About

The Apna Heritage Archive and Punjabi Workers collection in Wolverhampton, UK, are living archives, rich with visual entry points and questions on how to piece together the stories within and beyond the photograph. This proposal seeks to enter the archives from historical, creative and theoretical perspectives. An initial reading of the photographs and featured objects will prompt interpretation based on visual methodologies, focusing on the materiality and meanings of the representations of the everyday objects and places. The project will then connect with community members, consult other relevant local archives in the Midlands, and build the historical context that surrounds this series of photographs from the 1960s-1980s and beyond. By connecting with contemporary community members and facilitating community engagement with the archives through intergenerational storytelling, this research will develop critical understandings of positionalities and experiences of the diasporic space and experience. Intergenerational dialogue and questions prompted by the photographs will lead to a study the meanings of home, interrogating home as ‘the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighborhood or a home town.' This research will examine how the diasporic space became a home, and the community 'imagined' through 'daily encounters', where 'this "home" is a place with which we remain intimate even in moments of intense alienation from it. It is a sense of "feeling at home" (Brah 1996: 4). The proposed research will examine these encounters, imaginations and the sense of being at home preserved through the archives.