Archive as Prefigurative Space: Our Lives and Black Feminism in Canada.

This article introduces readers to the publication archive of Our Lives: Canada's First Black Women's Newspaper, founded by the Black Women's Collective in 1986 and housed within the digital collection of the Rise Up! Feminist Archive. By situating the publication Our Lives as a potential site for recuperating histories of Black feminist resistance, this article demonstrates the role that community or activist archives play in the preservation of collective history: combating institutional modes of erasure and challenging dominant historical narratives. It argues that there is a need for further examination of the pedagogical and ideological elements of activist archives and their contribution to social movements and archival practice. Rather than considering activist archives as relatives of traditional archival institutions, it suggests that these projects need to be examined as sites of active learning in the tradition of community-embedded experiments. Building on recent scholarship, it investigates the discursive continuity between archives and historical narratives, and it reconceptualizes the term archives to include alternative sites and materials for the reconstructing the stories of historically marginalized groups. Finally, the article argues that archival projects need to adapt to new forms of archival representation and contexts, allowing for shifts in traditional methods and definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]