Huc-Hepher, S. and Ma, X. 2025. Forthcoming. The Trouble with Community: Constructing, Deconstructing and Reconstructing Transnational “Community” Micro-archives. in: Brügger, N., Ben-David, A. and Aasman, S.I. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies Routledge.
| Chapter title | The Trouble with Community: Constructing, Deconstructing and Reconstructing Transnational “Community” Micro-archives |
|---|---|
| Authors | Huc-Hepher, S. and Ma, X. |
| Editors | Brügger, N., Ben-David, A. and Aasman, S.I. |
| Abstract | Almost three decades ago, social anthropologist Gerd Baumann (1996) noted that “ethnic minorities” are often called “communities” in British public, political and media discourses. Since then, the term has become increasingly widespread, with references to the “Chinese community” or “online communities” now not only standard, but generally deemed the most “culturally sensitive” coinage. In this chapter, focusing on our experience of curating diasporic “French” and “Chinese” “community” collections within the UK Web Archive, we argue that this normalisation serves to invisibilise the underlying problematics at play, particularly in the blurry in-between space of the transnational context. Drawing on French philosophical thought, specifically that of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, alongside Benedict Anderson’s seminal notion of the imagined community and contemporary xenofeminist ideas from the international collective, Laboria Cuboniks, we shall investigate the trouble with “community” in three dimensions: first, constructing community, as web curation process and principles; second, deconstructing community, as concept in the transnational archiving space; and third, reconstructing community as xenofeminist antidote to the archive’s endemic trouble. |
| Keywords | transnational web archiving |
| micro-archives | |
| community | |
| Chinese diaspora | |
| East & Southeast Asian diaspora | |
| French diaspora | |
| deconstruction | |
| xenofeminism | |
| Book title | The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| ISBN | 9781032497785 |