ABSTRACT
This chapter presents empirical evidence that people served and represented by minoritized identity-based community archives in the United States saw history repeating itself in the oppressive tactics of the Trump administration. More specifically, it reports on focus group data my research team and I conducted with users of community archives serving and representing LGBTQ+ people and communities of color to show how such communities are constructing their own cyclical conceptions of time in the current political moment. These communities pose direct challenges to the linear progress narratives of white and heteronormative time described in the previous chapter. Yet, I will also argue that members of minoritized communities see community archives, including their own use of, and volunteer labor for community archives, as a way to intervene on those repetitions of oppression. Across communities and identities, users of community archives articulated conceptions of archives as spaces to connect past injustice with contemporary activism, forging what I call corollary moments through activating corollary records. In so doing, the users of community archives are constructing a new conception of time, one in which archives have the potential to interrupt and change cycles of oppression if they are catalyzed in the now.
