Diasporic archive and archival diaspora: negotiating collective identity through community audiovisual archiving among Polish Highlanders in Chicago

Abstract This article examines how community audiovisual archiving shapes the production and representation of collective identity in a diasporic setting. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among Polish Highlanders in Chicago, the study contrasts a bottom-up audiovisual Polish Highlanders Archive run by Władysław Mrowca with the documentation practices of the Polish Highlanders Alliance of North America. Mrowca’s Archive operates partly as a complement to institutionalized archival practices, partly in response to its blind spots, and at times in tension with the Alliance’s logics and priorities. The analysis shows that bottom-up community audiovisual archiving challenges institutional archival authority across three interrelated dimensions of archival practice: content, medium, and access. Specifically, the case illustrates how including home movies and other informal recordings expands the representational field beyond institutional narratives; how amateur video foregrounds the ordinary as a form of archival evidence; and how open online circulation challenges institutional authority over representations. The article argues that community audiovisual archiving does not shape collective identity in isolation, but in relation to institutional archival practices. This perspective positions archival diasporas—understood as the circulation and reassembly of dispersed records—as central to the formation of the diasporic archive.