repression of difference." 19 Further, these heteroglossic articulations can, among other things, serve "as a corrective to nationalised representational systems" and the models of homogeneity they promote. 20 Zimmermann goes on to posit that amateur films pluralise national myths and narratives by "perform[ing] a form of psychic history-writing, a making legible of the invisible history of fantasies and social relations, a knitting of the local to the global." 21 While official national archives work to stabilise a historical and narratological perspective, counter-archival projects like HMV and MoaA point us towards the archive's refractions and instabilities. These films effectively become the archival shadowsthe hauntological stutters and excesses that fall outside the official scope of the nation.

Hauntings and Accretions
Sociologist Avery Gordon's influential conceptualisation of haunting can help us apprehend the heteroglossic shadows of nation and its official records and narratives. Gordon argues that haunting is "a constituent element" of contemporary life. 22 Rather than signalling absence or disavowal, haunting points us towards the "seething presence" that presses against our understanding and experience of history. 23 As Gordon notes, haunting thickens social life, because it points to the bodies, histories, and multiple forces that endure, despite the efforts to erase them. Such spectral forces speak of how different transparencies of power circulate in late capitalism. A hauntological approach would thus entail engaging with the "affective, historical, and mnemonic structures" of social forces and power relations that are often not seen, but felt. 24 Taking a lead from Gordon, I argue that we can approach diaspora and diasporic media not (just) in terms of loss and longing, but also as a process of hauntological thickening, especially through examinations of how material densities, narratives, silences, and affects accumulate in the archives.
First, we can consider the material accretions at the surface of the image itself, or what we can term "poor" images. 25 These textures, like Gordon's historical spectres, densify the present; they accentuate the material imprints that disturb the present, thus challenging an understanding of history as unitary and progressive. Laura U. Marks notes that both film and video "become more haptic as they die." 26 In other words, as they age, analogue formats accumulate material deteriorations, including scratches, colour distortions, bleeds, image ringing/ghosting. Recontextualised through the digital platform, HMV's home videos and MoaA's still images preserve these material markings and, in effect, their swelling accumulations of temporal densities. These densities are reminiscent of Lily Cho's discussion of how diasporic subjectivity coalesces around the imbrication of past and future. Cho offers the insight that "[d]iasporas emerge through losses which have already happened but which also define the future.
These losses come both before and after the emergence of diasporic subjectivity." 27 Here, Cho expresses the contradictions of diasporas being shaped by futures that remain haunted by antecedent losses and pasts that perpetually ripple forward. Collapsing tidy narratives of survival and closure, the unresolvable.
In addition to temporal accretions, HMV's and MoaA's archives also capture the material traces of complex migration histories and transnational entanglements. In her examination of how selfdocumentation has become a constituent element of modern migration and the growing ubiquity of portable recording devices, Alisa Lebow argues that the cinematic has become part and parcel of how we imagine diaspora. 28 Alongside their transient creators, visual archives migrate across spatial terrains, assembling and resonating histories as they move. For Arjun Appadurai, diasporic public spheres arise when "moving images meet deterritorialized viewers." 29  politicised "counterimage" of Black diasporic communities. 35 Taken together, the "less eventful" moments accumulated by HMV and MoaA also speak of the radicality of the unextraordinary, the power of witnessing racialised communities simply moving through the vicissitudes and rhythms of ordinary life. At times, these quotidian scenes also coalesce with broader histories of resistance, affiliation, and survival, even potentially challenging hegemonic visual regimes. Critics argue that state multiculturalism is a technology of discipline that functions through the spectacularisation of otherness to maintain whiteness at its unspoken core. 36 If multiculturalism demands deracinated and commodified difference, or recitals of identity that slot neatly into well-rehearsed categories, we could argue that HMV's and MoaA's archival projects subvert this disciplinary gaze and focus instead on the ephemeral, contradictory, and mundane murmur of everyday life for racialised communities.
While distinctions between state or "top-down" multiculturalism and "bottom up" lived diversity are important, it remains necessary to contend with the ways that these are not always easy to pry apart.
As Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung reminds us, the everyday, as captured in home videos, is not an impenetrable sphere, but one rife with the inherited forms and textures of larger ideologies. Fung, whose experimental works often return to and reengage his own home videos, writes about being unsettled when he first "reencountered" some of these archives as an adult, and was struck by how his own Chinese-Trinidadian family had been cast "to the template of suburban America." 37 He notes that home videos reproduce the likeness of the "right family" especially across markers of social class and gender. The family he found reflected back through the celluloid seemed to resemble a heterosexual nuclear family unit as shaped through the creeping influence of US military and consumer culture on the Trinidad & Tobago of his childhood. 38 As the HMV and MoaA archives also illustrate, hegemonic forms have the tendency to infiltrate the quotidian, and vice versa. Hence, traces of the quotidian have the potential to densify authoritative records of nation and multiply the latter's spectres.

Accumulated Affects
Alongside the accretions of the quotidian traces and textures of temporal and spatial transfers, haunting also can be thought of as the thickening of affects that shape our understanding of diasporic archives.
Returning to the earlier description of how material losses accumulate on the surface of the poor image, we can examine how noise and glitches introduce opacities into the otherwise smooth image and interrupt the ease or facility with which diasporic archival images are made available to their audiences.
However, such losses can also affectively impel us. Imperfect visual access, for Marks, prompts a haptic engagement that can usurp visual mastery, which Marks describes as the process through which the other is "killed into knowledge." 42 Haptic engagement is a mode that implicates the whole body in the act of perceiving. The quality of low-fidelity formats like video preserves the impenetrability of the image, so that the eye is moved to skim across surfaces as opposed to "plung[ing] into depth." 43 This more reciprocal embodied relation with the image leaves the object of knowledge, or the "other," intact. At the same time, the ungraspability of the poor image propels the viewer to intend everforward, thus dissolving sensorial and bodily boundaries in a co-implication of intimacies: "[i]n a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface." 44 This subversion of power relationsevanescent as it may beis, for Marks, the crux of the haptic as a generative mode of being and knowing, especially for minoritised communities.
Alongside the denial of visual transparency through poor images, the home movies collected through HMV also prevent the viewer from complete narrative access. In the absence of narrative structuring, the audience pieces together clues from fragments of quotidian ephemera. The descriptive texts offered alongside the archives provides some framework for decipherment, but they also leave much unsaid.
For example, the Baksh family videos include a two-minute clip entitled "Road Trip" (2008). It is time-lapse footage of a car ride between the Scarborough and North York suburbs of Toronto shot on Super 8. Shenaz Baksh has mounted the camera on the dashboard of the car, first trained on her aunt in the passenger seat. After her aunt exits the car at some point along the journey, Shenaz points the camera at herself as she drives to pick up her next passenger, her father. When he enters the car, she again readjusts the camera to focus on him now. Her father does not speak, but looks straight at the road ahead, sometimes rubbing his chin, seemingly deep in thought. We read consternation on his face.
Regarding this segment of the footage, the accompanying text simply reads: "[t]he camera is later refocused on her father in the passenger seat, as she drives him to his chemotherapy session. For the last portion of the road trip, Shenaz turns the camera onto the road itself, finally parking in front of her home where she began." 45 We perhaps lose details and information in the quickened pace and dropped frames of time-lapse; but this acceleration also condenses time and meaning. Here, it saturates the short sequence with inferred meanings and a silence that hangs in the air dense with affect. Such silences are markers of counter-archives, which denounce the authoritative archive's aims of completion and objectivity. They also compel their audiences by extending a space for our affective and sensorial participation. Both HMV and MoaA seem to serve a therapeutic function organised around the aim to rectify the exclusions of official archives through processes of community engaged archival affirmations. These include the creation of collective spaces for participants to remember, share personal and familial memories, as well as exercise some form of agency over how these remembrances are then preserved and reanimated. For diasporic audiences, access to these home videos of others can also be therapeutic.
The digital platform allows encounters with others' once-private scenes of domestic life, and also becomes a site of affective engagement, knowledge production, and communal recognition. As Appadurai notes, interactive media can help construct and mobilise diasporic public spheres through acts of "reading together" that have the potential to be more meaningfully participatory than those elucidated in Benedict Anderson's now-fraught model of "imagined communities." 46 The quotidian archives agglomerated through HMV and MoaA form flexible communities of shared intimacies, incorporating material traces of life that seem familiar, and might fill the lacunae in the audiences' own memories. However, rather than filling up archival gaps and silences, both HMV and MoaA instead linger on them, even drawing them out.
Extending Laura Wexler's idea that photographs are a "record of choices," Tina Campt argues that they are also "records of intentions." 47 The notion of intentionality requires us to consider "the social, cultural, and historical relationships figured in the image, as well as a larger set of relationships outside and beyond the framerelationships we might think of as the social life of the photo." 48 We can therefore think of these images as records of affects that extend far beyond the images themselves. Shantel Martinez refers to as the "generational hauntings" that "imprint" the body. 51 We can think of these as the dense narratives of arrival, loss, settlement, and survival that accrue along migratory journeys. The accumulated after-effects of dispersal and displacement thus mark this trove with a hauntological stain. As Lily Cho describes, diaspora rests not on definitional stability but on subjective experiences of unarticulated losses: "Diaspora is not a function of socio-historical and disciplinary phenomena, but emerges from deeply subjective processes of racial memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings which hang at the edge of possibility. It is constituted in the spectrality of sorrow and the pleasures of 'obscure miracles of connection.'" 52 These "condition[s] of subjectivity" can form a relational nexus for diasporic audiences, who might arrive at these archives with a ready store of their own emotional histories enfolded upon the body, and who, through the refraction of these histories, might recognise a familiar glance, silence, or gesture in the cacophony of the quotidian.

Conclusion
As populations become increasingly transient, so too are the accumulated images that accompany their movements dislodged from any unitary or stable point of origin. Participatory diasporic archives like HMV and MoaA provide vehicles to, at least momentarily, encapsulate and stabilise material, temporal, and spatial movements and accretions, while at the same time allowing for quotidian histories to be recirculated, and put into emergent orbits. Focusing on these two archival projects, this paper has explored how diasporic archives can challenge and redress the elisions and exclusions in official records, especially by capturing the ephemeral and quotidian to push back against multiculturalism's regimes of visibility. MoaA and HMV are projects that aim to gather and hold space for the still and moving image archives produced through migrations and dislocations. They have gathered a significant trove of archival materials from minoritised communities and mobilised them in an effort to insert overlooked images, narratives, and histories into public imaginaries. At the same time, one could argue that both projects also point to the impossibility of this task, or that gaps and elisions themselves paradoxically become the structuring force of the archival project, as well as counter-archival endeavours of collecting and accounting for occluded histories. This is why approaching diasporic archives through the orientation of hauntological thickening might prove useful, for it allows us to think beyond loss and trauma to the ambivalent accumulations of discourses, temporalities, and affects that bear down on the everyday. It allows us to not just come up against absence, but to reorient around an understanding of absences as potentially replete.