The Tricontinental Archive

The Tricontinental Archive Project

An open archive of the cultural and political histories of the continents of the global South: Africa, Asia, Latin America, together with the insular Pacific

One of the major difficulties in working on the cultural and political histories of the global South involves an absence of archives, or rather absence of information about what archives exist. Whereas those working on the history or culture of Europe or North America have immediate access to information through the internet, through which they can discover what archives exist and where, what they contain, and how the material can be consulted, for those working on other, so-called 'peripheral' regions, conditions are very different. While there are, of course, many libraries and other archives in the non-western world, information about them can be very hard to discover without field research. There are rarely electronic catalogues, and information about what manuscripts and other cultural materials they might contain is often limited. In order to locate material, researchers often have to rely on word-of-mouth information, chance encounters and expensive journeys of discovery to find their material. In this situation, academics from, and/or working on, the South, as well as interested graduate students everywhere who lack the personal and financial resources of more established academics, are at a considerable disadvantage. Even for important figures, there are very rarely published bibliographies with information about manuscripts and other primary material, a situation compounded by the fact that many may not have conformed to western ideas of 'art', 'culture', or 'politics'. Since many non-western writers and cultural activists of the twentieth-century moved extensively around the world, their manuscripts can be scattered across a wide range of locations.

The simple purpose of the Tricontinental Archive Project is to try to remedy this situation, and to develop a major resource for those working on the cultural and political histories of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the insular Pacific, in any form. Researchers are encouraged to upload relevant and objective information that they may have acquired about specific material in western and especially non-western archives. In this way, the Tricontinental Archive will become at once a reference resource for the archives of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as an archive in its own right of information about the cultures and histories of the global South.