4.1
INTRODUCTION
Counter Narratives and Mapping
The defining point of an imagined community that characterises a sense of belonging and solidarity through a portrayal of material heritage and the intangible elements of culture, such as memory, knowledge and practices of care, that may have been fragmented over time and space in a bid to continuously anchor ‘home’ in a diaspora.
Diasporas consist of “globally dispersed peoples […] who maintain links with globally dispersed co-ethnics and who identify with, and remain committed to, an actual or imagined homeland over time” (Berg and Eckstein, 2009). The notion of diaspora is framed around the sense of belonging and identification with a place and what constitutes ‘home’ (Ho, 2017). They have connections and leave their traces in space throughout time. As such, they inherently provide continuous tangible and intangible contributions in these spaces of diasporic geographies (Poulios, 2014). The individual identities that comprise diasporas create collective identities and frameworks of memory and generate a sense of belonging and solidarity (Halbwachs, 1992; Castells, 2010). These collective and individual identities produce history in space through the creation of sources, archives, narratives, and history and constitute living heritage (Trouillot, 2015). The spatial practices of diasporic groups reflect translocality and an alternative temporality that frames their various non-linear, dispersed, and scattered movements.
The role of design, then, is to leverage a diaspora’s living heritage and provide platforms with which community members can amplify their voices, (hi)stories, and memories. In Sheffield, the Bantu Archive Programme (BAP) showcases the voices of the city’s African-Caribbean diaspora. Run by the Sheffield And District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA) in conjunction with Live Projects from the University of Sheffield (2021), the BAP team is currently conducting and uploading interviews in which various community members discuss their lives and journeys coming to and in Sheffield, as well as building a digital map that highlights places of significance and impact as mentioned by the community members themselves or as researched by the BAP team. Our research design work in Sheffield was done in partnership with SADACCA over nine days to examine the role and use of the Bantu Archive more closely.
In this sense, the notion of living heritage counters conventional forms of heritage conservation and becomes important for diasporic communities. It refers to a shift from monuments and tangibility of the past to people and their ongoing intangible connections to heritage (Poulios, 2014). Importantly, power is put into the hands of the communities themselves and the continuity of heritage is emphasised (Poulios, 2014).
Building on and feeding into the work already done and being developed for the archive, this report will focus on how design can leverage and connect the Bantu Archive and the living heritage of the African-Caribbean community in Sheffield to raise and make visible the community’s voices. Our proposed strategies and outputs will investigate opportunities to weave, expand, and expose the living Bantu Archive in and throughout the building, neighbourhood, and city scales spatially.
Despite their dispersal and ties to various ‘homes,’ diasporic communities undoubtedly also have their own living heritage composed of their collective and individual identities, sense of belonging to the community, and resistance against threats to the community (Faist, 2010; Vathi and Burrell, 2021). This understanding led to our definition of living heritage in relation to diasporic geographies: 127
