Activating Personal Counter-Archives: The Case of the Amir Hassanpour Fonds

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, through a historical and theoretical reflection on the Amir Hassanpour Fonds, held at the University of Toronto, the author investigates the role of personal and community archives in counter-archiving in the Middle East, especially in Iran. He expands on his experience working on appraising, describing, and arranging the Amir Hassanpour Fonds at the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services (UTARMS) to argue that archiving a diasporic and revolutionary counter-archive calls for more than a procedural and habitual institutional practice. To activate such a counter-archive, there should be, first, close attention paid to the memory institutions against which the counter-archive has been developed. Such close attention calls for an investigation into the larger political structures in which the memory institutions are embedded. Second, the counter-archive should be understood in the broader modes and methods of cultural and memory resistance in that specific political structure, engaging analytically and theoretically with the creator's counter-archiving praxis, in this case Amir Hassanpour's Marxist internationalist revolutionary approach. The article ends with a brief discussion of the various ways UTARMS attempted to enliven this specific fonds.

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