Under The Shadow Of Empire

Minor Archives and Radical Media Distribution in the Americas

Under the Shadow of Empire: Minor Archives and Radical Media Distribution in the Americas (USEM) investigates the history of pre-internet media distribution of minor and radical archival nodes and collections by women, Indigenous, LGBTQ2 and Afro-descendant peoples. The temporal scope of USEM is from the early 1960s to the late 1990s; from the first Viña del Mar Film Festival in Chile in 1963 up to the rise of the internet and related grassroots distribution of online files and flash-drive file sharing. Through the set of case studies to map the connections between archival holdings, distribution modes, and counter-publics and using Digital Humanities tools, this project will translate the knowledge held in the localities of the case studies across borders of various kinds and build the Moving Media Maps of the Americas (MMM_A) digital platform. It will respond to that knowledge through best practices of archiving and metadata development, remediation of the archives and their access.

Team