“Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?”
--Saidiya Hartman
1 Introduction
Where are the borders of an archive? If the constitutive borders of archives are determined by political power and authority, as Jacques Derrida famously suggested, how do we unravel them?1 Does one start with building up their own archives when the walls of institutions are impenetrable? Or should one strive to undermine them by unsettling the foundational logic of who belongs and who does not? Should one fight for inclusion, and try to fill the gaps? Or respect what one cannot know? This article approaches these dilemmas from archival margins, positioning itself on the boundaries that shape the knowledge of the past and present. Focusing on marginalised audiovisual artefacts, specifically relating to the Turkish migrant community in the Netherlands, it explores potentials of community engagement to trespass on the hegemonic understandings of archival preservation –– which leads to absences, silences, and disparities of access.
The experiences of migration remain outside of archival borders, perpetuating the limbo state of migrants ‘perceived as stuck somewhere between a “here” and a “there”, somewhere liminal ––and mostly precarious–– state of not belonging anymore but not belonging yet’.2 This is the same for archival artefacts relating to migrant communities. When they make their ways into institutional archives, they are largely perpetuated in their silence due to a set of reasons that I explain below. How to overcome these boundaries? I am interested in exploring the counter-history potential of marginalised artefacts, should they become activated.3 Taking into consideration the limitations of the word ‘migrant’, the article proposes ‘minoritarian (audiovisual) heritage’ as a concept to address such counter-history potential. It explores the effective role of community engagement to speak back to the absences, silences, and state-sanctioned registers of migration. It concludes with proposing innovative viewpoints to encourage and facilitate productive encounters between migrant community members and archival objects.
2 With and Against the Archive
Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Venus in Two Acts’ is a pivotal essay that effectively ruminates on archival boundaries and addresses the dilemmas sketched above. Crucially, Hartman specifically tackles the absences, silences, and violences in the archives concerning the enslaved ––particularly enslaved women–– emphasising the impossibility of reconstructing a historical narrative as ‘the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses’.4 Hartman asks whether there is still a way to tell these women’s stories ‘without committing further violence’ in one’s own act of narration.5 ‘How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?’6 Informed by this ethical dilemma, Hartman’s writing endeavours to represent ‘the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known’.7 Imagining a historiographical operation across the boundary between archival presences and absences, Hartman proposes a double gesture: Advancing a series of speculative arguments in fashioning a narrative based on archival presence, at the same time amplifying the impossibility of its telling (due to archival absence).8 This method, which Hartman coins ‘critical fabulation’, imagines ‘what might have happened or what might have been said or what might have been done’ to displace the received or authorised account.9 ‘The intent of this practice,’ Hartman writes, ‘is not to give voice’ to the absences, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified and to acknowledge the cause(s) of such absences. This is, Hartman concludes, ‘a history written with and against the archive’.10
The violence that Hartman finds in the archives is not limited to the literal violence recorded across many documents, such as company ledgers, court records, logbooks, or memoirs. It also figuratively signifies ‘epistemic violence’, which determines what knowledges are considered valid and which are discredited, thus deciding the limits of our knowledge of the past. Gayatri Spivak used this term in her article ‘Can Subaltern Speak?’ to spotlight ‘how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one’.11 Absences, gaps, and silences are not results of unfortunate accidents, rather, they constitute the epistemic regime of the archive. Derrida called this ‘the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence’.12 From this standpoint, speaking back to the archives from outside of its constitutive limits is a political act, one that strives for epistemic justice and, by extension, social justice.13
According to Michelle Caswell, ‘there has been a lack of care among memory institutions when it comes to archiving and documenting communities of color, LGBTQ communities, and people who are marginalised due to beliefs, geography, and social class’.14 There is therefore value in bringing Hartman’s perspective into dialogue with other absences, silences, and gaps in the archives ––for example, in relation to so-called ‘minorities’; diasporic groups that are ethnically and racially marked; and migrants, including postcolonial migrants,15 guest workers, asylum-seekers, and forcibly displaced persons. While acknowledging the specific contexts of each of these communities and the historical specificities of Hartman’s research, I believe her approach opens important pathways for considering the dilemmas of examining migrant communities in the archives.
3 Between Archival Absence and Presence
About one year ago I embarked on research into the audiovisual heritage of the Turkish community in the Netherlands. As a first-generation migrant who relocated from Turkey to the Netherlands for academic study, I have been intrigued by the near-absence of the cultural memory of the Turkish community, especially in the Dutch cultural heritage. The Netherlands is home to the fourth largest Turkish population in Western Europe, after Germany, France, and Austria.16 Officialised by a Recruitment Agreement in 1964, large numbers of guest workers migrated to the Netherlands from Turkey from 1960s onwards.17 Yet it is only recently, in 2020, that these ‘guest workers’ or labour migrants were added to the Dutch canon.18 There are no cultural heritage sites pertaining to this memory, nor is there acknowledgement of Turkish political activism in the workers’ movement. Moreover, the Turkish community has been largely represented through ethno-racial stereotypes drawing on the cultural archive of Orientalism and colonialism.19
As a film historian, I am interested in audiovisual items such as television and radio programmes, documentary filmmaking, video activism, audio letters, and political film (sub)cultures. I’m particularly drawn to self-representation, as in the audiovisual material produced by and in service of the community ––be it for political campaigns, feminist awareness raising, or countering the persistent ethno-racial stereotyping. Searching for evidence of this heritage in the Dutch archives prompted a reflection on the constitutive limits and borders of the archives on different levels. The first concerns the limits of archival preservation in relation to migrant groups. As Fiona Siegenthaler and Catherine Bublatzy recently emphasised, ‘there is little awareness for archives of migration that come into being and disappear outside institutionalised national or communal archives’.20 The audiovisual heritage of the Turkish community provides valuable insights in this regard. My attempt to locate this audiovisual heritage in the Netherlands has brought up a complex map of items scattered across various institutions. These include the Eye Filmmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), the International Institute for Social History (IISH), and Atria: Institute for Women’s History. Relevant records are also held at the National Archive and smaller municipality and city archives, the archives of trade unions and businesses (such as factories) that employed guest workers, and migration centres that received the incoming migrants. While the archives of political organisations and cultural foundations established by the Turkish minority provide valuable information on self-representation and grassroots activism, they remain precarious, with the exception of a small number that are safeguarded in public institutions such as IISH. To this we must add personal archives, private collections, and/or family media which are perhaps the most vulnerable in this overview, reflecting the precarious and marginalised positionalities of migrants. This leads to a knowledge of the past that registers and prioritises the viewpoint of the state. The experiences of migration remain outside of archival borders. How to overcome these boundaries? On this point, I will discuss below potentials of community engagement to activate items that speak back to the absences, silences, and state-sanctioned registers of migration.
Second, the search for the audiovisual heritage of the Turkish community in Dutch archives made visible another boundary: access. Although the majority of public archives have online catalogues and digital query systems, searching for items related to the Turkish community is hindered by missing or incorrect descriptions in the metadata. Moreover, as some items in collections and archives are in multiple languages, the exclusive use of Dutch in metadata descriptions is another obstacle. Consequently, the only useful search words are in Dutch Turks, Turkse or Turkije. These words yield an insurmountable bulk of data that obscures crucial information on personages, events, activities, cultural/political organisations, places, and topics known to the Turkish community, thus leaving the discovery of these items largely to chance.
To give one example, in my research I came across the performance of a prominent left-wing activist singer in a television programme from the 1990s. Her name, Melike Demirag, was not in the metadata description, while her visit to the Netherlands must have been an event of great importance for the Turkish community. The difficulties in accessing information about Demirag’s performance highlights the disparity of access to information on Turkish culture in the Netherlands. This disparity in turn maintains the silence and absence of the cultural heritage of the migrant Turkish community from the Dutch cultural memory, as valuable items remain dormant within the walls of archives without ever being seen or heard in the public sphere. On this second point, in order to address and overcome such borders, I will discuss the potentials brought up by community engagement projects that may be undertaken by archival institutions as well as cultural organisations to encourage and facilitate productive encounters with the archival objects.
The constitutive limits of archives in relation to migrant cultural heritage are not confined to these two problems,which may be rephased as, respectively, vulnerability and accessibility. Below I elaborate on these two through a selection of case studies. For now, I want to point to other complexities of researching the archival presences and absences surrounding migration from Turkey. For example, when writing this history, how do we approach the population movement from Turkey to the Netherlands? More specifically, do Dutch Levantines count also as migrants? Dutch Levantines had resided in Western Anatolia since the seventeenth century, before migrating to the Netherlands following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.21 Another question is how to approach the archives that have been moved from Turkey to the Netherlands, i.e., the migratory archives? The cultural, political, and commercial exchanges between two countries have been depicted visually in paintings and later photographs. Paper archives documenting these exchanges, such as state registers, letters, postcards, fundraising brochures, business records, and family chronicles are preserved in Dutch public institutions. These two examples attest to the complex nature of archives of migration, which are entangled in transnational histories of population movements as well as politics of archival preservation. They also reveal the discrepancies in discourse determining who counts as migrant and what kind of mobility counts as migration.
Up until here, I have used the term ‘migrant’ when referring to the Turkish community, which consists of guest workers, political refugees, and asylum seekers. However, this term has clear limitations. Primarily it centres the (myth of the) sovereign nation state with uniform citizenry defined on the basis of immobility.22 As such, migrants are perceived from the perspective of the ‘receiving’ country as being ‘foreign’ with connotations of being ‘stuck somewhere between a “here” and a “there” […] somewhere in a liminal —and mostly precarious— state of not belonging anymore but not belonging yet’.23 This myth of uniform citizenry underwent challenges, especially concerning the particular policies for ‘guest workers’ in major European countries that recruited foreign workers to meet their immediate demands of labour in a period of rapid industrialisation in the wake of the Second World War. Sociologist Yasemin N. Soysal explains that
“the official position was that foreign workers could be sent home at will, upon the decline of their productivity or when unemployment rose. However, the guestworker experience has defied these original expectations and plans. (…) Despite increasing unemployment and formal policies of repatriation, the host states have not succeeded in sending their guestworkers away. Guestworkers are now permanent, and form large, ‘foreign’ communities within the host societies.”24
‘Postmigration’ has thus been suggested as a useful concept to signify ‘a determination to end the perpetual “migrantization” of people of colour and of people with actual or ascribed migrant backgrounds’.25 Furthermore, Surinamese-Dutch cultural thinker Gloria Wekker reminds us that the specific use of the term ‘migrant’ is problematic in a Dutch context. Wekker argues that ‘depending on the country of birth, interpellating especially the four largest migrant groups – Turks, Maroccans, Surinamese, and Antilleans – the children and grandchildren of migrants remain migrants until the fourth generation.’26
What are the implications of these societal and political transformations for archives? What role do archives play in upholding the myth of the sovereign nation-state? What role do archives play in sustaining the imagined community, as in who belongs and who does not? How do archives draw boundaries between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’? How is migrant heritage positioned in the archives? With the aim of positively centring the migrants instead of the receiving/host country in this analysis, and considering the limitations of the word ‘migrant’ to describe the Turkish population in the Netherlands, below I suggest a new concept to elaborate further my main question concerning archival presences and absences.
4 A Minoritarian (Audiovisual) Heritage
Just like ‘migrant’, another concept that is largely used to connote outliers of the imagined community of a nation is ‘minority’, a term that has been widely critiqued for its shortcomings, with some even advocating that we abandon it altogether. Critics stress that ‘minority’ is a term supposedly based on communities’ numerical representation.27 Furthermore, it functions to homogenise different cultural groups (such as the diasporic, migrant, exiled, and displaced) into a simplistic category based on a selection of markers such as skin colour, language, or religion. In so doing, it falsely erases the versatility characteristic of such communities and identity performances. In keeping with this function, minority as a category only operates as the binary opposite of ‘majority’, which similarly wipes out differences among a wider group to foster an imagined community.28 The conceptual duo functions within the boundaries of such national imaginaries, where the majority is the sovereign and the minority is positioned as inferior, or simply as enigmatic. In the face of the sovereign majority, minority thus stands for demographically, socially, and culturally lesser.
In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and later in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari detach the concept of minority from its deceptive demographical meaning.29 Majorities (or, majoritarian) and minorities (or, minoritarian) are not determined by numbers; rather, they are mutually defined in a power relation.30 The dominant group might be smaller in number yet hold power over a larger group to shape social, political, and economic relations. As such, the majority operates as the invisible norm against which departures are measured. It positions itself at the centre and pushes differences to the margins.
What makes Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the minor(ity) productive within the frame of this discussion is its affirmative and empowering connotations. Freed from its inferior meanings as ‘less’, minoritarian in Deleuze and Guattari’s view denotes a positionality of political action that challenges dominant and normative systems that shape cultural production and identity performances, as well as narratives of the past and imaginaries of the future.
Based on this definition, I argue that minoritarian audiovisual heritage as a concept can help study the specific corpuses of different minority groups (not all minority groups homogenised into one sum). Deleuze and Guattari’s original description of minoritarian concerns literature and language. In the practice of minoritarian writers, for example, deviations from the standard tongue and ‘a mere stylistic experimentation with syntax’ could be simultaneously ‘a linguistic practice with an inextricably political dimension’, thus a political action. Through such linguistic practices, minoritarian writers articulate collective voices, who have been systematically excluded, silenced, or unheard. The three defining characteristics of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ are: (1) non-standard use of language (2) a political action to articulate a message that (3) immediately takes on a collective value, beyond the individual.
While minor literature does not simply equal literature by minorities, many studies have explored such non-normative and political uses of language as expressions of dissent by minorities. Film scholars have expanded the concept to ‘minor cinema’ and ‘minority filmmaking’.31 In such formulations, minor cinema does not simply apply to the cinema of minorities.32 Rather, it applies to the cinema of dominated and disempowered groups, which uses the three criteria outlined above. For example, the anti-colonial filmmaking of Ousmane Sembène, Glauber Rocha’s cinematic ‘aesthetics of hunger’, and the revolutionary cinema of dissident Kurdish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney are some examples in Deleuze’s work, and all stand out with their common characteristics of minor cinema. Film scholars from Turkey have pointed to the counter-archival function of Kurdish filmmakers such as Güney in the face of purposeful erasure and epistemic (as well as literal) violence. Here minor cinema’s potential to speak back to absences, gaps, and silences in national histories is emphasised.
While minority does not allude to demographically smaller groups, strictly speaking, the archival representation of minoritarian groups has been far less than repositories documenting majoritarian pasts. I propose that having a minoritarian view of audiovisual heritage could help us tackle not only the inequalities and gaps in our global view of audiovisual heritage that Giovanna Fossati underlines across the socio-economic divides of the Global North and the Global South.33 It also sheds light on the scarce and skewed archival representation of minoritarian communities. To borrow an expression by Jarret Drake, I propose shifting the focus to the heritages of the less (less archived, less catalogued, less accessible, less known) in order to ‘learn the most from the least’.34
Ultimately, a minoritarian audiovisual heritage can undermine the constructive limits of the archive. ‘Learning the most from the least’ could mean, for example, inquiring the extent of archival representation of minorities and examining these objects to find out more about its archival journey at phases of acquisition, appraisal, cataloguing, and access. How are these objects archived, by whom, and what kind of information do we find in their metadata? Are they accessible? Is the metadata accurate? The concept of minoritarian audiovisual heritage can shed light on the normative and dominant practices at archival institutions, and the aberrations when it comes to such artefacts. Additionally, to learn the most from the least, one might follow the inspiration of Hartman’s practice of ‘telling an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling’. As such, one might emerge from archival encounters with a sense of incompleteness, ‘with the recognition that some part of the self is missing’.35 Third, learning the most from the least might foster an inquiry into the ‘conditions of unknowability’36 and which knowledges were unwelcomed at which historical junctures.
Minoritarian audiovisual heritage, as much as it can be accessed and activated, would then be immediately political, since it is positioned as subjugated in official history, and by extension, in public memory and imaginary. Like minor literature and minor cinema, each object in the minoritarian audiovisual heritage would immediately take on a collective value. A single document registering the arrival of a guest worker in the reception centrum, one medical record chronicling bodily examinations, one letter sent to the family back home — none of these is ever really about one individual alone.
As shown earlier, studying the archival conditions of minoritarian (audiovisual) heritage ––such as cataloguing, preservation, metadata, access–– may shed light on largely invisible borders of the archives. Rethinking archives from a minoritarian viewpoint, I argue, may thus lead to undermining such borders, through pointing to new openings, visions, and practices that defy restrictive categories of archival preservation. It might open up potentials to rebuild archives in a more active and inclusive manner, with regard to marginalised categories and heritages of race, gender, and other intersectional identities that remain ‘unseen’ by archives.
This viewpoint is informed by bell hooks’ conceptualisation of the margin. In ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,’ hooks wrote ‘to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body’.37 This is also true for marginalised artefacts of minoritarian audiovisual heritage in public archives. Through their presence, these artefacts partake in public collections; yet, due to hegemonic archival practices they remain invisible, inaccessible, thus dormant, silent, absent. For hooks, this quality makes the margin not only a site of exclusion, but also a site of resistance. For her, margins, are political locations (or, positionalities) from where a counter-hegemonic cultural practice could emerge.38
Similarly, Stuart Hall suggests understanding margins as political positionalities that eventually can enrich cultural heritage. In ‘Un-settling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-nation: Whose Heritage?’ Hall explores ways to unsettle the imagined community of the nation as a determining factor in the discourse and practices of heritage.39 Hall argues for re-imagining the nation as diverse, inclusive, in-becoming, and heritage as continuing, open-ended, living. Such a re-imagining must start with rewriting ‘the margins to the centre, outside into the inside.’40
Below, I explore ways of rethinking the archives, specifically archival borders, from a minoritarian viewpoint via two case studies relating to the audiovisual heritage of the Turkish community. First, I will focus on the ‘vulnerability’ of minoritarian heritage and suggest moving beyond restrictive categories of nation and national identity to activate diasporic heritages. Second, I will focus on ‘accessibility’ issues when it comes to minoritarian heritage and discuss the hegemonic use of dominant language as well as the possibility for counter-hegemonic language acts in archives that go beyond the dominant language. Finally, I will conclude by pointing to the constellations beyond the walls of archives, primarily underlining the potentials brought by centring communities through active community engagement with care.
5 Beyond the Nation: Activating Transnational and International Constellations
In these two sections, I use ‘constellation’ as a helpful image to re-envision archival multiplicities that defy entrenched categorical positions in archives with regard to race, nation, gender, and so on. I borrow this image from Alisa Lebow’s web-based interactive archive of documentary filmmaking during the Egyptian Revolution: Filming Revolution.41 Lebow designed an interface that looks like a starry night sky: scattered small dots against a dark grey background. These dots in three colours represent themes, people, and projects. Once the user hovers over these dots, clusters of items related to that theme, person, or project emerge. Once the clusters are activated, the user can dig deep into the archive, watch the videos, listen to the interviews, or read further articles. Filming Revolution is a fascinating visualisation of how archives can be activated in a myriad of ways, each time allowing for different clusters to emerge. In the scope of this paper, I call such activated clusters ‘constellations’ to help envision the endless possibilities to unravel archival borders from within and beyond.
With this method in mind, I first focus on the Turkey-related collections at Amsterdam’s IISH to explore the specific constellations that can be activated through a documentary as my case study: Met een nieuwe naam: Gastarbeider (With a New Name: Guest worker; my translation). Positioning itself as an institute safeguarding the precarious heritages of social movements, IISH has a substantial collection of items that shed indispensable light not only on the recent history of Turkey but also on the political, social, cultural activities of post-war migrants and political refugees from Turkey. On many levels, the collections preserved at IISH allow for transnational and internationalist constellations to retrieve the silences and gaps in the shared history and collective memory of the Turkish community in the Netherlands.
Before I move on to the discussion of Met een nieuwe naam, I want to give an overview of Turkey-related collections at IISH. These can be roughly considered in two groups. First, there are archives brought from Turkey; some of these contain unique items that survived the risk of destruction in the wake of the violent military coup of 1980. The curator of Turkey-related collections, Zulfikar Ozdogan, explains how such growing risk of destruction led to an urgency to acquire these archives, which are now indispensable sources to study the social and political history of Turkey.42 IISH started collecting predominantly materials related to working-class movements and unions, which came under immediate threat in the political climate of the 1970s. The primary emphasis was acquisitioning the archives of left-wing political organisations. Furthermore, items pertaining to Kurdish political activism have also been valuable additions. Second, there are archives that have been acquired within the Netherlands, especially concerning political activism. In this group, we may consider the archives of political organisations, NGOs, foundations, women’s collectives, and other solidarity organs founded by Turkish migrants. There are also personal archives of leading political figures as well as journalists and photographers ––inter alia.
In addition to these collections, which are immediately related to Turkey and the Turkish diaspora in the Netherlands, there are other materials that trespass the boundaries of restrictive categories such as nation and race, which eclipse the internationalist character of the working-class movement in the Netherlands and the active role played by migrant workers from various backgrounds. Mostly migrant communities ––including post-war workers from Spain, Morocco, and Turkey; postcolonial migrants from Suriname and Indonesia; and political asylum seekers from Chile, Iran, Palestine–– came together in solidarity across many platforms to struggle for better working conditions, social justice, and legal rights. This shared history is a significant part of recent Dutch history but remains mostly unknown. I chose Met een nieuwe naam to shed light on this shared history of working-class activism that cannot be confined to categories of nation, race, ethnicity, gender.
Preserved at IISH, Met een nieuwe naam: gastarbeider is a mid-length documentary from 1973 directed by Farideh Fardjam, a woman filmmaker from Iran.43 Now an established playwright and director, Fardjam wrote and directed the documentary, which is a co-production of Nederlands Centrum Buitenlanders (Netherlands Centre for Foreigners; my translation) and Nederlandse Filmacademie (Dutch Film Academy).44 IISH holds a 16mm print (which has a 45-minute running time according to the online catalogue) and a VHS version, which is noted to be ‘slightly different’.45 A scanned version is available for streaming on YouTube on the IISH channel (with 26 minutes running time), although the source of this digitised version remains unspecified.
The documentary belongs to the archives of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms, a political activist group for filmmaking and film distribution in the Netherlands.46 Cineclub archives provide a great source to highlight political cinema culture, where filmmaking and screenings were seen as powerful tools for internationalist solidarity.47 Cineclub also screened and distributed films from Turkey as well as by exiled Turkish and Kurdish filmmakers.
Met een nieuwe naam consists mostly of interviews (in voice-over, without talking heads) with workers from Turkey. The documentary opens with a dynamic sequence that portrays the wide range of work undertaken by guest workers, from men’s work of building ships, canning food, and smithing metal to female labour of cleaning, cooking, and housekeeping. The industrial rhythm of the Dutch factories is counterpoised with the agricultural time of vast landscapes of farms in the home country. In the next scene, a young man in medium close-up speaks directly to the camera: “I am a worker. I come from Turkey.” The opening sequence thus establishes the message: This is a documentary that centres the worker; national identity comes second. This is further evidenced in the film’s interviews with workers. Overall, the voice-over dialogues contain sharp working-class wisdom, with incisive commentaries about working and living conditions in the Netherlands, and how the recruitment agreement between Turkey and the Netherlands solely benefited international capital and how, at a political level, the ruling elite fed on the feelings of ethnic hostility among the working class, to maintain exploitation. In the spirit of this Marxist commentary, there is strong emphasis on solidarity across workers from all nations: with the Dutch working class as well as other ‘guest’ workers from other countries. The largest common denominator is being a worker, that surpasses all nations, ethnicity, race, and gender. Although it provides such valuable insights into the working-class activism of the 1970s in the Netherlands, the documentary is not widely known nor circulated.
Image 1
Still from Met een nieuwe naam.
Alongside its form and content, Met een nieuwe naam is an intriguing case as an archival object. First, let’s consider the language(s) it contains. The soundtrack comprises voice-over dialogue in Turkish, which varies in terms of local accents spoken by the interviewees. It is subtitled in German, which raises the question whether this copy was used or intended for screening in Germany. However, more research is needed to find out if there were multiple prints or copies with subtitles and/or voice-over in other languages. Interestingly, the absence of Dutch in the digital copy makes the film largely inaccessible for Dutch-speaking audiences. While Dutch is not part of the film (at least the currently available copy), the metadata on the accessible online catalogue of IISH is almost exclusively in Dutch, with two main keywords from two different languages, English and Dutch: ‘migrant workers’ and ‘Turks’. Not much information exists on the production, distribution, and screening of this documentary; however, in-depth archival research may yield further findings. There are no details about the digitisation and restoration. For all these complexities, Met een nieuwe naam is a pertinent example of a marginalised archival object. Due to the archival difficulties mentioned above, it is likely to fall through the cracks and remain inaccessible, thus dormant, silent, and absent from cultural memory.
Writing on migrant archival objects, John Sundholm argues that ‘independently produced films by migrant filmmakers ––whether professional, semi-professional or amateur–– challenge most common-sense practices when it comes to scholarly and archival procedures’.48 As a result of the un-traceability of their historical conditions of production and distribution, they end up ‘invisible.’ For Sundholm, this invisibility is reinforced by their ‘multilingual character, meaning that they have been filmed in a language other than the local hegemonic one(s)’.49 Sundholm underlines how
“this linguistic estrangement (which is always the product of the current hegemony of language use) is one of the main reasons why national archives have traditionally shown little interest in such films and have been reluctant to give them the status of historical objects.”50
From this standpoint, Met een nieuwe naam attests to how archival borders constituted by majoritarian markers such as official language, nation, ethnicity could be challenged in many ways from within. Here, a minoritarian viewpoint that centres the complexity of the archival object may inspire new archival practices that can spotlight the diversity of the object itself. For example, centring Met een nieuwe naam, researchers and archivists can map out a constellation of archives, collections, and items relating to the businesses, migration centres, and political organisations portrayed in the documentary, or used in its production, even perhaps its distribution. Extending this map beyond the extant archives, collections, and items into more precarious ones may bring to attention vulnerable items that could shed light on this shared history of working-class activism across migrant communities. Following from this, adopting a perspective beyond the national markers of identity, a cross-cultural constellation of audiovisual heritage documenting the political, cultural, and social interconnections among a multi-national working class would emerge. Here the constellation of archives, collections, and items may expand beyond those concerning the Turkish guest workers and spotlight Moroccan, Spanish, or postcolonial migrant workers’ activisms found in archives.
Image 2
Multilingual banner testifies to the internationalist solidarity among labour migrants.
According to Sundholm, migrant filmic objects are always entangled in ‘the networks and social relations of which the film become a part, and which are their vital condition’.51 Therefore a historiography of these films is ‘rather a historiography of cultural and social relations, of uses and practices’.52 From this perspective, Met een nieuwe naam can shed light on transnational routes of migrant political activism and the role of cinema therein beyond the national borders of the Netherlands. The fact that the documentary contains German subtitles could be the starting point for archival research into networks of distribution, political organisation, and community activities in Germany, where a larger community of guest workers lived. The exchanges between the Turkish guest worker community in Germany and the Netherlands are not fully mapped out, especially regarding the archival status of audiovisual objects.53 Here, regional collaborations between archival institutions beyond their national borders could contribute to activating these constellations.
Last but not least, centring Met een nieuwe naam may also activate a constellation that can bring to light the film production and distribution networks for political activism. I come back to this in the conclusion, where I explain the potentials of community engagement to safeguard diversity and multiplicity of knowledges around precarious archival objects.
It should be clear from this example that the marginalised status of migrant archival objects does not stem from a simple coincidence, but from the hegemonic archival practices of preservation, cataloguing, metadata, and access. Marginalised archival objects such as Met een nieuwe naam shed light on these hegemonic practices which reflect in many ways the social, cultural, and political hegemonies in the society at large. Thus re-centring these items may unravel the restrictive categories of archives and inspire ways to tackle the gaps, absences, silences. At this point, re-imagining the archives and archival processes as constellations promises a dynamism that is able to account for the multiplicity, precarity, and mobility of migrant, minoritarian heritages.
6 Beyond the Dominant Language: Multilingual Constellations
Besides majoritarian conceptualisations of nation that position minorities at the margins, dominant language remains a significant determiner of archival borders that inhibit visibility, access, and thus production of knowledge. In this section, I focus further on the possible ways in which accessibility can be improved, specifically through unravelling the borders set up by dominant language in archives.
The language barrier was mentioned a few times in the literature on audiovisual heritage of migrant groups.54 While public archives use the national official language of the state, collections rarely consist of a single language. It’s not uncommon that archives contain records in another language, because of historical factors, mobility of items, political representational structures in a country, or the demographical composition of population. From this perspective, multilinguality is not specific to migrant audiovisual heritages; it is a common challenge, for example, in countries with multiple official languages, such as Switzerland and Belgium. However, there are still some problems that stem from the specific nature of migrant archival objects. Below, I first visit the existing literature on accessing multilingual items, before delving into the specific issues concerning the Turkish audiovisual heritage in Dutch archives. My case study for this section is Multiculturele Televisie Nederland (The Netherlands Multicultural Television; my translation), also known as Migranten TV (Migrants’ TV; my translation).
There are practices and experiences with multilingual access, for example, in transnational archival collaborations in Europe, such as EUScreen (a project that provides access to European television heritage), Europeana (a web portal that contains cultural heritage items of 3,000 institutions across Europe), and EFG1914 (the digitisation project and its website focusing on films and non-filmic material concerning World War I). Studying these cases especially focusing on how multilingual access has been implemented could provide some entry points to discuss how archives can improve access concerning the marginalised, migrant archival objects in either another language or multiple languages. In addition to these technical aspects, I argue below that community engagement is crucial to improve the language(s) of metadata, such as incorrect or offensive words, incomplete descriptions of persons, places, and events, as well as contextual information.
In 2016, Europeana published a White Paper on Best Practices for Multilingual Access to Digital Libraries. 55 Some of the ideas in this document can be applied to the challenges of multilingual audiovisual objects relating to the Turkish community in archival institutions across the Netherlands. The most common issue here is that while the archival objects are in Turkish (or in combination with Dutch, and sometimes with Kurdish), the descriptions and other metadata is predominantly if not exclusively in Dutch. This results in serious issues for access, as it excludes non-Dutch speakers from retrieving these items from catalogues. Likewise, non-Turkish speakers may be able to retrieve collections via effective querying in Dutch, only to find items that are impenetrable due to language barriers. For international researchers who are competent in contemporary lingua franca, there might be a few English language keywords noted to facilitate access ––yet these remain insufficient. My previous case study Met een nieuwe naam evidenced some of these complexities.
The Europeana White Paper proposes that information systems should ideally be able to bridge language gaps, letting users find objects in languages different from their native one.56 According to the White Paper, multilingual access consists of four layers: user interface, user interactions, access system, and underlying data (metadata and/or objects).57 Based on this model, it suggests a trajectory starting with first making the data multilingual and then the user interface, plus designing user interactions to support multilinguality.
At the outset of this trajectory, the White Paper suggests clarifying the default language of metadata to users, then moving on to enrich descriptions in metadata with multilingual vocabulary. Here translation could play a key role: ‘manual translation of existing vocabularies and manual term translation is beneficial’.58 For example, EFG1914 included translations of concepts in the metadata to improve access across European languages. While the White Paper does acknowledge here the beneficial role automated query translation can play to retrieve items in other languages, it cautions against the limitations of machine translation for ‘highly specialised and curated content’.59 Similarly, machine translation may fail to recognise the intricacies of language concerning sensitive and contested archival materials. Thus, specialist mediation is key to rendering the (sensitive) metadata to another language for purposes of access. Here we can already see the significance of community engagement, which may play a pivotal role to unravel these language barriers by translating the metadata using community-sensitive terminology.60
In addition to translation, the White Paper suggests contextualising items through ‘linking or adding additional terms to the metadata’, which ‘helps to contextualise the cultural heritage objects and makes them easier to retrieve’.61 Here, creating cross-connections of items to help contextualise them brings us back to the image of constellations, which I described earlier as a useful way to rethink minoritarian heritage as it defies entrenched archival categories. Creating such constellations to link archival objects with each other can be carried out effectively with community collaboration. In terms of adding additional terms to metadata, I argued earlier how communities can bring their own knowledge of the places, persons, and events to enrich the descriptions in the metadata, which eventually improves access. I come back to the discussion and ethics of community engagement below.
Shifting the focus from metadata to the user interface level, the White Paper emphasises the importance of the interface as a space of encounter: This is where the user meets and engages with collections as well as the underlying structures of information and politics of knowledge. To improve multilingual metadata of items and to welcome the insights and knowledge of users, the White Paper proposes user-assisted query translation as a beneficial practice. However, it cautions that ‘it’s still an open issue how the quality of user generated input should be controlled and measured’.62 User-assisted translation, should a feasible procedure be established, has the potential to go beyond supporting the system in adding domain specific translations to the dictionary and provide the user with more control over the system functionalities. Similarly, going beyond the translation, users can provide input on the missing information in the metadata. Thus, user-generated content, argue the writers, can help improve multilingual access.
In terms of the audiovisual heritage of the Turkish community in the Dutch archives, one case in point is the collection of Multiculturele Televisie Nederland (hereafter, MTNL), which started as Migranten Televisie Amsterdam (Migrants’ Television Amsterdam) in 1984 and was rebranded in 2001. A group of people from migrant backgrounds, such as Surinamese, Antillean, Latin American, Turkish, and Moroccan, came together in 1984 to produce television content for migrant communities in their own languages. As such, MTNL is a fascinating case of self-representation of migrant communities in the broadcast history of the Netherlands. In 2001, with support and funding from the government, the regional broadcast turned into national broadcast, resulting in rebranding. The multilingual and target-group-oriented programming was replaced in September 2005 by thematic programming, and Dutch became the official language for all broadcasts. The MTNL dissolved in 2012, as a result of government austerity measures.
After its dissolution, MTNL archives went to the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), the Amsterdam City Archive, the Rotterdam City Archive, and the Utrecht Archive.63 The national programmes produced by MTNL (between 2001-2012) as well as the local material concerning The Hague are preserved at the NISV. The local materials from Amsterdam and Rotterdam are safeguarded in the Amsterdam City Archive and the Rotterdam City Archive, respectively. The Amsterdam City Archive also hosts the company archives of the MTNL Foundation and the pre-rebranding local broadcasts from 1984-2001. The Utrecht Archive houses the Utrecht productions (2002-2012).
MTNL is a complex case of minoritarian audiovisual heritage not only for its multilingual content but also for its multi-archival status, spread across multiple city archives as well as the national radio and television archive. The metadata concerning these audiovisual artefacts are predominantly in Dutch, with the exception of names of public figures, which may facilitate access and retrieval for non-Dutch-speaking users. Occasionally the language of the programme is marked in Dutch as Turkse Uitzending (Turkish Broadcast), or Marokkaanse Uitzending (Moroccan Broadcast), and so on.
Focusing on these target-group-oriented-broadcasts before the rebranding, we must mention another level of complexity in terms of content. Catering to a specific migrant group, each programme in fact combines shorter programmes of various genres, blending informative formats such as news, documentaries, public service announcements with entertainment such as concerts, music videos, skits. There are usually interviews with prominent public figures from the community, for example artists, poets, and writers. Street interviews representing the vox pop of the neighbourhoods were not uncommon. Kids content was also part of an ordinary broadcast. This wide range of formats require deeper and closer engagement with the content as well as the context, for which it was curated as a response.
Going back to the suggestions in the White Paper, centring MTNL as a prime example of multilingual audiovisual heritage might provide effective insights for a dynamic re-bordering of the archive. How to facilitate multilingual access to such a wide ranging, complex, scattered collection? Considering the multicultural character of these items, it would be worthwhile to provide detailed descriptions of each in the metadata, and then give users the possibility to view these descriptions in the languages represented in the collection. Second, in terms of absences and gaps in the descriptions, engaging communities to identify the persons, places, events seen in the content may improve the access to these items substantially. Surely the complexities of the MTNL collection as a multilingual, multicultural, multi-institutional cultural object are not limited to these, and a deeper engagement with them deserves its own paper. Within the scope of the current article, MTNL is spotlighted as a pertinent case to show the multiplicity and dynamism of migrant cultural heritage artefacts that transgress the entrenched categories of archival preservation and access. Below I elaborate further on the role of community engagement in activating such artefacts and the encounter between the communities and archives.
7 Conclusion: Activating the Archive, and Being Activated by the Archive
In this concluding section, I take Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s idea of encouraging minoritarian communities activating the archive but also being activated by the archive as a departure point to reflect on the dynamism of migrant audiovisual heritage that I discussed earlier.64 Through reviewing some initiatives by archival institutions, I will explore potential ways in which the borders of archives can be unravelled by (minoritarian) community engagement, and some of the ethical questions implicated in this process.
In a recent article, digital heritage scholar Christian Gosvig Olesen re-evaluates the concept of ‘helpful user’, which was spelled out in the Journal of Film Preservation’s Special Issue: Manual for Access to Film Collections in 1997. In that issue, the term corresponded to
“the embodiment of a type of researcher that has been successful in establishing a trust-based relationship with an archivist, and who, having won the confidence of an institution, gives something back to the archive in the form of research data that may be transformed into catalogue metadata (descriptive, technical, or administrative).”65
Assessing the ‘helpful user’ in 2022, Olesen argues that, through the proliferation of collaborative, networked, archival-scholarly digital infrastructures, ‘broader communities of (potentially helpful) users increasingly encounter, analyse, and annotate digitised archival films’.66 This re-assessment of the current role of the helpful user in the context of the digital turn raises a few questions: How do current digital technologies enable wider and collaborative engagements with the archival material? In what ways can they empower marginalised and minoritarian communities to engage with the artefacts relating to contested pasts? How can we envision an encounter between communities and archives on equal footing? How might we facilitate speaking back to absences, gaps, and silences, but also traumas, erasure, and violence in archives? Can we imagine a new concept that encapsulates the collective and emphasises mutuality between archives and communities, alongside of the ‘helpful user’, that gives prominence to the individual in service of the archive?
To address these questions, I think along Ndikung’s idea of activating the archive but also being activated by the archive. In a recent talk, curator and writer Ndikung emphasised a relationality between communities and archival objects. Questioning the centrality of objects in archives, Ndikung suggested de-centring them through opening space for stories, anecdotes, emotions, objects, and other forms of personal/communal, cultural, artistic engagements. Ndikung explained how actively inviting persons and communities ‘to activate the archive and to be activated by the archive’ made visible a rich diversity of forms of engagement, reflection, and creation.67 I would like to follow this reasoning further by way of conclusion, and reflect back on the archival borders I’ve discussed up until here. Ndikung’s idea inspires potential ways to answer the questions raised earlier via the peculiar cases of minoritarian audiovisual heritage items. As migrant archival objects defy categorical borders, they inspire us to imagine dynamic forms of archival preservation, access, and engagement.
In an earlier article, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci and I have defined ‘activating’ on two levels. First, it involves ‘excavating’ the archives to rediscover marginalised artefacts that remained invisible and inaccessible due to problems of incomplete or incorrect information, misidentification, and abandonment. Second, thus unearthed artefacts must be ‘spotlighted’ through making them ‘accessible for further viewing, exhibition, and research as a way to challenge, subvert, or complicate’ existing (audiovisual and historical) knowledges.68 We wrote: ‘derived from active and to act, the word addresses the dormant potency of the archival moving image artefact to be awakened, set in motion to effect change’.69
Ndikung’s emphasis on relationality helps us envision this ‘activating’ as a two-way mutual process: If archival objects can be activated, they also activate emotions, memories, knowledges, and other artefacts among communities. How can we envision ways to visualise this encounter between communities and artefacts to give thus retrieved emotions, memories, knowledges a place in the archives? We can now begin to see the potentials of ‘constellations’ as a dynamic way of imagining the wide social, cultural, historical networks in which each and every archival object is entangled. Such a view renders the peculiarity of migrant and minoritarian archival objects as unstable, always shifting, fugitive. The two case studies exemplify this peculiarity, as I explained earlier.
In addition, the dynamism of constellations can be used to incorporate the knowledges, memories, stories, and emotions activated by the artefacts. For example, through various forms of community engagement ––e.g., oral history, social gatherings, and artistic reuse –– people can speak back to archival artefacts.70 Such an engagement may aim at retrieving (and safeguarding) vulnerable objects, e.g., items in personal collections that can become activated in relation to the artefacts in archives. Similarly, the communities can engage with absences, gaps, and silences, as well as erasure and (epistemic) violence in archives. Such an engagement might address the words used in labels and descriptions in metadata, but it can also entail undermining state-sanctioned histories in archives through activating footage, artefacts, and/or counter-memories by minoritarian communities in question. This is where we can see the counter-historical potential of minoritarian audiovisual heritage.
While the value of community-driven projects reaching beyond the institutional walls of archives are undeniably important, these may be understood as bringing marginalised groups in the service of state archives, thereby contributing to filling in the blanks. Rightfully, there could be discomfort, especially among communities that have been targeted by state violence and surveillance. Here, remembering Hartman’s emphasis on respecting these limits is crucial. The mutual process of communities activating the archive and being activated by the archive is meaningful if it unravels the rigid categories of archival preservation, and absences, gaps, silences that resulted from these. It’s not a question of filling in the blanks, it’s a question of undermining the epistemic regime of the (state) archives.
I started this paper with Saidiya Hartman’s powerful question: ‘Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?’ Through a discussion of minoritarian audiovisual heritage as a political positionality in the margins, I have tried to show the potentials of the paradoxical gesture of working with the archives against the archives. Activating constellations that unravel the constitutive principles of archives ––such as nation, ethnicity, and language–– can lead to recovering or rewriting forgotten histories of cross-border/transnational activisms and cross-cultural solidarities.
Notes
[1] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[2] Fiona Siegenthaler and Catherine Bublatzky, “(Un)Sighted Archives of Migration-Spaces of Encounter and Resistance: An Introduction,” Visual Anthropology 34:4 (2021): 284.
[3] Asli Ozgen and Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, “The Transnational Archive as a Site of Disruption, Discrepancy, and Decomposition: The Complexities of Ottoman Film Heritage,” The Moving Image 21 (1-2, 2021): 78.
[11] Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. P. Williams & L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 76.
[13] On archives and social justice, see Michelle Caswell et al., “Images, Silences, and the Archival Record: An Interview with Michelle Caswell,” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory 27 (2018): 21-27. Open access at https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol27/iss1/7.
[15] In the specific context of the Netherlands, “postcolonial migrants” refer to “people who since 1945 arrived in the Netherlands from Indonesia and the former Dutch New Guinea, Suriname or the Antillean islands in the Caribbean.” See Susan Legêne, “Bringing History Home. Postcolonial Immigrants and the Dutch Cultural Arena”, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 126 (2), 2021: 54–70.
[16] Anna Fleck, “Europe’s Turkish Communities,” Statista, May 11, 2023. https://www.statista.com/chart/29975/number-of-turkish-people-in-european-countries/.
[17] “De Gastarbeiders: Nieuwe Nederlanders,” Canon van Nederland. https://www.canonvannederland.nl/nl/gastarbeiders.
[18] Enne Koops, “Gastarbeiders in Nederland,” Historiek: Online Geschiedenismagazine, December 29, 2020. https://historiek.net/gastarbeiders-nederland-betekenis-marokko-turkije/135726/#:~:text=De%20term%20gastarbeiders%20kennen%20de,aan%20de%20Canon%20van%20Nederland.
[19] Also see Andrea Meuzelaar, “The Emergence and Persistence of Racialised Stereotypes on Dutch Television: Tracing the History of Representation of Muslim Immigrants along the Archival Grain,” VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 10, no. 20 (2021). Open access at https://viewjournal.eu/articles/10.18146/view.268/.
[20] Fiona Siegenthaler and Catherine Bublatzky, “(Un)Sighted Archives of Migration-Spaces of Encounter and Resistance: An Introduction”, Visual Anthropology 34:4 (2021): 283.
[21] Jan Schmidt, From Anatolia to Indonesia: Opium Trade and the Dutch Community of Izmir, 1820-1940 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1998).
[22] See for example Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
[25] Anne Ring Petersen et al., “Introduction: From Artistic Intervention to Academic Discussion” in Reframing Migration, Diversity, and the Art: The Postmigrant Condition, eds. Moritz Schramm et al. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 4.
[26] Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
[27] Timothy Laurie and Rimi Khan, “The concept of minority for the study of culture,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 31, no.1 (2017): 1-12.
[29] Originally, Deleuze and Guattari base their concept of minor on the works of Franz Kafka and the literary community the author envisaged. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004).
[30] Ronald Bogue, “Minor” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles Stivale (London: Routledge, 2005), 113.
[31] William Brown, “Minor Cinema” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, eds. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (London: Routledge, 2014), 290.
[33] Giovanna Fossati, “For a Global Approach to Audiovisual Heritage: A Plea for North/South Exchange in Research and Practice,” NECSUS, 2021, n.p. Open access at https://necsus-ejms.org/for-a-global-approach-to-audiovisual-heritage-a-plea-for-north-south-exchange-in-research-and-practice/.
[34] Jarret M. Drake, “Qualified Citizens: The Most from the Least,” medium, October 24, 2017, https://medium.com/on-archivy/qualified-citizens-the-most-from-the-least-bffc0846bf91.
[36] Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
[37] bell hooks, “Choosing Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 20.
[39] Stuart Hall, “Un-Settling ‘the Heritage’, Re-Imagining the Post-Nation: Whose Heritage?” Third Text 13 (49), 1999, 3–13.
[41] See Alisa Lebow, Filming Revolution (California: Stanford University Press, 2018). Visit the interactive website at https://www.filmingrevolution.org.
[42] Zülfikar Özdoğan, “Uluslararası Sosyal Tarih Enstitüsü ve Türkiye Koleksiyonları,” Kebikeç 25 (2008): 34.
[43] Farideh Fardjam and Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms (Amsterdam). Met een nieuwe naam: gastarbeider. 1973.
[44] This information is provided in the YouTube description, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On3W-WD7afM.
[45] See https://hdl.handle.net/10622/DD974561-B167-428D-BBF3-0A38F5F1EC0F and https://hdl.handle.net/10622/2FFCAF36-9FCC-11E4-A47D-9F880C22BBFA.
[46] See Archief Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms (Amsterdam), International Institute for Social History, The Netherlands. https://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH02599.
[47] See for example Luna Hupperetz, “The Militant Film Circuit of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms,” Master’s Thesis. (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 2020); J.P.G. van Laarhoven, ““PAN!”: Nederlandse film als socialistisch wapen Een verkennend onderzoek naar Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms” Master’s Thesis. (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2013).
[48] John Sundholm, “Ulkomaalainen/Utlänningen/Yabanci (1979-1981-1983) – a most typical migrant archival object,” L’Atalante Revista de estudios cinematográficos 34 (2022): 104.
[53] We read from Tuskan and Vogel that some artefacts, such as Turkish-language newspapers, would be distributed to the Netherlands from Germany. See Tuskan, Erhan and Jaap Vogel. 2004. Lied uit den Vreemde/Gurbet Türküsü: Brieven en foto’s van Turkse migranten 1964-1975. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Aksant.
[54] See for example Özdoğan, “Uluslararası Sosyal Tarih Enstitüsü,” 41; Erhan Tuskan et al. (n.d.). Cultureel Erfgoed Migranten: Collecties en beleid van openbare archiefinstellingen, Amsterdam. Open access at https://iisg.nl/publications/migranten.pdf.
[55] Juliane Stiller, ed., White Paper on Best Practices for Multilingual Access to Digital Libraries, June 23, 2016. Open access at https://pro.europeana.eu/files/Europeana_Professional/Publications/BestPracticesForMultilingualAccess_whitepaper.pdf
[60] A valuable project to tackle the sensitive political connotations of terminology used in metadata, descriptions, and other texts is Words Matter: An Unfinished Guide to Word Choices in the Cultural Sector, a publication compiled by the National Museum of World Cultures (Tropenmuseum, Afrika Museum, Museum Volkenkunde, Wereldmuseum). Available open access at https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/about-tropenmuseum/words-matter-publication
[63] See “Ons Media Archief,” mtvn.nl; “Inleiding: Multiculturele Televisie Nederland Utrecht” https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/onderzoek/resultaten/film-en-geluid?miview=inv2&mivast=39&mizig=210&miadt=39&miaet=1&micode=6002&minr=39879256#inv3t1.
[64] Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, “Apoptotic Archive”, YouTube Video, 1:41:22, September 3, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYiAT4jUa8E.