Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Archival Complexities

Tracing the idea of the archive back to its ancient Greek roots, Jacques Derrida writes that an archive is “at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional… it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion” (1995, 7). The archive promotes some imaginaries and excludes others. Official archives of a state or other powerful institution establish and reinforce certain hegemonies; “the archive,” Derrida continues, “if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive, and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (11). In other words, the official archive in Derrida’s research as conceived of by hegemonic authorities is a paralytic, freezing the narratives selected for the archive so that they may be privileged above any others that contradict them even as they slip from individual consciousnesses. In contrast, writes Rodrigo Lazo, “a personal archive has the potential to challenge the authority of the national [archive] building. And scholars who conceptualize archives in ways that displace the terms under which a singular archive is constructed can open new routes for research agendas” (2010, 200). Lazo’s thoughts specifically address questions of legitimizing archives of multilingual, multioriginate materials of many kinds amassed and curated by migrants to the United States, both physical and digital. His conclusion, that “archive collections can inhibit avenues of research that might move closer to alternate truth claims,” stands as a warning against forcing personal or otherwise non-officialized collections to conform to institutional archive formats (207). Instead, the possibilities both Derrida and Lazo have written about are those that allow for greater flexibility in how we archive and in what we designate as worth archiving.

A community radio archive has the potential to fall anywhere on the spectrum between upholding and countering strict hegemonic narratives. Some key questions to consider in trying to assess such an archive might include: how many and which participants have a say in archival curation? What archiving processes are in place, and what interests were they designed to serve? What items in the archive are accessible to various parties? How are they framed within the archive and when repurposed, and what imaginaries does this framing convey? What aspects of community radio practices are not stored in the archive, and why? In cases of community radio, this last question is one that calls into question how we perceive archives to be related to performance repertoires.

In her book The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor observes a tension between the titular concepts of archive and repertoire, which

…has often been constructed as existing between written and spoken language. The archive includes, but is not limited to, written texts. The repertoire contains verbal performances—songs, prayers, speeches—as well as nonverbal practices. The written/oral divide does, on one level, capture the archive/repertoire difference I am developing in this study insofar as the means of transmission differ, as do the requirements of storage and dissemination… [repertoire] traditions are stored in the body, through various mnemonic methods, and transmitted ‘live’ in the here and now to a live audience. Forms handed down from the past are experienced as present. (2003, 24)

The binary between archive and repertoire, notes Taylor, is “certainly not sequential… Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. Other systems of transmission—like the digital—complicate any simple binary formulation” (22). Taylor emphasizes the value of studying live and embodied acts with as much care and earnestness as texts; while she echoes Benjamin in distinguishing between an original performance act and a reproduction of it, hers is a productive framing: “A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire)” (20). An archive, in short, has power, and it is up to researchers and curators—those who have power over that power—to build a more inclusive archive and to understand it not as superior to live performance but rather to understand the archive and repertoire as interrelated and richer for it.

One framework that embraces multivocality and multimodality such that it can consider the importance of the repertoire is that of the community archive. Like the notion of community, the notion of community archives is broad and perhaps best explored as processes rather than product. Andrew Flinn discusses them as “the grassroots activities of documenting, recording, and exploring community heritage in which community participation, control and ownership of the project is essential... the impetus and direction should come from within the community itself” (2007, 153). He goes on to warn against stringent definitions to the point of warning against an attachment to the very term of “community archive,” which may not be terminology with which the community itself identifies its work and which may, to some, qualify the project unfavorably. Since Flinn’s writing on the subject, the community archive movement has grown in scale and legitimacy, meaning there is also more extensive theorization on the practical overlap between “community” and “formal” archives. Niamh Moore writes, “we can think of the archive, any archive,” she writes, “as a shared space, rather than a contest between different places and spaces or different archival practices” (2016, 135). While it is important to recognize that there are differences between archives built by professionals with formal training and those built without them, there is far more variation within each of these categories than a false dichotomy of community/formal suggests. Radio, which variously comprises elements and imaginaries of institutions, industries, and communities, is an ideal sphere for challenging such boundaries.

In the next section, I explore the productive capacities of the overarching archival frameworks, live broadcast events, and sound objects found in examples of two different cases of radio archives with which I have worked. One is the Vrabely Collection, housed at the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at Indiana University. I worked as a library assistant at the ATM from the summer of 2022 through the end of 2023. There, I received my earliest training in archiving work from then-director Alan Burdette and librarian Allison McClanahan. I worked with the Vrabely Collection, a radio-related collection at the ATM, for seven months in 2023, culminating in my writing a post about it for the IU Libraries weblog. In addition to an investment in radio, the ATM is connected to WFHB’s archives because several other WFHB personnel gained archiving experience under its auspices as well. Josh Brewer, who worked as WFHB’s operations manager from 2023 through 2025, worked at the ATM during his years as a college student. Suyash Kumar Neupane, who received his PhD in ethnomusicology from IU in 2025, also worked at the ATM and cites it in his dissertation as one of the key reasons he decided to attend IU (2025, 30). Both Josh and Suyash have worked on a station-wide archiving initiative at WFHB that has been ongoing since 2024. This initiative is my second case. I offer more background on and information about each archive in the following section as I explore archival systems of knowledge production.