Introduction

What does it mean to sustain a community archives? We know that constituting an archives is a special moment, one that consciously brings together the corpus of our documentary heritage, however fraught with lacunae, into a space where it can be cherished and deeply considered by ourselves and others. We know that the early moments of an archives are often sparked by a desire to build a heritage that better reflects who we are and what we want to be as a community. We know that our nascent archival practices are often the most exhilarating activities as a community archives begins to take shape. But what happens next? What happens after this excitement gives way to a recognition that archival work is labour, that it requires an investment of time and money and that our community's ideas about who we are and what we want to be change over time? What if the banality of collecting, cataloguing and indexing has discouraged everyone but the most dedicated champions of the archives? What happens when the champions bow out?

Drawing from both archival studies and queer theory about the archive as a site for cultural reproduction, this essay will focus on how communities sustain and nurture archival projects over time. Here, I conceptualise sustainability as both a practical challenge and an ideological exercise, producing imbricated, overlapping and distinct sets of demands.