Archival Activism

Abstract

Hip hop archives, in their recent and significant growth across American cities, provide new opportunities to engage and preserve what was once imagined as a fleeting youth subculture. Importantly, hip hop archives also allow us to intervene on the lack of archival materials relating to hip hop in the City of Toronto Archives, a municipally funded institution. In this article weargue that "rogue" archival practices provide the theoretical tools for an urgent response and solution to the lack of municipal preservation of marginalized histories. We use the term rogue following Abigail De Kosnik to gesture at some of the productive ways that digital archiving, in its refusal to "follow the rules" of archiving, or in its disorderly fan-based labour, opens new passages to think about hip hop's history beyond state-sanctioned institutions.

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